Synopses & Reviews
Frank OHara (1926-1966) was one of the most original and influential American poets of the twentieth century. Although he grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts, OHara developed into the quintessential poet of mid-century Manhattan; soon after his arrival in New York in 1951 he evolved a new kind of urban poetry that brilliantly captures the heady excitements of a golden period in the citys artistic life. OHaras style exudes an insistent, seductive glamour; his mercurial poems, at once open-ended and startlingly immediate, radiate an insouciant confidence that has lost none of its freshness over the decades. OHara was at the heart of a vibrant artistic circle that embraced fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, as well as experimental painters such as Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jasper Johns. Their achievements are movingly celebrated in many of his poems, while at the same time he paid loving tribute to popular idols such as James Dean and Lana Turner:
Lana Turner has collapsed!
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 exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
This generous new selection by Mark Ford reflects all the phases and varied achievements of OHaras tragically foreshortened career, including his drama, and is followed by an appendix of key prose texts such as “Personism,” in which OHara succinctly summed up his overall approach to poetry: “You just go on your nerve.”
About the Author
Mark Ford has published several volumes of poetry and is the author of the critical biography Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and London Review of Books; he teaches in the English department at University College London.
Table of Contents
Introduction A Note on the Texts
Autobiographia Literaria
Poem (At Night Chinamen Jump)
Poem (The Eager Note on My Door Said “Call Me,)
Today
Memorial Day 1950
Travel
Les Étiquettes Jaunes
A Pleasant Thought from Whitehead
Animals
The Three-Penny Opera
An Image of Leda
Poem (If I Knew Exactly Why the Chestnut Tree)
The Critic
Poetry
Song (Im Going to New York!)
A Rant
Interior (With Jane)
A Party Full of Friends
A Terrestrial Cuckoo
To Dick
Commercial Variations
Chez Jane
Blocks
October
River
Walking to Work
Try! Try!
On Rachmaninoffs Birthday (Quick! A Last Poem Before I Go)
To My Dead Father
The Hunter
Grand Central
Homosexuality
To a Poet
Aus Einem April
On Rachmaninoffs Birthday (I Am So Glad that Larry Rivers Made a)
Epigram for Joe
Meditations in an Emergency
To the Mountains in New York
Mayakovsky
In the Movies
Music
To John Ashbery
For Grace, After a Party
Poem (I Watched an Armory Combing Its Bronze Bricks)
Poem (There I Could Never Be a Boy,)
To the Harbormaster
Une Journée de Juillet
At the Old Place
Nocturne
Poem (Johnny And Alvin Are Going Home, Are Sleeping Now)
To an Actor Who Died
Thinking of James Dean
My Heart
To The Film Industry in Crisis
On Seeing Larry Rivers WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE at the Museum of Modern Art
Radio
Sleeping on the Wing
Joseph Cornell
[It Is 1:55 in Cambridge, Pale and Spring Cool,]
Poem (And Tomorrow Morning at 8 Oclock in Springfield, Massachusetts,)
Poem (Instant Coffee With Slightly Sour Cream)
Returning
In Memory of My Feelings
[And Leaving in a Great Smoky Fury]
A Step Away From Them
Digression on NUMBER 1, 1948
[It Seems Far Away and Gentle Now]
Why I Am Not a Painter
Poem Read at Joan Mitchells
John Button Birthday
Anxiety
Louise
Failures of Spring
Two Dreams of Waking
Ode to Joy
Ode to Willem De Kooning
Poem (I Live Above a Dyke Bar and Im Happy.)
Ode To Michael Goldberg (s Birth and Other Births)
Ode (To Joseph Lesueur) on the Arrow that Flieth by Day
Ode on Causality
Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets
A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island
Fou-Rire
To Gottfried Benn
Heroic Sculpture
The “Unfinished”
The Day Lady Died
Rhapsody
Song (Is It Dirty)
Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul
Joes Jacket
You Are Gorgeous and Im Coming
Poem (The Fluorescent Tubing Burns Like a Bobby-Soxers Ankles)
“Lamour Avait Passé par Là”
Poem (Hate Is Only One of Many Responses)
Poem (I Dont Know as I Get What D. H. Lawrence Is Driving at)
Personal Poem
Post the Lake Poets Ballad
Naphtha
Kein Traum
Poem (Khrushchev Is Coming on the Right Day!)
Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)
In Favor of Ones Time
Les Luths
Poem (Now the Violets Are All Gone, the Rhinoceroses, the Cymbals)
Poem “À LA RECHERCHE D GERTRUDE STEIN ”
Poem (Light Clarity Avocado Salad in the Morning)
Hôtel Transylvanie
[On the Vast Highway]
Present
Poem (Thats Not a Cross Look Its a Sign of Life)
Avenue A
Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think
A Little Travel Diary
Beer for Breakfast
Having a Coke with You
Steps
Ave Maria
Fond Sonore
[The Fondest Dream of]
Cornkind
Macaroni
For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson
Essay on Style
Vincent and I Inaugurate a Movie Theatre
Early on Sunday
St. Paul and All That
F. (Missive & Walk) I. # 53
Poem En Forme De Saw
Metaphysical Poem
Biotherm (For Bill Berkson)
Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)
First Dances
Answer To Voznesensky & Evtushenko
Again, John Keats, Or the Pot of Basil
[The Light Presses Down]
Walking
Poem (I to You and You to Me The Endless Oceans of)
Fantasy
Cantata
Little Elegy for Antonio Machado
Appendix: Prose
Personism: A Manifesto
[Statement For THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY]
[Statement For Paterson Society]
V. R. Lang: A Memoir
A Personal Preface
Larry Rivers: A Memoir
Short Chronology
Index of Titles