Death is often a good career move in poetry. No sooner are the obsequies over and the baked meats eaten than the publisher warms up the presses for a definitive edition of the collected poems, solemnly proofread down to the last querulous comma. Yet not all poets are well served by such an exhaustive volume, which may seal up a reputation forever—indeed, such a book has sometimes been called a tombstone. A ‘collected poems’ may be cruelest to a poet whose genius shone as intermittently as a firefly.

At 40, FrankK O’KHara was struck one night by a Jeep on a Fire Island beach. He died scarcely two years after the publication of Lunch Poems (1964), the volume that introduced him to most readers. As a poet he wrote so much—so wildly and unevenly much—it has been difficult to reach a just estimate of his wayward, influential talent. O’Hara was born in Baltimore and schooled at Harvard, a roommate of Edward Gorey and a friend of John Ashbery. He soon went to work at the Museum of Modern Art, where he rose to become an associate curator. As he had fallen in among a crowd of painters and poets that included Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch, it was perhaps natural to make poems out of their parties, feuds, love affairs and drunken gossip.

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