Customer Reviews

Selected Poems

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Gracious, charming, witty, sassy, spontaneous, irreverent, joyful, campy, insouciant--Frank O'Hara's poetry always brings to mind the best sort of adjectives, those that celebrate life, even as it turns toward eulogy and lament. "No more dying," dares the refrain from O'Hara's "Ode to Joy," and Mark Ford, in editing this long-overdue new selection, has done the excellent and necessary task of dusting any traces of oblivion from O'Hara's oeuvre. As Ford notes in his succinct yet personable introduction, "even [O'Hara's] close friends were surprised at the extraordinary bulk of his Collected Poems when it appeared in 1971." The massiveness of the Collected was tempered in 1974 by the now out-of-print The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Both of these volumes were edited by Donald Allen, who, in 1977, gathered two further collections, Poems Retrieved and Early Writing, which were comprised of work not appearing in either the Collected or Selected editions. For this new selection, Ford has culled work from these and all previous incarnations of O'Hara's published materials, and has thankfully opted, unlike the original Selected, to honor each poem with its own page. Also included are several of the seminal prose works and a useful short chronology. While the volume doesn't offer any newly unearthed, archeological treasures (we'll have to wait--as we have been for years!--for the letters), it does present a palpable and nicely packaged sampling of this important New York School poet. In an age where the ubiquity of information storage sparks in fledgling writers the solipsistic image of their own massive archives, O'Hara's notorious organizational nonchalance--indeed, even in keeping copies of his own poems--might seem odd; however, one need only open this book anywhere at random for evidence of life so full, so teetering on the brink of explosive jubilance, to make moot any concern for self-mythologizing beyond that already embedding within the poems.

(written for The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. XXVIII, #2)

At the May 2010 meeting, the gay book discussion group met at The LGBT Center in NYC and read a number of poems and discussed them.

I think that reading the poetry out loud, especially a couple of short poems that we read twice, helped. Most of the discussion revolved around the quick, easy nature of the poetry that seemed to flow out of O'Hara. A few of the participants did not care for the apparently unstructured and slightly rough form that much of the poetry took, but others of us were charmed by its clever language and pointed observations. The fact that the popular show "Mad Men" alluded to the popularity of Frank O'Hara's "Lunch Poems" clearly put him and his poetry in a very specific period of the pre-Stonewall 1960's.

Finally, the group split into two groups: those who learned to like the free-form poetry after some minor work, and those who continued to find it largely empty and hard to discern why --other than his NY art connections, fast alcoholic magnetism, and early death on Fire Island-- he became so admired. Many agreed that reading the poetry out loud and hearing others talk about it helped since it may not be immediately clear why O'Hara has such a popular following.

I had no idea who Frank O'Hara was until I stumbled upon this newly released book of selected poems. What a treat! The introduction gives readers a wonderful background on him, and each page is full of delicious little gems. He writes exactly what he thinks....and he's so fresh and creative. Makes you wander and think - which is the hidden gift.
With the holidays fast approaching or a special birthday coming up, Frank O'Hara Selected Poems is an ideal gift that you'll be proud to give. The recipient will thank you every time s/he reads one of these wonderful nuggets.

The book is an excellent collection of Frank O'Hara's poems, and is well organized. While I wouldn't consider this a definitive volume, it's certainly a nice book to keep around the coffee table.