A Daughter, Her Father and the Long-Gone Poet Who Brought Them Together
In her memoir “Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me,” Ada Calhoun set out to write a poet’s biography and found a connection to her father instead.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/books/ada-calhoun-book-frank-ohara.html?searchResultPosition=1
I'm really looking forward to this book! The NYT article references Schjeldahl's remarking that Ashbery was a "better poet" than O'Hara. Without debating the whole questionable enterprise of rating poets in the first place, I do believe that Ashbery was "better" in at least two respects. First, if we compare the "best" poetry of both men, Ashbery at his "best" was "better." Also, Rivers and Mountains is one of the "best" books of poetry in the 20th century, in a league with Four Quartets. O'Hara himself wrote in a review (in Poetry magazine) that Ashbery's Some Trees was "the most beautiful first book of poems since Wallace Stevens' Harmonium." Actually, Rivers and Mountains (Ashbery's thrid book) makes Wallace Stevens's Harmonium look like a Sunday school picnic.
On the other hand, I also believe that Ashbery did not again produce a book at the level of Rivers and Mountains, nor a poem at the level of "The Skaters." But who could? And he certainly kept at it. Who knows what O'Hara might have done if he'd been able to keep at it? (Her died at the age of 40). When Bertrand Russell was told he was too young to write an autobiography, he agreed that he might someday have become president of Mexico.
And one more thing, as Columbo used to say. O'Hara's Lunch Poems, is a masterpiece in its own right, "better" than anything Ashbery did in its own way, and not the less for that. Everything about it is great, the text, the size of the book, the colors, the publication date. Sam Johnson, always interested in physicians, taught that a correct prescription encompassed many factors: the drug, the patient, the season of the year, the time of day, who knows what else. I had the great fortune to buy my copy of Lunch Poems at City Lights bookstore one day in 1965. The exact right thing, at the exact right place, at the exact right time. Thanks, boss. Much ass grassy ass.
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