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The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.
624 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
About the author
Frank O'Hara
125 books680 followersCollections of American poet Francis Russell O'Hara include
Meditations in an Emergency
(1957) and
Lunch Poems
(1964); playfulness, irony, sophistication, and a shared interest in the visual arts mark works of the New York School, an active group that included O'Hara during the 1950s and 1960s.
Parents reared O'Hara in Grafton, Massachusetts. O'Hara served in the south Pacific and Japan as a sonar man on the destroyer United States Ship Nicholas during World War II.
With the funding, made available to veterans, he attended Harvard University and roomed with artist-writer Edward Gorey. He majored in music and composed some works despite his irregular attendance was and his disparate interests. Visual art and contemporary music, his first love, heavily influenced O'Hara, a fine piano player all his life; he suddenly played swathes of Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff when visiting new partners, often to their shock.
At Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.
He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At Michigan, he won a Hopwood award and received his Master of Arts in English literature 1951. In that autumn, O'Hara moved into an apartment in city of New York with Joe LeSueur, his roommate and sometimes his lover for the next 11 years. Known throughout his life for his extreme sociability, passion, and warmth, O'Hara had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life, many from the New York art and poetry worlds. Soon after he arrived in New York, the Museum of Modern Art employed him at the front desk, and he began to write seriously.
O'Hara, active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News, and in 1960 was made Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with artists like Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers, and Joan Mitchell. O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island in which he was struck and seriously injured by a man speeding in a beach vehicle during the early morning hours of July 24, 1966. He died the next day of a ruptured liver at the age of 40 and was buried in the Green River Cemetery on Long Island.
Parents reared O'Hara in Grafton, Massachusetts. O'Hara served in the south Pacific and Japan as a sonar man on the destroyer United States Ship Nicholas during World War II.
With the funding, made available to veterans, he attended Harvard University and roomed with artist-writer Edward Gorey. He majored in music and composed some works despite his irregular attendance was and his disparate interests. Visual art and contemporary music, his first love, heavily influenced O'Hara, a fine piano player all his life; he suddenly played swathes of Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff when visiting new partners, often to their shock.
At Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.
He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At Michigan, he won a Hopwood award and received his Master of Arts in English literature 1951. In that autumn, O'Hara moved into an apartment in city of New York with Joe LeSueur, his roommate and sometimes his lover for the next 11 years. Known throughout his life for his extreme sociability, passion, and warmth, O'Hara had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life, many from the New York art and poetry worlds. Soon after he arrived in New York, the Museum of Modern Art employed him at the front desk, and he began to write seriously.
O'Hara, active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News, and in 1960 was made Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with artists like Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers, and Joan Mitchell. O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island in which he was struck and seriously injured by a man speeding in a beach vehicle during the early morning hours of July 24, 1966. He died the next day of a ruptured liver at the age of 40 and was buried in the Green River Cemetery on Long Island.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 153 reviews
April 3, 2013
Frank O’Hara
Why I Am Not a Painter
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
In “Why I Am Not a Painter” we are privileged to witness the beauty of the creative process, not only of a poem, but also of a painting done by Mike Golberg, one of O’Hara’s friends and an abstract expressionist painter of the time.
Told in a first person point of view and somehow in a jesting tone, O’Hara explains why he is a poet and not a painter and then he goes on comparing these two types of artists, and the evolution and similarities of their works in process and their final result, which in both cases turn out to be something completely different from what originally inspired them; SARDINES in Goldberg’s painting and ORANGES in O’Hara’s poem, ultimately none of those works contain sardines or oranges but they use them as a title.
I can easily recognize the basic treats of the New York School in this poem. The I-do-this, I-do-that form, as we see in sentences like: “I drink; we drink. I look up”. The description the daily urban life, the spontaneous manner, told in an informal and casual way, for example “for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. Sit down and have a drink, he says”. The parataxis, the list of sentences not necessarily in order and told at the same time, without sequence of events, without the cause and effect relation, like in “You have SARDINES in it. Oh. I go and the days go by and I drop again.” There are also several words used as polyptotons, “The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by.”
Reading this poem made me feel like I was a friend of O’Hara’s and that we were having a conversation about something very intimate to him; of why he is a poet and not a painter. And he resolves that question in the first three lines of the poem: “I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well,” In this first stanza, O’Hara simply points out that he can’t be a painter because he is a poet. He expresses his wish to be a painter, maybe because of their bigger fame (Pollock?) or because he admires their work, but he then assesses that he can’t be what he is not, he has no choosing in it. He is a poet. “I am a real poet.” he reaffirms at the end of the poem. And that final “Well,” in the third line could be read as a “oh well, I would love to be a painter, but I’m not, and that doesn’t upset me very much at all”. The adverb also connects the first stanza with the rest of the poem, which is the comparison of the process of painting and writing and their similarities in the end.
