![]() ![]() Nonetheless, Schjeldahl remained consumed by his writing career throughout Calhoun’s upbringing, pursuing an ideal that, for him, was embodied in Frank O’Hara. Her father, Peter Schjeldahl, began as a New York School poet but made his name as a renowned art critic, though Calhoun’s mother, actress Brooke Alderson, believes he “should give out business cards that read: PETER SCHJELDAHL-BRIDGE BURNER.”Ĭalhoun describes her father as “reckless, mercurial, occasionally mean,” though she acknowledges that unlike most men in their 70s and 80s bohemian East Village arts scene, he did stay with his family. ![]() Their sense of daring exuberance had shifted the zeitgeist as “they ushered in a lusty new gay sensibility - urbane, witty, obsessed with all forms of culture.” And at the center was O’Hara, “the group’s beating heart.”Ĭalhoun was born into the 1970s generation of that post-O’Hara East Village arts scene. Photo: Kathleen HannaĪfter poet Frank O’Hara died from a roadside accident in 1966, the New York City arts scene around him - made of writers, painters, and entangled personalities of various kinds - would never be the same. When she undertakes the task of completing a literary biography of Frank O’Hara - a project that had stumped her art critic father decades earlier - Calhoun engages complex, fascinating dynamics of familial angst and artistic ambition. In her memoir Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, Ada Calhoun grapples with numerous legacies at once, each one proving elusive and irresistible. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |