I’m instructed by Alice Notley writing about Frank O’Hara in the first essay of Coming After, re-alerting us to the weight of his last poems that I still resist, a voice that’s “anonymous and communal (in the bad sense) in its exploitation of verbal mediocrity.” Notley sees O’Hara influenced by the “deadly flat diction” of television (the first generation of such pervasiveness), thus affects of the heinous sort, offering up “warnings.”Also in the same essay, on an earlier poem of O’Hara’s, Notley interjects, “the Buddha fucking well ought to think at this point in history,” a rousing supposition on her part about what O’Hara meant by ending “Image of the Buddha Preaching” this way: “...hopeful of a new delay in terror / I don’t think” — deeply stoic of O’Hara and Notley.