The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes traces a tradition of revolutionary self-mythologising in the lives and works of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, as a significant trefoil in twentieth-century English language poetry. All three had untimely deaths, excited a collective homage, and developed cult followings that reverberate today. This book tracks the transmission of the poem as charm, the poet as charmer, and the reinstitution of troubadour erotics as a kind of social poetics. Starting with Orpheus, the book refreshes the myth of the poet as mythmaker, examining how myths of "self" and "nation" are regenerated for the twenty-first century and how persons-as-myths are made in community through coteries of artists and beyond. Duncan Bruce Hose's critical vocabulary, with its nucleus of mythos, searches the edges of phenomenal enquiry, closing in on the work of "glamour", "aura", "charm", "possession", "phantasm", the "daemonic", and the logic of haunting in the continuing being of these three poets as "charismatic animals".
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Frank O'Hara: Myth as Madrigal.- Chapter 3: "You in Me, That is What the Soul Is": The Traffic of Frank O'Hara's.- Chapter 4: Daemon.- Chapter 5: Tricked Myth Machines: Making Ted Berrigan Making
The Sonnets.- Chapter 6: Phantasmatic Transmission: Ted Berrigan's
vida and
razo.- Chapter 7:The Textural Shimmer of John Forbes's Dead Reckoning.- Chapter 8: The Pagan Sermons of John Forbes.- Chapter 9: Charismatic Animals.
Duncan Bruce Hose is a poet, scholar and painter. His published books include Testacles Gone Walkabout (2021), The Jewelled Shillelagh (2019), Bunratty (2015), A Book of Sea-Shanty (2014), One Under Bacchus (2011) and Rathaus (2007).
