You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Brad Gooch, the author of City Poet,

a literary biography of the Life and Times of Frank O'Hara.

He's the author as well of one of my favorite undiscovered books of short stories called Jail Bate and a novel, Scary Kisses, as well as a book of poetry.

And I thought I'd begin by wondering if this biography of Frank O'Hara extends an aesthetic belonging to those other books as well.

Well, I think it extends something.

It seemed writing it through some kind of hybrid like a novel mixed in not so much with those

others but but with magazine articles and information and facts and things so in that way

those were two things I tried to mix together and then what you end up with is like a 19th century novel.

Well, I found reading it very enjoyable, aside from my own interest in Frank O'Hara and his

circle, because the writing seemed to me to be very poker-faced. You know, there's a certain

kind of amusingly flat tone about this and that.

Some of it, I imagine, I remember once reading an interview with John Ashbury in the Paris

Review, and he's asked, what was it like to live in Paris for all those years?

And he said, oh, it was very amusing, the many ruse and a rondees man.

Wherever one went, one saw an interesting sight.

And here, too, there seems to be, you know, an amusingly obligatory description of God knows what, this place in Massachusetts, that place

in Baltimore, sort of dutiful, but to my mind very funny.

...