[A] grand slam ... Also a Poet began as Calhoun’s attempt to finish what her dazzling, absent-minded father couldn’t ... But it turned into something much less dutiful, and more interesting, a story about both the impossibility of reconstructing another person’s life and the importance of trying ... Calhoun’s through-her-teeth hisses at her father’s fumbling are great, as are the tapes: snatches of poetry unto themselves ... A big valentine to New York City past and present, and a contribution to literary scholarship, molten with soul.
... moving ... her book isn’t 'strange,' as she fears: it’s engrossing and deft in its juggling of multiple genres ... A project marked equally by honesty and warmth, it closes on a note of reconciliation, with Calhoun transcribing a recording she found amid the O’Hara tapes of Schjeldahl and her then two-year-old self singing nursery rhymes—a testament to the moments of togetherness they have managed, despite it all, to share.
As Calhoun tracks down the people Schjeldahl interviewed fifty years earlier, the names, dates, and places run together. She immerses us in a parallel timeline of her interviews in 2020 interspersed with her father’s from the 1970s, excerpted in italics. It’s fascinating to hear all these voices directly but sometimes confusing to move back and forth between people and time periods, out of chronology. Who are these people, and what year are we in? Calhoun is an engaging guide and I was willing to wait and see where she led, but it was sometimes hard to follow ... In retrospect, the beginning of the memoir is hard to follow because Calhoun was withholding information she didn’t want to tell us yet ... Once it’s clear that Calhoun is not writing a biography, O’Hara can drop away as the presumed focus of the book—and it becomes the more interesting story of her relationship with her father. The book thus becomes a contribution to a hybrid genre of memoir ... Calhoun is a savvy enough writer to make good use of the situation she finds herself in ... Schjeldahl’s accomplishments were built at least in part on his single-minded attention to them, whereas the women in his life had to divide their creative energies. Calhoun’s book is a way to call him out on his lack of interest and attention without disengaging altogether. That’s difficult and brave to watch ... no one else could have written this brave, intimate memoir in which she insists on her own worthiness to speak and be heard. Also a Poet will appeal to readers who enjoy what Granville-Smith dismisses as 'gossip,' enjoy hybrid forms that bend genres, and admire authors who take you along with them as they figure things out. Calhoun and her book are more than interesting enough in their own right.
Part biography, part memoir, it reflects the half-spoken belief that writing about the things and people we love is often a lot easier than living with them ... isn’t about the study of poetry so much as about living with it—and this energetic living with poetry was something that Frank O’Hara very industriously did. Like Ada and her father, he walked and drank and partied and read and wrote and made love; he exulted in the beauties of streets and cities and rarely had anything negative to say about any of them ... O’Hara never seemed to give up on the exultant life, and it is perhaps one of the greatest and saddest ironies of contemporary poetry that he died so young, and so unexpectedly. Like all lives, his was a messy one; but at times, no life seemed more gloriously messy than his. And it is the glorious messiness of O’Hara’s life (and of Ada Calhoun’s own) that this little book captures elegantly and transparently without ever aspiring to capture something as fragile and pointless as 'literary greatness.'
... breezy, whip-smart ... a scintillating work of personal quest and cultural history ... an irresistible Day-Glo portrait of O’Hara and his circle, although the interviewees (and Calhoun) tend more toward gossip than analysis of his oeuvre ... She writes with bracing vulnerability and a dreamy sweetness about her adolescence, light of touch but long on skill, exonerating her mother and demanding 'amends' exclusively from Schjeldahl...Her ambivalence fuels the narrative, but also raises disquieting questions about male achievement and how women should respond to it ... shares a propulsive energy with such vivid oral histories as Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil’s trippy Please Kill Me and Jean Stein’s stylish Edie. As Calhoun’s earlier books attest, she’s a hell of an observer, writing with flair and putting herself on a tightwire, a high-risk gamble that mostly results in high rewards.
... if, like me and countless others, you’ve loved Schjeldahl’s art criticism — its acuity, its passion — and considered him (quoting a fan) 'the best art writer of our era … one of the best critics ever' — brace yourself. Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, Calhoun’s brave, blistering new memoir, may force you to — uh — revise your assumptions ... At times the saga of Schjeldahl’s neglect (instance after instance) combined with Calhoun’s repeated efforts to gain his care and esteem, nearly obliterate O’Hara’s story — making it more a satellite against which embattled father-daughter energies bounce. It’s a strange triangulation, inevitably somewhat sidelining the artist whom longtime lover Joe LeSueur called, after O’Hara’s funeral, 'our Apollinaire' ... kudos to them both, then, for this fierce, dissonant, yet compelling duet, or — by turns, however improbably — trio.
... dazzling ... A generous writer, Calhoun spends much of Also giving others the benefit of the doubt. Still, she becomes disillusioned by dude-centric, mid-century Greenwich Village ... We learn about O'Hara and Schjeldahl but the vividest portrait is of frank, un-self-pitying and effortlessly hilarious Calhoun as she struggles with her dad and with crafting the very book we're reading ... It's tempting to give Schjeldahl the last word on what he calls 'the best book I've ever read' in Calhoun's acknowledgments. But I prefer thinking about how I put down Also a Poet for a moment, believing I had one chapter to go, only to pick it up and realize I'd reached the end. But it's not the end of Calhoun and Schjeldahl's relationship, which the gifted memoirist gives us room to hope has more, brighter chapters to come.
