Fifty years ago, City Lights published Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, a collection he wrote mostly during or just after his lunch breaks at the Museum of Modern Art. The collection contains O'Hara's seemingly spontaneous reactions to the world around him, and ranges from references to pop-culture icons, to his literary and art world friends, to the sights of New York City. It became a seminal work for his generation. On the occasion of the book's golden anniversary, City Lights has published a new edition with a preface by John Ashbery and an editor's note by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was one of the book's original editors, as well as some previously unpublished correspondence between Ferlinghetti and O'Hara, who died in 1966. To celebrate, an all-star cast of poets reads some of O'Hara's work: O'Hara's longtime friend Bill Berkson, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Clark Coolidge, and more.
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