Customer Reviews

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

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For those less famililar with O'Hara there is only one place to start: City Lights' superb little pocket collection, "Lunch Poems."

This collection is enormous, and much of it--especially the early work--is not stylistically representative of his best and most well-known work. It is also dreadfully organized. The poems are not presented by date of publication or date written. Nor do the poems include either date. That information is in a separate index--organized, infuriatingly, by date. So unless you've memorized the year of each of the thousands of poems in this 600 page book, it's not terribly useful. I do hope this book is re-edited substantially for future publication. In the meantime, it will have to do.

At his best, Frank O'Hara's poems are wonderfully accessible, sparklingly natural, delightful, and have the ability to delicately carve out a perfectly captured nanosecond of living breathing space and time with insight and sincerity.

When the critical dust really settles, I think O'Hara will be seen as a crucial American poet -- in the ranks of Whitman, Dickinson and Stevens. Cultured, perceptive, meaningful, playful, and always funny, he took American poetry light-years beyond the "well-made" poets of the midcentury, and the tormented stylings of the 'confessionals' (Lowell, Plath, Berryman et al.)

He introduced a new kind of literary voice into serious poetry: highly personal, specific, catty, generous, vivid and oddly friendly, with an unpretentious humor, and a sense of physical placement, that were often almost mystical. (See "A Step Away from Them.") He showed that you didn't have to be 'heavy' to be profound. In the process, this added an entirely new dimension to serious American writing, the effects of which are still only starting to be understood -- and not just in poetry, but in other forms, too.

Frank could do it all: existential crisis ("1951," "Adieu to Norman..."); artistic meditation ("Ode on Causality"); high erotic comedy ("To the Film Industry in Crisis," "Ave Maria," and the minor, but inspired, "The Lay of the Romance of the Associations"); and poignant confusion ("Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)". And this is not listing the famous "I-do-this-I-do-that" poems, or the transcendent "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island".

(One caveat for newcomers to this work: the book was compiled and edited by Donald Allen after Frank's sudden death. Mr. Allen scrupulously, and wisely, chose to include all of the materials he found, not making any editorial judgements about quality. But the fact is that O'Hara was an uneven writer, and about 20% of these poems are, well, pretty bad. You just have to exercise some caution, and avoid making snap judgements. There are classics on the same page as duds, and sometimes a 'dud' changes into a classic, right before your eyes, after you've gotten the hang of how to read O'Hara.)

Whew. Sorry about the length.

It is amazing to still hear people accuse this work of being 'shallow' (O'Hara had actually found a way of being meaningful in a different tonal range); nonetheless the charge is easily refuted by reading, say, "Ode to Willem de Kooning," or "Joe's Jacket." The best answer comes from Frank himself, at the close of "Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets":

"The only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth,
And dying in black and white, we fight for what we love, not are."

Don't miss it.

An earlier reviewer describes O'Hara's poetry as shallow and vacuous. Shallow, maybe. But not vacuous. O'Hara's interested in the minutiae of daily life - buying a pack of Gauloises on the way to friends for dinner, seeing a headline about Lana Turner collapsing, the hard hats worn by construction workers. Read one poem and you might come away thinking it's trivial. But his life's work - taken as a whole - is an intelligent, alert, funny and perceptive record of a life lived to the full (I think someone else may have said that before me, somewhere). Thing is, O'Hara's interested in surfaces - things, events, trivia - because they have meaning. So his poetry is shallow in a very real and virtuous sense. He's not trying to make big statements, a la Charles Olson or Robert Lowell. What I find amazing is how moving his poetry can so often be, as in The Day Lady Died. On one reading, it's simply a list of things he does on the way to friends for dinner. But the impact is enormous. The poem gets you right up close to O'Hara as he learns of Billie Holiday's death and remembers hearing her sing. Nothing vacuous about that.

Here's an idea for Ph.D. candidates in American Lit, searching for that breakthrough dissertation topic: Frank O'Hara was the (almost-literal) bridge between, on the one hand, the high aethestic seriousness that began in English with Wilde, and culminated in early Modernists like Hart Crane, Eliot and Wallace Stevens; and on the other, what we might call the pan-aesthetic, media-saturated 'hyper-culture' of serious early 21st-century thought, which is equally at ease in poetry, movies, pop music, foreign cultures, the avant-garde, and cartoons -- and blurs the barriers between all of them.

Frank did it first, in case you were wondering. He was as funny as Wilde and as dead-serious as Stevens, plus as silly as a Tarzan movie (which he loved). A hard set of balls to juggle, but juggle them he did, and brilliantly.

