Standing Still and Walking in New York
From the author of Lunch Poems, a wide-ranging selection of Frank O'Hara's prose, brimming with impressions of his childhood, New York, the art world, and the work of his peers.
Standing Still and Walking in New York paints a vivid portrait of an artist whose work was deeply rooted in place. First published in 1975 and long out of print, this informal volume pairs a number of O'Hara's essays, reviews, and letters with a lengthy interview by art critic Edward Lucie-Smith. Taken together, these texts reveal O'Hara's "concerns, enthusiasms, loyalties, annoyances and distrusts" (New York Times), providing the closest thing to a spiritual and aesthetic autobiography of the New York School's founding member.
No subject is too far afield, whether the astrological significance of his birth in Baltimore, the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum, contemporaries like John Ashbery, Robert Motherwell, and Morton Feldman, American movies, or Apollinaire's pornographic novels. In this constellation, one begins to recognize first-hand the influences that shaped O'Hara's poetics. Chatty, candid, and engaging, the book partakes of the same aesthetic as his classic Lunch Poems--famously written on lunch breaks while working at MoMA--evoking both quotidian experience and the bustling excitement of Manhattan. Standing Still and Walking in New York feels like hanging out with Frank, a notoriously charming, erudite, and accomplished young poet filled with an ebullient joie de vivre. Indeed, as his friend Kenneth Koch wrote, "Something Frank had that none of the other artists and writers I know had to the same degree was a way of feeling and acting as though being an artist were the most natural thing in the world."
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