Finally, I want to mention the last line of the poem, which is, for me, the biggest revelation of all because we discover that neither the poem nor the painting contain the original ideas which inspired them. This could be simply an example of another juxtaposition, often used for the New York School Poets, only a contradiction that could be read in a joking or a playful tone.
But at the same time, this sincere way of showing the beauty of the inspiration process makes, in my humble opinion, this seemingly light and easy-going poem almost an emotional and intense confession of O’Hara’s love for art and for New York, creating meaning out of the comparison of these two arts and making the seemingly unconnected sentences converse in the end, where everything makes complete sense.
Dolors Casas
October 24th, 2012
Why I Am Not a Painter
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
In “Why I Am Not a Painter” we are privileged to witness the beauty of the creative process, not only of a poem, but also of a painting done by Mike Golberg, one of O’Hara’s friends and an abstract expressionist painter of the time.
Told in a first person point of view and somehow in a jesting tone, O’Hara explains why he is a poet and not a painter and then he goes on comparing these two types of artists, and the evolution and similarities of their works in process and their final result, which in both cases turn out to be something completely different from what originally inspired them; SARDINES in Goldberg’s painting and ORANGES in O’Hara’s poem, ultimately none of those works contain sardines or oranges but they use them as a title.
I can easily recognize the basic treats of the New York School in this poem. The I-do-this, I-do-that form, as we see in sentences like: “I drink; we drink. I look up”. The description the daily urban life, the spontaneous manner, told in an informal and casual way, for example “for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. Sit down and have a drink, he says”. The parataxis, the list of sentences not necessarily in order and told at the same time, without sequence of events, without the cause and effect relation, like in “You have SARDINES in it. Oh. I go and the days go by and I drop again.” There are also several words used as polyptotons, “The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by.”
Reading this poem made me feel like I was a friend of O’Hara’s and that we were having a conversation about something very intimate to him; of why he is a poet and not a painter. And he resolves that question in the first three lines of the poem: “I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well,” In this first stanza, O’Hara simply points out that he can’t be a painter because he is a poet. He expresses his wish to be a painter, maybe because of their bigger fame (Pollock?) or because he admires their work, but he then assesses that he can’t be what he is not, he has no choosing in it. He is a poet. “I am a real poet.” he reaffirms at the end of the poem. And that final “Well,” in the third line could be read as a “oh well, I would love to be a painter, but I’m not, and that doesn’t upset me very much at all”. The adverb also connects the first stanza with the rest of the poem, which is the comparison of the process of painting and writing and their similarities in the end.
Finally, I want to mention the last line of the poem, which is, for me, the biggest revelation of all because we discover that neither the poem nor the painting contain the original ideas which inspired them. This could be simply an example of another juxtaposition, often used for the New York School Poets, only a contradiction that could be read in a joking or a playful tone.
But at the same time, this sincere way of showing the beauty of the inspiration process makes, in my humble opinion, this seemingly light and easy-going poem almost an emotional and intense confession of O’Hara’s love for art and for New York, creating meaning out of the comparison of these two arts and making the seemingly unconnected sentences converse in the end, where everything makes complete sense.
Dolors Casas
October 24th, 2012
September 16, 2020
'There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for Bullfight and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
show there.
A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is poems by Pierre Reverdy'
So many great poems here that I wouldn't even know where to start in selecting a few - and most of my faves were pretty long ones anyway - so would just take too much time.
This was a massive collection, and it rarely let me down. For me over 90% of it ranged from very good to damn right brilliance! In short - I'd be very surprised if I read a better book of poems this year - and I've read quite a few already - and that will continue.
Frank O'Hara now easily sits inside my top five American poets.
June 2, 2019
One of those giant books of poetry that at times serves as "dip in" book while reading others and at times serves as "my main read."
Because this collects just about everything O'Hara wrote, it's a mixed, mixed bag. Add to that the fact that he often comes across as so casual and so cavalier that you wonder, "How's he doing this?" Oh. And, "Why can't I, too?"
Because, fool. There's only one Frank O'Hara, and he had his moment. The record of it is here.
Because this collects just about everything O'Hara wrote, it's a mixed, mixed bag. Add to that the fact that he often comes across as so casual and so cavalier that you wonder, "How's he doing this?" Oh. And, "Why can't I, too?"
Because, fool. There's only one Frank O'Hara, and he had his moment. The record of it is here.