For those who think this poetry is too 'casual' to be ranked as first-class, consider the following: Frank was arguably the most cultured man in America in his generation. An art curator, skilled classical pianist, Harvard grad and Navy veteran, fluent in several languages, he basically had all of English and French poetry saved to hard disk in his brain, as well as the last 400 years of Western painting and music. It's almost silly to think about. All of this material forms the background for his impressionistic, seemingly-flip meditations on rainy days, radios, painting, blueberry blintzes, Khrushchev, and love in all its manifold forms. But he's actually built a kind of socio-artistic City with this stuff: read one way, the Collected Poems is the autobiography of a culture at one of its critical historical moments (it's also the autobiography of an individual, and the autobiography of New York.)

In the great poems, the synthesis is utterly cosmic (and comic) in its scale and purpose; in the lesser poems, it's the cultural equivalent of a man lighting his cigars with $100 bills.

Frank more or less dispensed with the concept of the literary 'persona' (a la Ginsberg or Sexton or Berryman) and located his literary impulse within the personal Self. As a result, he re-discovered in literature what we all know in our hearts, but often forget: that the important crossroads of the political and the aesthetic, the public and the unconscious, is the Individual, with all his quirks and eccentricities, and vital importance to the fate of the Republic. If you meditate a while on the lesson, it maybe becomes more meaningful than the clumsy, obvious way that I've expressed it here.

Read Ginsberg's great poem "My Sad Self" (which he dedicated to O'Hara); it's the sound of Frank O'Hara's aesthetic being filtered through another man's consciousness, and then sent back to him.

"...and he will be the wings of an extraordinary Liberty"
-- O'Hara, 'Ode to Michael Goldberg's Birth'

This stuff is the secret pulse of the second half of the 20th century, as Eliot and Stevens were the pulse of the first. One way you can preserve it is to buy the book, and help keep it in print for the next generation.

I found Frank O'Hara's collected poems in my college's library when I was a young girl of 17 and they really freaked me out. They flipped all my notions of "poetry" all on their heads, and I was intrigued and fascinated and turned on and plugged in and electrified. A great poet. Everyone should read this. His ear for diction and amazing wordplay amaze me each time I read anything he's written.

Great book! What else can be said of a book that brings together all Frank O'Hara? Great portrait on the cover too. The only problem with this marvellous book is that the cardboard cover is way too thin for practical reasons (reading, holdin' the book, putting it in your library, leaving it open somewhere since reading him is an ongoing occupation!) The cover gets dog eared soon and damages easily. A sturdier cover for a hefty volume like this please!

This poet changed my life. This poet had style, made his own breaks (luck), had great friends because he gave a damn about them, and loved art unconditionally in any form but with a special love for the city, for the life and art and noise (music) of the city. This poet wore a tie and jacket and swiveled out the door of the Museum of Modern Art with more hip in his pocket than you, Bro. This poet was gay and and every man considered him their best friend and every woman wanted to sleep with him. This poet grew up near Boston, went to the Navy and Hafvard and spent a year in Ann Arbor but was New York all the way, the very heart and soul of New York and the New York School of poets. This poet extends the line from Keats to Rimbaud into the American future.

One test of a fine poet for other poets is that she or he makes you want to write your own poems and gives you permission and the tools to do so. Frank O'Hara does this for me, as well as Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Lautreamont, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Patrick Kavanaugh, Geoffrey Hill, Diane di Prima and others. When I begin to hit patches of rocky ground in my imagination and the hammer of Los falls from my hand, I reach for Frank O'Hara to find permission to write a clean line celebrating art and music and friends and day to day life. His intelligence, his incredible style, his crazily optimistic American/international take on things, beams through. I first came to O'Hara's work through Lunch Poems, which is about as great a crystalization as possible to be had of this man's talent, but the Collected, too, which includes O'Hara's trying out of poses and voices and inventing just about every style that New York poets have been using since, is useful to have in the same way that the complete Leaves of Grass, or Blake, or Dickinson is useful to have. Uneven perhaps in parts, redundant, but even the least typical is instructive: a tool box, if you will, filled with tools (habits of language)with which to craft your own poems. Definitely deserving a place on the shelves of any working poet's library, alongside Lunch Poems and the Poet among the Painters biography. Five stars.

Normally, I am not a fan of poetry. I am a fictional prose fan who often gets tangled up in the abstractions of poetry. With the exception of Rimbaud and WC Williams, I usually leave poetics of any kind to someone else. However, when I finished up a queer theory class with a reading of Frank O'Hara's poetry, I was absolutely stunned at his surprising way with words. I was transported back to my first reading of The Great Gatsby where I fell in love with (became obsessed with) Fitzgerald's poetic prose. Fraught with images of pop culture and constructions of post industrialism, O'Hara makes beautiful the images of the mundane. I find myself getting excited at the prospect of reading more of his stuff (he was very prolific)and learning more about his life and times.
If poetry scares you, this might be the very best place to start in gaining an appreciation. I have become a lifelong fan of O'Hara and this book is wholly responsible for that.

I dare you to flip through this book and not be deeply affected. His poetry is immediate,honest, and completely transparent. Rare is it that emotion is so cleanly displayed, and so easily understandable. I have little patience for most poetry after reading this collection.