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Celebrating Frank O’Hara

Wednesday, 27th July, 2016    
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Five Leaves Bookshop*
14a Long Row, Nottingham, NG1 2DH

To celebrate the life and works of Frank O’Hara, we will be hosting a night of his poetry around the 50th anniversary of his death. There will be readings from O’Hara’s work by Newstead Abbey Poet-in-Residence Becky Cullen, Five Leaves’ worker Leah Wilkins, gay literature historian Gregory Woods, novelist and poet John Harvey, Nottingham Contemporary director Sam Thorne and novelist David Belbin. Matthew Welton, writer and creative writing lecturer, will talk about the importance of O’Hara’s work.

lunch-poems

Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O’Hara’s poetry is “urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny” containing “material and associations alien to academic verse” such as “the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends”. O’Hara’s writing “sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be “between two persons instead of two pages.”