October 8, 2014
One of the greatest, and one of those poets who you're glad wrote so much because even his mediocre poems have a verve and spontaneity and humor lacking in so many "great" poems by "great" poets. Reading him is also a freeing experience, for the poet or non-poet, because his omnivorous interest in the world is enlivening and free-spirited and can open all the little spigots of imagination in one's mind causing an invigorating flowing sensation through the body which can inspire one to take a wide-eyed walk or write a poem.
January 25, 2016
Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)
is a poem I find myself returning to constantly and with a certain quiet obsessiveness; it captures something I can't quite articulate yet recognize as very fundamental about myself. Its concluding line—"each day’s light has more significance these days"—might very well mean more to me than any other in all of poetry.
May 21, 2016
As with most collections of poetry, read-ish--probably not every word of the book, certainly not chronologically, but enough to form an opinion. And my opinion is O'Hara is a cool dude. Forget Ginsberg's endless and easy hippie hand-wringing about consumerism, O'Hara is your real all-American gay poet, or better put, poet-who-just-so-happens-to-be-gay. He is both fun and moving and as up on the universe's ecstatic motions as the best of 'em, and he happens to like Coca-Cola too. A good starter kit would be
(i) Ave Maria
(ii) Myakovsky (of Mad Men fame)
(iii) St. Paul and All That
(iv) On the Way to the San Remo
and (v) Song (Is it dirty),
which is harder to Google because so many of O'Hara's poems are called "Song" and it's short anyway so I'll just leave it here:
Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that's what you think of in the city
does it just seem dirty
that's what you think of in the city
you don't refuse to breathe do you
someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very
he's attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes
that's what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that's not a thought that's soot
and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don't refuse to breathe do you
(i) Ave Maria
(ii) Myakovsky (of Mad Men fame)
(iii) St. Paul and All That
(iv) On the Way to the San Remo
and (v) Song (Is it dirty),
which is harder to Google because so many of O'Hara's poems are called "Song" and it's short anyway so I'll just leave it here:
Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that's what you think of in the city
does it just seem dirty
that's what you think of in the city
you don't refuse to breathe do you
someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very
he's attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes
that's what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that's not a thought that's soot
and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don't refuse to breathe do you
December 19, 2020
so come the winds into our lives and last
longer than despair's sharp snake, crushed before it conquered
so marvelous is not just a poet's greenish namesake
and we live outside his garden in pure tempestuous rights
Frank O'Hara was a sensual man. His appetites and appreciations are rather evident. Emblazoned, if you will. This massive tome affords the reader a vantage, a portal to a life one of both privilege and scorn. It is a cultured and urban window: the natural world arrives largely through sand in the poet's swim trunks. The content is very uneven in form and likely quality. It is this erratic quality which makes all the more autobiographical, regardless of such violating accepted critical standards. I kept leering, looking for Gotham cultural overlaps with Arendt and McCarthy. It was a fascinating experience, very emotive even when O'Hara is providing a "I did this and then I did that" sort of lyrical exercise.
And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.
I feel enriched by this. Despite a certain aversion to the dedicated composer I felt O'Hara's celebratory poems in honor of Rachmaninov's birthday to be especially effective paens to creation. There is much about music and painting. There is also a reverence to his fellow poets and authors. Pasternak especially is a force to behold and the essay regarding the Russian poet such should be better know.
longer than despair's sharp snake, crushed before it conquered
so marvelous is not just a poet's greenish namesake
and we live outside his garden in pure tempestuous rights
Frank O'Hara was a sensual man. His appetites and appreciations are rather evident. Emblazoned, if you will. This massive tome affords the reader a vantage, a portal to a life one of both privilege and scorn. It is a cultured and urban window: the natural world arrives largely through sand in the poet's swim trunks. The content is very uneven in form and likely quality. It is this erratic quality which makes all the more autobiographical, regardless of such violating accepted critical standards. I kept leering, looking for Gotham cultural overlaps with Arendt and McCarthy. It was a fascinating experience, very emotive even when O'Hara is providing a "I did this and then I did that" sort of lyrical exercise.
And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.
I feel enriched by this. Despite a certain aversion to the dedicated composer I felt O'Hara's celebratory poems in honor of Rachmaninov's birthday to be especially effective paens to creation. There is much about music and painting. There is also a reverence to his fellow poets and authors. Pasternak especially is a force to behold and the essay regarding the Russian poet such should be better know.
March 18, 2009
Frank O'Hara's poems range from utterly brilliant to utterly pointless, but man, I love him. When I was a wee English undergrad O'Hara made me laugh so much, and was one of the voices that helped me realize that poetry resides as much in the mundane and the absurd as it does in the fantastic and the beautiful.
