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Wonderful, original poems' He was an essential contact-man between the worlds of painting and poetry. And he suggested a rich and fascinating dialogue between them.' Eavan Boland. 'O'Hara's hip, glamorous, freewheeling self-celebrations both reflected and helped disseminate a new kind of confidence and daring in American poetry.' Mark Ford.
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Frank O'Hara (1926-66) is among the most delightful and radical poets of the twentieth century. He is celebrated for his apparently unpremeditated poems, autobiographical and immediate ('any time, any place'). This is not the whole O'Hara: he may have scribbled poems on serviettes, but others he worked on with intense concentration, creating sequences that are inexhaustibly nuanced, full of surprise, heartbreak and laughter. There are analogies between his work and that of the painters he championed, Pollock, Kline and de Kooning among them. He is resolutely metropolitan, and his metropolis is New York City. He brilliantly captured the pace and rhythms, quandaries and exhilarations, of its mid-twentieth-century life.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Since his death in 1966 in a freak beach-buggy accident O'Hara, who published little during his lifetime, has had an increasingly wide influence. Although this Selected includes earlier work showing the influence of the French Surrealists, O'Hara's best known today for his 'I-do-this-I-do-that' poems, where he's wandering about New York City on his lunch-breaks from his job at the Museum of Modern Art. His typical manner in these poems is casual, improvisatory and non-metrical, producing a convincing impression of immediacy and intimacy. He uses real friends' names and events and pop references. Quirky line breaks, colloquial diction and vocabulary, and 'undignified' exclamation marks create a sense of breathlessness, excitement and innocent wonder, which were astounding and original emotions for American poetry in the 50s, when the mainstream style (of Lowell, Wilbur and co.) was to be civilized, ironic and cerebrally distant. O'Hara, who cared little about wider publication, wrote for his wide circle of artistic friends and, for such a promiscuous poet, friends were potential seductees. These poems are like extensions of display behaviour, where the poet is _calculatedly_ lovable.
Much lyric poetry (then and today) seems to have the poet 'coming to a realisation' about something, moving from ignorance to knowledge that he or she then wants to share. O'Hara found this false and patronising. His poems don't make a 'point'; there is little attempt to derive meaning, or make judgements. He shows instead what things feel like at a given moment, and seems less interested in questioning American society than in working out how to live as a individual within it: "how to be open but not violated, how not to panic" and "what's important is not what happens but how one feels about it", as Marjorie Perloff says in her book. It's perhaps this approach that's made him increasingly popular these days, where more and more people live a friends-centred, urban, socially-rich, sexually-diverse, politically-inactive, individualist life than ever before, and where the seductive, witty, inconsequential voice he invented now gets heard ubiquitously in journalism and TV as well as in literature.
This selection includes 'Personism' (O'Hara's parodic manifesto), nearly all the poems discussed by Perloff and many more, an index of first lines and a list of works.
Much lyric poetry (then and today) seems to have the poet 'coming to a realisation' about something, moving from ignorance to knowledge that he or she then wants to share. O'Hara found this false and patronising. His poems don't make a 'point'; there is little attempt to derive meaning, or make judgements. He shows instead what things feel like at a given moment, and seems less interested in questioning American society than in working out how to live as a individual within it: "how to be open but not violated, how not to panic" and "what's important is not what happens but how one feels about it", as Marjorie Perloff says in her book. It's perhaps this approach that's made him increasingly popular these days, where more and more people live a friends-centred, urban, socially-rich, sexually-diverse, politically-inactive, individualist life than ever before, and where the seductive, witty, inconsequential voice he invented now gets heard ubiquitously in journalism and TV as well as in literature.
This selection includes 'Personism' (O'Hara's parodic manifesto), nearly all the poems discussed by Perloff and many more, an index of first lines and a list of works.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
The Perfect Lunch Date
23 April 2000
Format:Paperback
It's not exactly pocket-sized, but this volume can be conveniently and inconspicuously carried to lunch uptown, midtown, downtown, or out of town. There is a great collection of poems here (no plays), from the short and sweet to the longer and sweeter. All set in beautiful type on nice, formal heavier paper and with the inclusion of "Personism: A Manifesto" for an introduction and the cover art by O'Hara's personal friend. The cover is more than just interesting, however, it really informs some of the questions about confessional poetry raised by O'Hara's work. Just look at it for awhile... By the way, if you haven't yet read Frank O'Hara's poetry, this volume is an excellent and accessible place to start. Grab a fork, a cup of coffee, and dig in!
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
A great collection.
19 April 2004
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Dear Diary: I have fallen in love with a poet named Frank O'Hara. I started with "Lunch Poems," but needed more. This volume is divine. O'Hara sneaks up on you. His style is so simple, so conversational, that you often times are surprised by the sudden depth of feeling comminicated in a final phrase. I don't know enough about poetry to prattle on and on without betraying my ignornace in short order. However, I know what I like, I know what speaks to me. I know that Frank O'Hara was a great poet.
Words from the short life of a New York Poet
4 Sep 2011
Format:Paperback
Francis O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry. 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.
O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Artnews, and in 1960 was Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with the artists Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers and Joan Mitchell.
In the early morning hours of July 24, 1966, O'Hara was struck by a dune buggy on the Fire Island beach. He died the next day of a ruptured liver. O'Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery on Long Island.
While O'Hara's poetry is generally autobiographical, it tends to be based on his observations of New York life rather than exploring his past. Among his friends, O'Hara was known to treat poetry dismissively, as something to be done only in the moment. n 1959, he wrote a mock manifesto called "Personism: A Manifesto." In it he explains his position on formal structure: "I don't ... like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve.
O'Hara's poetry shows the influence of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, Russian poetry, and poets associated with French Symbolism.
As part of the New York School of poetry, O'Hara to some degree encapsulated the compositional philosophy of New York School painters.This interaction between poet and painter is most evident in the poem "Why I am Not A Painter", in which O'Hara compares the process of writing a poem called "Oranges" with a description of his friend Mike Goldberg's creation of a painting entitled "Sardines". Neither work in the end contains a reference to its title. O'Hara was also influenced by William Carlos Williams.
O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Artnews, and in 1960 was Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with the artists Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers and Joan Mitchell.
In the early morning hours of July 24, 1966, O'Hara was struck by a dune buggy on the Fire Island beach. He died the next day of a ruptured liver. O'Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery on Long Island.
While O'Hara's poetry is generally autobiographical, it tends to be based on his observations of New York life rather than exploring his past. Among his friends, O'Hara was known to treat poetry dismissively, as something to be done only in the moment. n 1959, he wrote a mock manifesto called "Personism: A Manifesto." In it he explains his position on formal structure: "I don't ... like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve.
O'Hara's poetry shows the influence of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, Russian poetry, and poets associated with French Symbolism.
As part of the New York School of poetry, O'Hara to some degree encapsulated the compositional philosophy of New York School painters.This interaction between poet and painter is most evident in the poem "Why I am Not A Painter", in which O'Hara compares the process of writing a poem called "Oranges" with a description of his friend Mike Goldberg's creation of a painting entitled "Sardines". Neither work in the end contains a reference to its title. O'Hara was also influenced by William Carlos Williams.
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