Also a Poet, a review

Also a Poet
Ada Calhoun
Grove Press, 2022

I’d recently been doing internet research into a quote I love:

I’m out on a limb, and it is the arm of God. Frank O’Hara.

This quote perfectly expresses how I feel when I begin a bike tour. It’s crazy to think frumpy me on my little bike crossing the country will actually make it. Soooo many things can end such a trip, like getting struck and killed by a car—or killed period by psychopaths, alligators, bears—you see where this road leads, down a hole of NO. It’s why most people don’t go or seek adventure; there are too many things to be afraid of.

Out on a limb—check. The hand of God—yes.

We are putting ourselves into the hands of destiny, seeing where it leads. Into the hands of a God who loves, who cares, where even I matter. It is an attitude of vulnerability, but also openness. Which describes Frank O’Hara and his attitude toward life.

Thus, in my research of the quote, I discovered an article by Ada Calhoun (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/magazine/frank-ohara-poet.html) where it mentioned she’d have a new book out entitled Also a Poet. I put it on my library wishlist. After a few months it showed it was in the system (an aside: Lansing has THE BEST EVER library system, I can get books from almost any branch, even those outside the system usually within days!).

The rabbit hole that is the web but also particular to the New York School where first and second generation poets co-mingled in a bizarre way where EVERYTHING is connected—I also discovered Peter Schjeldahl and his work.

As much as this book puts forth that it is about Frank O’Hara it is a memoir, an exploration into famous daughter-famous father relationships, the tension between fellow writers, and the impact Frank O’Hara continues to have in the lives of his readers. Another thing this book confirmed—especially to the children, the offspring of the frolicking parents of the New York School crowd is that they are a bit screwed up. I mean the parental units, the adults surrounding them were in love with life and also at the same time a death spiral with all their drugging drinking promiscuity. I don’t mean to be a prude, but there is something to be said about clean living.

Not to say that some of these folks haven’t lived to a decent old age. Bernadette Mayer recently passed at 77. There wasn’t one of her memory photos that featured either she or a friend where there wasn’t a lit cigarette. I’m exaggerating, but cigarettes seemed to be embedded in the New York School—and frankly that whole Mad Men generation. As well as the excessive drinking. Coffee, liquor, tobacco, and I’m sure “schrooms” and weed, etc. There is a scene in Calhoun’s book with a fast-paced back and forth exchange at the doctor’s office (she’d driven them there because of her father’s terminal lung cancer diagnosis) where they rhapsodized the days where they were on speed. They LOVED and missed that feeling. “We got so much done!”

Needless to say, this is a book about Peter Schjeldahl who was also a poet.

The reference is to a kind of slight the New York Times attributed to Frank O’Hara in his obituary. The fact that he wrote poetry seemed secondary to his work as a MoMa curator. Today being a poet it is the only thing he is known for.

Yet, the irony of the title is not lost. That both Frank and Peter worked in the arts while their own art at times languished.

Through the unraveling of the book, we learn that Ada has not been given permission by the Estate of Frank O’Hara to quote his work or to write a biography. She was cut off at the knees with her plans for the project. A project that began with her father and then lay fallow before being taken up by herself. Both were stymied by the Estate. Both writers, father and daughter, were enthralled and brought to anguish by attempting to write about O’Hara—and by all the interconnected relationships. Add to this the pandemic. In the end many of the people interviewed for the book were swept away.

Indeed, Peter Schjeldahl passed Oct. 22, 2022—about the time of this book’s release.

Their whole lives they’d been living this book or a form of it. Out on a limb. Now in the hands of God, or in the hands of readers who also understand the tenuous bond between us all.