May 4, 2008
If you don't yet know Frank O'Hara I ENVY YOUR discovery! If this book isn't soon taught in every high school in America I'm going to... tell them! Something! Anyway, THIS is the collection to have of his work. I find that the selected poems don't have ALL the poems I LOVE by him, and why bother having a selected when you can have the WHOLE MEAL of extraordinary work of an extraordinary life!?
With MUCH respect,
CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
With MUCH respect,
CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
September 25, 2011
Famously dour poetry critic William Logan smooths a few of the wrinkles from his creased visage and assess editor Mark Ford's new Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara with a surprisingly even hand. That is, he found some nice things to say about a poet you wouldn't have thought he'd consider to have any saving graces .The upshot is that he has a peeve against massive "Collected Poems" from dead writers where the good work is buried among limitless juvenilia and failed experiments. The poems of O'Hara, he writes, needed a good weeding.
"O’Hara’s wonderful poems are all too easily drowned out by the vivifying mediocrity of the rest. At times the banalities pile up and overwhelm the poems — but then they were the poems. Rarely has an American poet so influential (two generations of urban poets have come out of O’Hara’s shopping bag) written so many poems dull to anyone except his genial fanatics — his very notion of the aesthetic courted failure as a method.... When O’Hara was lucky, he was very lucky, because his method could not help but fail most of the time."
One does have to admire this congenial sourpuss's ability with a phrase.I happen to love my massive , Donald Allen edited Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara , and think that Logan is being obtuse for the sake of not diminishing his reputation for taking iconic writers to task, but all the same, enjoy the review. What is significant and wonderfully successful about O'Hara's poem is , as Ron Silliman upon, he was the first American poet since William Carlos Williams to shy from, lampoon or ignore altogether the dominant conventions of formal, high style then current in American poetry and to instead settle on a unique idea of the patois of American cities. There is something wonderfully askew in the poet's work, and a good amount of the poems in the Complete Poems succeed because of what I suspect was a canny knack O'Hara developed and honed as he wrote over the years; a speech that was endearingly familiar, with an elegance that didn't announce its beauty with trumpets summoning the reader to a poem's epiphany, but rather something that caught you in wildly conflating stream of language.
Not unlike the live-wire architectural cubism in Stuart Davis paintings, with their jazz inflected angles , bright,bursting colors and idiomatic use of advertising iconography (but avoiding the entombing tendencies that doomed Pop Art), O'Hara's writes the poetry equivalent of a man supremely stimulated by what the boundless blocks and tall buildings of New York could bring him; his was the rhythm of someone wanting to talk to you about a dozen items at once, and there in is his genius; with so many things to relate, to remark upon, to marvel at and express the accelerated rush of emotional response, the poet allows matters to drift, topics to drop, creating an impressive verse that is at once of it's time and yet timeless in the sense that a reader to this day recognizes the exhilaration and sadness of O'Hara's valedictorian missives, both compact and expanded, generalized and specific to friends, lovers, situations.
There is something wonderfully askew in the poet's work, and a good amount of the poems in the Complete Poems succeed because of what I suspect was a canny knack O'Hara developed and honed as he wrote over the years; a speech that was endearingly familiar, with an elegance that didn't announce its beauty with trumpets summoning the reader to a poem's pared essence, but rather something that caught you in wildly conflating stream of language. As others would learn from him, O'Hara was the master of not getting to the point. The point , if any, was that he was alive in a life that was simply too incredible for words to contain.
"O’Hara’s wonderful poems are all too easily drowned out by the vivifying mediocrity of the rest. At times the banalities pile up and overwhelm the poems — but then they were the poems. Rarely has an American poet so influential (two generations of urban poets have come out of O’Hara’s shopping bag) written so many poems dull to anyone except his genial fanatics — his very notion of the aesthetic courted failure as a method.... When O’Hara was lucky, he was very lucky, because his method could not help but fail most of the time."
One does have to admire this congenial sourpuss's ability with a phrase.I happen to love my massive , Donald Allen edited Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara , and think that Logan is being obtuse for the sake of not diminishing his reputation for taking iconic writers to task, but all the same, enjoy the review. What is significant and wonderfully successful about O'Hara's poem is , as Ron Silliman upon, he was the first American poet since William Carlos Williams to shy from, lampoon or ignore altogether the dominant conventions of formal, high style then current in American poetry and to instead settle on a unique idea of the patois of American cities. There is something wonderfully askew in the poet's work, and a good amount of the poems in the Complete Poems succeed because of what I suspect was a canny knack O'Hara developed and honed as he wrote over the years; a speech that was endearingly familiar, with an elegance that didn't announce its beauty with trumpets summoning the reader to a poem's epiphany, but rather something that caught you in wildly conflating stream of language.
