In this episode of Private Life, the poet and writer Eileen Myles reads Geoffrey O’Brien’s essay on Frank O’Hara, “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street,” from The New York Review of Books’s December 2, 1993, issue. Myles’s work includes the semi-autobiographical book Chelsea Girls (1994), the novel Inferno (2008), and the poetry collection I Must Be Living Twice (2015). 

Frank O’Hara was a writer, art critic, and a leading poet of the New York School who worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He is best known for his poetry collection Lunch Poems (1964) and “Personism: A Manifesto” (1959).