An offbeat memoir in many ways, and not always sure what it’s trying to convey, it meanders through the challenges of writing a biography without the confidence of its subject’s estate. But it’s also a familiar enough design: a literary biography (here, wrapped up in a second biography) mashed up with confessional vignettes from the author’s own life, as successfully popularized over the past decade by writers such as Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson ... As O’Hara’s life and poetry recedes into the distance, Also a Poet wryly reflects on the thorny resentments of literary and paternal inheritance, and what it means for someone to touch the lives of those that come after – even without knowing it ... What happens next is a sincere and expressive portrayal of a fraught but tender relationship between a daughter and her father, at once intimately relatable to any child of an absent parent, yet singularly an honest – and regularly hilarious – account of two obsessive writers struggling in their own ways to connect.
... a portrait of Schjeldahl that feels much clearer and intimate than any we might have gotten of O’Hara by way of overheard interviews. It’s a portrait informed by love and candor, threading together disparate chapters of a complicated man’s life into a thoughtful, cohesive whole.
Deeply moving and exceptionally well written, this offbeat memoir will please anyone interested in the NYC art scene from the 1950s on. Every father should have a daughter as loving, perceptive and honest as Calhoun.
Vexed but deceptively tender and cleverly conceived ... With Also a Poet, Calhoun seems to have created a new nonfiction genre: the biographical profile within a biographical profile within a memoir. As for readers awaiting the definitive Frank O'Hara treatment, they'll find Also a Poet to be an engrossing placeholder.
Fluidly morphing, magnetically candid ... Ultimately, Calhoun offers an arresting and provocative carousel of family dynamics, creative paradoxes, literary history, unnerving dilemmas, thorny questions of inheritance and legacy, wry humor, and love.
Fearless ... The unexpected convergence of the challenging O’Hara book project and her father’s sudden decline provide Calhoun with a singular perspective on the timeless issues of family relationships, most especially the vulnerabilities of following in a father’s eminent footsteps and the elusive possibility of ever fully understanding our parents. Calhoun’s honesty and willingness to push beyond her own resentments make Also a Poet a potent account of a daughter reaching out to a perhaps unreachable father before it’s too late.
Calhoun engages complex, fascinating dynamics of familial angst and artistic ambition ... If this premise sounds like it risks becoming publishing-world inside baseball, the actual result here is a moving, funny, and insightful page-turner that refuses all simple conclusions. Calhoun deftly maneuvers her narrative through her upbringing amid this bohemian environment, bringing both the gifts and the dangers of that world to bear on the story of O’Hara’s legacy. Alongside passages about her household’s love of poetry, for example, sit references to her parents’ fondness for amphetamines ... This double edge gives invaluable context to the taped interviews, which include the perspectives of much-lauded poets and painters like Kenneth Koch and Willem de Kooning. Calhoun also includes the crucial recollections of a man who bonded with O’Hara while he was a young child surrounded by the chaos of bohemian grownups — a subject Calhoun knows inside and out ... is a series of reflections on what the pursuit of creative ambition actually does to human beings over time. Calhoun shows respect and wonder for the dedication such work requires, but she does not flinch from the messiness and the dangers posed by the accompanying single-mindedness ... By exposing the prickly, sometimes maddening relationship between her father and herself, she makes a thoughtful narrative space for the messiness of creative lives — and for the irresolvable impasses that sometimes form within family dynamics ... a memorable work.
If this were an O’Hara biography, it would, I believe, be necessary to recreate the heady, masculinist ambience of an arts scene predicated upon the enjoyment of women as sex objects and muses...If this were a biography of O’Hara, I would do it — I might even want to do it — but I’m glad not to have to ... may not be a conventional biography, but that is because it is as much a primary as a secondary source. By excerpting her father’s interviews, Calhoun offers us a glimpse into her father’s very substantial archive, 'vital to literary history,' and smuggles into print invaluable biographical sources that will, without intervention, 'ro[t], unheard, in an East Village basement.' After Granville-Smith’s prohibition, we can appreciate this as the principled act that it is ... I am astonished by Calhoun’s decision to include the entirety of this damning exchange verbatim. The decision is an act of defiance. I don’t know if I would have done it myself, but I appreciate it all the same. But then again, why not? Calhoun is hardly sharing private information; she’s providing an explanation, disclosing the logic behind 'decades of estate management' that have affected the preservation of O’Hara’s legacy and the accessibility of his works. It feels like a violation; it feels like justice. Either way, it’s radical. Why shouldn’t Granville-Smith’s executorial ethos appear before the court of public opinion? ... traverses many genres, but Chapter 20, which contains Calhoun’s transcribed phone call, is one for the O’Hara archive, bibliographies, and reference books; it is a priceless artifact of literary history ... one of many hybrid memoir-biographies that have been published in the last five years, but what distinguishes it from likeminded projects is its explicit provocation for the future of the form: memoir-biography is a genre that may very well allow us to smuggle biographical reckoning under the copyright radar — and to make the conditions of literary history’s adjudication more transparent in the process.
A sweeping investigation of familial bonds in this mesmerizing work from journalist Calhoun ... What follows is less a straightforward chronicle of one misunderstood genius’s life, and more a prismatic account about 'writing and books and Frank O’Hara,' three interests that tie Calhoun to her vexing yet fascinating father ... She crafts a masterpiece entirely her own ... It’s a dazzling thing to behold.