Not unlike the live-wire architectural cubism in Stuart Davis paintings, with their jazz inflected angles , bright,bursting colors and idiomatic use of advertising iconography (but avoiding the entombing tendencies that doomed Pop Art), O'Hara's writes the poetry equivalent of a man supremely stimulated by what the boundless blocks and tall buildings of New York could bring him; his was the rhythm of someone wanting to talk to you about a dozen items at once, and there in is his genius; with so many things to relate, to remark upon, to marvel at and express the accelerated rush of emotional response, the poet allows matters to drift, topics to drop, creating an impressive verse that is at once of it's time and yet timeless in the sense that a reader to this day recognizes the exhilaration and sadness of O'Hara's valedictorian missives, both compact and expanded, generalized and specific to friends, lovers, situations.
There is something wonderfully askew in the poet's work, and a good amount of the poems in the Complete Poems succeed because of what I suspect was a canny knack O'Hara developed and honed as he wrote over the years; a speech that was endearingly familiar, with an elegance that didn't announce its beauty with trumpets summoning the reader to a poem's pared essence, but rather something that caught you in wildly conflating stream of language. As others would learn from him, O'Hara was the master of not getting to the point. The point , if any, was that he was alive in a life that was simply too incredible for words to contain.
August 6, 2007
Oooh, my name is Frank O'Hara and I like to write most of my poems on the go, on the back of important papers or on napkins or on anything that could be lost in an instant. After I die, my friends will turn my apartment inside out to try to find the poems that make up this book. Don't forget in between the couch cushions!
June 20, 2007
If you haven't read O'Hara, do it. Fun, fun poetry. A contemporary of Kerouac and Ginsburg, but I really prefer him to either of those beatniks. He is irreverent, writes about all sorts of things from movie stars to life in Manhattan. I read him first back in college - when I was in San Francisco, I visited the famed City Lights bookstore and bought his collected poems there. Another poet I would rank as "accessible" - but don't let that fool you, accessible isn't necessarily simple... O'Hara is an original.
December 7, 2009
What is more beautiful than night
and someone in your arms
that's what we love about art
it seems to prefer us and stays
and someone in your arms
that's what we love about art
it seems to prefer us and stays
April 4, 2023
frank i love youuuuu
Read
December 4, 2024Writing about "Homosexuality" for my spring term paper in junior year of college legitimately changed the trajectory of my life... now i'm gonna go to grad school... on the penultimate day of senior essay writing, with 70+ mid pages in hand, including the nine that started it all, i am getting a little emotional.... i can't believe i have the privilege to just write and read... my life feels a lot brighter these days!
August 19, 2021
the hodges figgis bookseller told me i had good taste in books when i got this and my ego will never come down now
May 23, 2019
I could not finish this. And it sucks. I've called myself a fan of Frank O'Hara for years, having read scattered poems of his throughout those years, ones that resonated with me.
To this day, Frank O'Hara remains the only poet who has ever written a love poem I actually liked (Having a Coke with You).
But after 200 pages, I am not so sure I can call myself a fan anymore. The language is so outdated even by the standards of the era -- at times, he comes across as outright pretentious. So many lines I had to read again and again and again, some poems I just skipped.
This was disappointing, to say the least. I read all I could. But I can't go on.
To this day, Frank O'Hara remains the only poet who has ever written a love poem I actually liked (Having a Coke with You).
But after 200 pages, I am not so sure I can call myself a fan anymore. The language is so outdated even by the standards of the era -- at times, he comes across as outright pretentious. So many lines I had to read again and again and again, some poems I just skipped.
This was disappointing, to say the least. I read all I could. But I can't go on.
April 3, 2023
“oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much”
Frank O’Hara is a very underrated modern American poem who belonged to the New York School. He was known as a ‘poet among painters’ and hung out with the likes of Ginsberg, De Kooning, Kenneth Koch.. etc.
He published Meditations on an Emergency in 1954, Lunch Poems in 1964 and then died by a freak accident.
O’Hara started as a postcard seller at MOMA and worked his way up to an assistant curator. What he did best was romanticising everyday things, like his walks around New York City during lunch hour.
