Absract of Keynote Paper:
Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of Art Writing: ‘On Looking’ to the ‘Crowning of the Poet’ Redell Olsen
Grace Hartigan ‘Crowning of the Poet’ (1985)
Frank O’Hara’s writing on art is diverse and crosses multiple genres from criticism, poetry to collaborative and visual works. In addition to critical writings on artists he often wrote poems on paintings, dedicated his poems to painters and made reference in his own poems to particular paintings from a range of art historical periods that included his own. In its diversity O’Hara’s art writing contributed to the conditions of mutual influence that emerged between the poets and writers who were his contemporaries. Grace Hartigan’s painting the ‘Crowning of the Poet’ (1985) demonstrates the ongoing effect of the poet on the artist nearly twenty years after O’Hara’s death. This talk will examine a number of paintings and works of art that relate in very different ways to O’Hara’s poems and explore the ways in which these paintings, when read in conjunction with O’Hara’s writings, might help us to re-imagine and to rethink the traditional modes used to describe the constellated and inter-related practices of poetry and painting.
See a Video of the Paper Here (Olsen at 4:09)