(We learn why over the course of the book.) Rummaging through the basement of her parents’ East Village apartment some forty years later, Calhoun discovered dozens of cassette tapes containing interviews between Schjeldahl and O’Hara’s friends, lovers, and colleagues. At first, Calhoun’s book aspires to be a biography-the completion of one on O’Hara that Schjeldahl began in the late 1970s but had to abandon when the poet’s younger sister and executor, Maureen O’Hara Granville Smith, withdrew her support. Yet these two very different people share a common love for writing and for the poetry of Frank O’Hara, who serves as the fulcrum for Calhoun’s moving memoir of her fraught relations with her father. In Also a Poet, Ada Calhoun presents herself as the opposite of her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl: where he is a flake, she is a reliable presence where he is a tortured artist, she is a hard worker. Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, by Ada Calhoun,
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