Frank O’Hara liked to write about the connection people had with each other on a micro and macro scale, as well as the connections he had with the world. He developed his own style of poetry that he calls ‘I do this, I do that poems’, written in first person, eschewing rhyme and meter, typically while he’s walking/ferrying/commuting around NYC on his lunch breaks from MOMA, typically mentioning food, and with a lot of references to art, pop culture and Hollywood. I love his style so much and I completely resonate with the personal bond that’s formed with a city through walking around and doing seemingly mundane things. His poems tend to start like this:
“It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me”
Another example:
“I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!”
His most celebrated poems are ‘Having a Coke with you’, ‘The Day Lady Died’, written about Billie Holiday’s death, ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Poem: Lana Turner has Collapsed’.
Having a Coke with you is an amazing example of him taking something so American and relatable and filling it with a lot of emotion. It’s about starting to fall in love with someone where merely having a coke with them and looking at them is better than spending time in coastal European towns, better than looking at great artists works.
“ I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time”
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much”
Frank O’Hara is a very underrated modern American poem who belonged to the New York School. He was known as a ‘poet among painters’ and hung out with the likes of Ginsberg, De Kooning, Kenneth Koch.. etc.
He published Meditations on an Emergency in 1954, Lunch Poems in 1964 and then died by a freak accident.
O’Hara started as a postcard seller at MOMA and worked his way up to an assistant curator. What he did best was romanticising everyday things, like his walks around New York City during lunch hour.
Frank O’Hara liked to write about the connection people had with each other on a micro and macro scale, as well as the connections he had with the world. He developed his own style of poetry that he calls ‘I do this, I do that poems’, written in first person, eschewing rhyme and meter, typically while he’s walking/ferrying/commuting around NYC on his lunch breaks from MOMA, typically mentioning food, and with a lot of references to art, pop culture and Hollywood. I love his style so much and I completely resonate with the personal bond that’s formed with a city through walking around and doing seemingly mundane things. His poems tend to start like this:
“It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me”
Another example:
“I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!”
His most celebrated poems are ‘Having a Coke with you’, ‘The Day Lady Died’, written about Billie Holiday’s death, ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Poem: Lana Turner has Collapsed’.
Having a Coke with you is an amazing example of him taking something so American and relatable and filling it with a lot of emotion. It’s about starting to fall in love with someone where merely having a coke with them and looking at them is better than spending time in coastal European towns, better than looking at great artists works.
“ I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time”
April 1, 2019
from “Mayakovsky”:
Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,
and I’ll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.
Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick
with bloody blows on its head.
I embraced a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.
O’Hara’s got this gift for making poetry sound like snatches of dialogue or lines from a play you wish you’d written mixed with this poetic diction that feels like what I imagine New York School must have loved. My method for taking in his collected works was to sit for extended periods flipping at random throughout this massive tome. Less a study of the progression of his career and more the sampling from a smorgasbord to develop my palate. The poems I ended up really enjoying, though, were ones I already knew about. Former friends. Much of the rest I encountered seemed odd in form or sound—I’m still not sure what struck me as off-putting—and didn’t capture me like I was hoping. But I enjoyed the ride.
Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,
and I’ll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.
Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick
with bloody blows on its head.
I embraced a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.
O’Hara’s got this gift for making poetry sound like snatches of dialogue or lines from a play you wish you’d written mixed with this poetic diction that feels like what I imagine New York School must have loved. My method for taking in his collected works was to sit for extended periods flipping at random throughout this massive tome. Less a study of the progression of his career and more the sampling from a smorgasbord to develop my palate. The poems I ended up really enjoying, though, were ones I already knew about. Former friends. Much of the rest I encountered seemed odd in form or sound—I’m still not sure what struck me as off-putting—and didn’t capture me like I was hoping. But I enjoyed the ride.
June 7, 2022
Я прочитала все сразу и теперь мне кажется что я и поэт гей в нью-йорке 70 лет назад были бы бэстис. Я постараюсь выбрать совсем немножко цитат, потому что в закладках миллион слов!!!
We are sick of living and afraid that death will not be by water, o sea
It's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness
I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?
It's a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern
Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change? I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
don't think of others
until you have thought of yourself
To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage of my will.
Лайк бэстис.... айм киллин майсэлф
We are sick of living and afraid that death will not be by water, o sea
It's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness
I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?
It's a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern
Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change? I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
don't think of others
until you have thought of yourself
To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage of my will.
