O, Frank O’Hara to Ovid

A musician before he was a poet, then word-musician, poet’s poet, artist’s poet, poet of Lunch Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets, 1986) & Meditations in an Emergency (Grove Press, 1957), Frank O’Hara lived only 40 years but his light still shines among the New York School.

Her work is much beloved & you will find it quoted in sermons, quotation collections & Web pages everywhere -- see “Wild Geese,” A Visitor,” “Mockingbirds,” “The Journey,” “Climbing the Chagrin River” & “The Swan,” all at Modern American Poetry.

Oliver is also known for her Poetry Handbook, called “the best brief introduction to the basics” by R.T. Smith in “O Body Swayed To Music,” his essay sequence for Poetry Daily.

Smith College’s Poetry Center has a profile, photograph and three of Oliver’s poems, and there is a rare public interview with Oliver from 1992 in The Christian Science Monitor’s archives: “A Solitary Walk.”

Eirik Ott, aka Big Poppa E, was a member of the San Francisco Slam Team that tied for the championship at the 1999 National Poetry Slam, & is most famous for his “Wussy Boy Manifesto.”

Amy “Uzi” Ouzoonian is co-guerrilla poetique, spent the summer of 1998 touring with Brett Axel and edited the 1999 anthology Skyscrapers, Taxis, and Tampons (Fly By Night Press) and the 2005 anthology In the Arms of Words.

Sean Redmond's Ovid FAQ is the best place to start finding out about the author of the Metamorphoses (link here is to Dryden's translation in MIT's Internet Classics Archive).

Hope Greenberg's Ovid Project, “Metamorphozing the Metamorphoses,” has put the beautiful & rare illustrated versions of Ovid's masterwork owned by the University of Vermont on the Web for all to see: 1703 edition with engravings by Johannes Baur & George Sandys' 1640 edition.

The Analytical Onomasticon Project is an attempt to create a concordance and crosslinked reference to all the names in the Metamorphoses, that might demonstrate how Ovid’s “pastiche-epic” is a coherent work of literature. Bring your Latin dictionary.