Robert Glück on His Books, Frank O'Hara, and Dreams

In the piece that you wrote that has become kind of a famous text now about New Narrative, the movement that you co-founded with Bruce Boone, the long note on New Narrative, you mentioned that you immediately connected about how you were both obsessed with Frank O'Hara.

True.

And Bruce also goes on to get a PhD on O'Hara and his milieu.

That's right.

And when I asked you to choose something from the archive, you said you wanted to talk about this O'Hara essay by Jeffrey O'Brien that is a review of the Brad Gooch biography, City Poet.

Yes.

So could we just maybe start by talking about why O'Hara emerged as such an important ancestor or guiding light to these three books and New Narrative in general? Sure.

Okay.

When I was later in college, I found the Donald Allen anthology, The New American Poets.

It's an anthology, actually, that O'Hara helped create.

And it was the Bible of my generation.

And at that time, learning to be a writer... and learning to be a gay man were almost the same thing, at least for me.

And it would be hard to overestimate the effect of that anthology on young queer writers struggling with finding an identity in the 60s.

Imagine in one book coming out of a place where a poet on campus was called a living poet, you know, coming from that kind of dead place, having a book that had Jack Spicer, Frank O'Hara, Robert Duncan, Robin Blazer.

I mean, imagine having them in one fell swoop.

So that was my Bible and the Bible of many other young queer writers or queer want-to-be writers.

So when I was sort of at a loss as what to do with my life, I happened to be living on a commune in the Sierras.

Good start.

In 1969.

And finally, I thought, I've got to start my life.

And what I did was get a U-Drive car to New York.

Just to be in the radiance of where Frank O'Hara had been, he had been dead for three years.

I started taking Ted Bergen's writing workshops at St. Mark's, and that was really the beginning of my writing life.

So it was really propelled by Frank O'Hara.

And a lot of moments in my life after that had some kind of element of Frank O'Hara in it.