Лайк бэстис.... айм киллин майсэлф
June 12, 2019
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF FRANK O’HARA is a brick of a book that hit me like Ignatz does Krazy Kat, with a skull-thundering love. Over the course of 500-plus pages I got to know the poet as he rambled day and night, drunk and sober, but always ecstatically, like he was grabbing me by the collar and shaking me. I was reminded of the Zen saying, “Don’t squander your life!” which I always hated. I can do with my life as I please, thank you. O’Hara is more my type of spiritual guide, cutting a path through a time and place I love, with a manic enthusiasm, part of a parade of painters and poets who created without constraint of meter or rhyme. It’s mostly incomprehensible to me, catching only a drift of reference as it quickly passes, yet I was addicted to the voice. When the book ends with O’Hara killed on Fire Island in a freak accident with a dune buggy (!) I felt the loss as if of a good friend.
June 6, 2019
i can’t talk about it
March 13, 2022
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
- Mayakovsky
This is my first dip into poetry since my years during GCSE English Literature and Frank O’Hara made me remember how much I loved the art of poetry, and can’t wait to read more in the future!
- 5 Stars
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
- Mayakovsky
This is my first dip into poetry since my years during GCSE English Literature and Frank O’Hara made me remember how much I loved the art of poetry, and can’t wait to read more in the future!
- 5 Stars
March 10, 2024
Picked this up because the port was referenced in a book about the new York art scene. Not my bag.
November 27, 2020
If you've wandered into this space wondering where to begin with Frank O'Hara, let me admit up-front I'm unfamiliar with the 2009 Mark Ford-edited Selected Poems, and go on to advocate for three of the four single volumes O'Hara published in his lifetime, Meditations in an Emergency (1957), Lunch Poems (1964) or Love Poems (Tentative Title) (1965), as well as something about (in favor of) the present (pictured above) volume -- this is the 1970 Don Allen-edited The Collected Poems, different from the revised version, put out in paperback that removed poems mistakenly put in the hardcover -- by Joe LeSueur, Patsy Southgate, and others. It's useful to have it all.
What happened was this: When O'Hara died, at 40, in a bizarre RV accident at Fire Island, in the summer of '66, he'd written much that hadn't been published. Donald Allen, who'd brought O'Hara into The New American Poetry anthology and helped edit him at Grove, was tasked with going through what must have been a morass of manuscripts. The above-pictured The Collected is the result, a huge volume that appeared in 1970. Allen then did an abridgment, or Selected in 1974, that I don't recommend. Why? There was always going to be a tendency, by the publishers, to want to see the three short volumes re-printed together in a larger volume (this would vitiate the need for the smaller volumes to remain in print). The puzzle, however, is that O'Hara wrote nearly every day for fifteen years, essentially between 1948-1963, and never bothered to get so much of it into print. He relied, rather, on what his friends told him were the good poems; much, then, was left in manuscript form. The daily sketch from the 1970 The Collected is where O'Hara readers wishing to get beyond the phenomenon of the lunch poem should apply.
There's little secondary work to help you read O'Hara, so dig in. The biography, done in the early Nineties by Brad Gooch, is inadequate. Much more interesting is O'Hara's longtime companion, Joe LeSueur's Digressions on Some Poems By Frank O'Hara -- a complicated, far from scholarly, emendation of forty poems. But to take a whole different tact: O'Hara wrote, from 1961 on, a whole book of poems to his friend (if they were lovers it was only briefly), and muse, Bill Berkson -- you won't read that book anywhere but here. So reading it alongside something like Berkson's Serenade (2000) has been useful to me. O'Hara is another poet whose reputation has gained and lost ground since his death, much of the variability due to the unfinished state of his publication at the time of his death. He's never not been a central poet since the moment I began reading him.
What happened was this: When O'Hara died, at 40, in a bizarre RV accident at Fire Island, in the summer of '66, he'd written much that hadn't been published. Donald Allen, who'd brought O'Hara into The New American Poetry anthology and helped edit him at Grove, was tasked with going through what must have been a morass of manuscripts. The above-pictured The Collected is the result, a huge volume that appeared in 1970. Allen then did an abridgment, or Selected in 1974, that I don't recommend. Why? There was always going to be a tendency, by the publishers, to want to see the three short volumes re-printed together in a larger volume (this would vitiate the need for the smaller volumes to remain in print). The puzzle, however, is that O'Hara wrote nearly every day for fifteen years, essentially between 1948-1963, and never bothered to get so much of it into print. He relied, rather, on what his friends told him were the good poems; much, then, was left in manuscript form. The daily sketch from the 1970 The Collected is where O'Hara readers wishing to get beyond the phenomenon of the lunch poem should apply.
There's little secondary work to help you read O'Hara, so dig in. The biography, done in the early Nineties by Brad Gooch, is inadequate. Much more interesting is O'Hara's longtime companion, Joe LeSueur's Digressions on Some Poems By Frank O'Hara -- a complicated, far from scholarly, emendation of forty poems. But to take a whole different tact: O'Hara wrote, from 1961 on, a whole book of poems to his friend (if they were lovers it was only briefly), and muse, Bill Berkson -- you won't read that book anywhere but here. So reading it alongside something like Berkson's Serenade (2000) has been useful to me. O'Hara is another poet whose reputation has gained and lost ground since his death, much of the variability due to the unfinished state of his publication at the time of his death. He's never not been a central poet since the moment I began reading him.
September 1, 2020
As with all collections of poetry (and especially ones of this size), I began reading this book with trepidation – determined to go cover to cover while fearing a tedious struggle to find meaning in cryptic lines full of mythical or classical literary references. After struggling to find significance in some his earliest poems, I soon found myself moving eagerly from one to the next – at first a line or brief passage on occasion, and then entire poems that brought back thoughts, emotions, and experiences of my own that had been long forgotten.
O’Hara’s and my lifetimes barely overlap on the historical timeline, but we share the almost universal personal timeline of men who must come to terms with their homosexuality and find a way to long-term stability and happiness. Much of his poetry is a record of his development in this regard, some of it surprisingly blunt, but most with some degree of discretion or allegory. There were frequent reminders that this collection contains not only poems written for publication, but also those written to and for his intimates.
More historically significant, however, is that O’Hara’s work is a record of one man’s thoughts, emotions, and intimate interactions as a participant in the New York School of poets and artists, and its cross-pollination with the Beat Generation and Hollywood. Cultural references to the people and works of the not-too-distant past also provide clues to what motivated this new school of creativity.
The end of his poetry came as a surprise in this book, as did his death in July 1966 after being hit by a dune-buggy on the beach on Fire Island. But flipping a couple of pages I found a collection of his essays. Among them was one titled “About Zhivago and His Poems”, which I found to be the most captivating item in this collection – I savored every sentence. It brought back vividly some of the greatest passages in Doctor Zhivago, but more powerfully the cultural significance of the poet and poetry. O’Hara focuses on Russian poets Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esinin [Yesenin], and Yuri Zhivago (the fictional character O’Hara considered distinguishable from its creator). O’Hara’s observations of the effects of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet state on these men’s lives and works provides for an extremely powerful example of the role poetry plays in society and for the poet himself. (I would recommend consulting the Wikipedia articles on Mayakovsky and Esinin to enhance the impact of this essay.)
O’Hara’s and my lifetimes barely overlap on the historical timeline, but we share the almost universal personal timeline of men who must come to terms with their homosexuality and find a way to long-term stability and happiness. Much of his poetry is a record of his development in this regard, some of it surprisingly blunt, but most with some degree of discretion or allegory. There were frequent reminders that this collection contains not only poems written for publication, but also those written to and for his intimates.
More historically significant, however, is that O’Hara’s work is a record of one man’s thoughts, emotions, and intimate interactions as a participant in the New York School of poets and artists, and its cross-pollination with the Beat Generation and Hollywood. Cultural references to the people and works of the not-too-distant past also provide clues to what motivated this new school of creativity.
The end of his poetry came as a surprise in this book, as did his death in July 1966 after being hit by a dune-buggy on the beach on Fire Island. But flipping a couple of pages I found a collection of his essays. Among them was one titled “About Zhivago and His Poems”, which I found to be the most captivating item in this collection – I savored every sentence. It brought back vividly some of the greatest passages in Doctor Zhivago, but more powerfully the cultural significance of the poet and poetry. O’Hara focuses on Russian poets Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esinin [Yesenin], and Yuri Zhivago (the fictional character O’Hara considered distinguishable from its creator). O’Hara’s observations of the effects of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet state on these men’s lives and works provides for an extremely powerful example of the role poetry plays in society and for the poet himself. (I would recommend consulting the Wikipedia articles on Mayakovsky and Esinin to enhance the impact of this essay.)
January 12, 2013
It's hard to argue with lines like "As they're putting up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue/I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets/put to some use before all those coloured lights come on."
I often turn to this book when I need shot of whimsey or inspiration. It's a rich source for me.
I often turn to this book when I need shot of whimsey or inspiration. It's a rich source for me.
December 9, 2010
I defend Jackson Pollock's paintings relentlessly because they are brilliant. If Pollock had not put effort and craft and thought behind his every paint brush swing, his paintings would have turned out like this bilge.
January 18, 2016
Stunning, vibrant, incredibly moving poems that I related to so closely. Felt like this was written just for me.
December 4, 2013
If you happen to connect with this work you'll be devoted for life. There are those who don't and view his work as gibberish. I have nearly canonized him.
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