Selected Poems
Frank O’Hara was one of the experimental poets of the mid-twentieth century, associated with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and other innovative artists that lived and worked in New York City during the 1950’s and 1960’s. O’Hara’s work is flamboyantly original, capturing the details of the cityscape and the lifeblood that ran beneath it. His energetic and vibrant poems are filled with names and places and events of the time, and even while celebrating life, they hold an elegiac undertone.
This new selection presents the essential O’Hara. The poet’s life was tragically shorthe was killed at forty in a freak accident. This collection begins with a poem written in 1949 or 1950 (the editor does not know which year) and ends with a poem written in 1966ironically, an elegy for another poet, Antonio Machado. Thus O’Hara’s writing, or at least his publishing, life spanned about sixteen yearslong when compared with John Keats’s but short if compared with most writers. O’Hara wrote prolificallyeditor Mark Ford said of Donald Allen’s edition of O’Hara’s Collected Poems (1971), “I weighed it on my kitchen scales and found it came in at just over three and a half pounds.” It seems appropriate to weigh this poetry on a scale, like produce. There is not a lot of change in the poetryO’Hara’s distinctive voice speaks consistently in the same tones, at least most of the time, although the effect is never dulled. The subject matter and style vary, providing different takes on the same life and place.
The selection includes useful material beyond the poems. The verse play Try, Try is here, and so are a few prose pieces, including the famous manifesto on Personism, the school of poetics O’Hara founded on a whim, as well as other poetics statements and brief memoirs. Interesting in themselves, the editor’s introduction and the concluding chronology help present a poet who has less currency among today’s poetry readers, and they consider some of the popular O’Hara myths.
These poems emanate a fiery energy, exploding on the page with a force and a visceral presence, as though the poet were in a small room with you, dancing around with excitement and explaining something crucially important in his life. They flow from line to line without stopping for breath; when they do stop, they are often punctuated with exclamation marks or commas or nothing at all. Nevertheless, the line endings seem appropriate, providing an invisible check to the current of language, reminding the reader that these are poems, that they have a form to guide their flow.
Their topicality ensures these poems are fresh rather than dated. The density of proper nouns in O’Hara’s poems is highmany well-known people are addressed directly, or evoked otherwise, always involved in some action that is characteristic. The reader is pulled through a series of rambling speculations that rejoice in the flux and flash of the artistic life, although sometimes glimpsed through the effervescence of the poems is a sadness. This effect is heightened for today’s reader because of the names of stars and artists long since faded. Suggestions of transience were always a part of the poems, through their references to news headlines, flowers, and fruit and through their direct descriptions of the persistent awareness of time’s passage.
O’Hara’s most anthologized poem may be “Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed],” in which the intensity of physical, personal presence communicates itself through the imagined connection between the speaker’s world and the star’s. The speaker is “trotting along” through New York’s rainy, snowy weather on his way to meet a friend or lover when he sees a headline,...
(This entire section contains 1741 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
“LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED.” He thinks about the different weather where she is and comments:
there is no snow in Hollywoodthere is no rain in CaliforniaI have been to lots of partiesand acted perfectly disgracefulbut I never actually collapsedoh Lana Turner we love you get up
This poem catches the fast movement of life and its eccentric, electric connections. It appears in many resources, yet it is only one of many similar poems that feature the characteristic O’Hara current that allows the reader to feel invaded by the 1950’s and 1960’s and carried off. The poems in this collection are all different, despite their shared voice, and they depict a world in which everything is likely to shift at any moment, and this instability is what provides life’s savor. Whether O’Hara is doing a riff on Sergei Rachmaninoff (“Onset, Massachusetts. Is it the fig newton/ playing the horn?”) or taking delight in the differences among New York men’s rooms in “Homosexuality,” he projects a sense of nownessas though complete immersion in the moment would immortalize it. Ideas and images hurtle past. Most of O’Hara’s poems are short, a page or less, catching the feel of events flying by. Nevertheless, even the very long “Biotherm” maintains the sense of rush from the beginning:
The best thing in the world but I better be quick about itbetter be gone tomorrow better be gone last night and next Thursday better be gonebetter be always or what’s the use the sky the endless clouds trailing we leading them by the bandanna, red
An atypical poem is “To the Harbormaster,” which catches the downside of this flux. The speaker is on his way in his ship to meet the harbormaster, but the ship “got caught in some moorings.” His intentions were good, he says, but his actions were ineffective. He is not able to achieve the goal of his journey.
In storms andat sunset, with the metallic coils of the tidearound my fathomless arms, I am unableto understand the forms of my vanityor I am hard alee with my Polish rudderin my hand and the sun sinking. Toyou I offer my hull and the tattered cordageof my will.
He makes an offering, then, of self, and despite his lack of progress in the right direction, he realizes that he is still sailing, not out of danger. He finally comments that there may be a reason for his failure to arrive: “Yet/ I trust the sanity of my vessel; and/ if it sinks it may well be in answer/ to the reasoning of the eternal voices,/ the waves which have kept me from reaching you.”
The humble exploring soul is not seen much in this work, but it is there, and this apology for not connecting with the harbormaster has a powerful appeal. The tone is quiet, and the extended metaphor is rare and unusual. This other side to O’Hara gives his work a metaphysical dimension, even if he denies its presence elsewhere.
Opening the book at almost any point provides a jolt. The poet is open and clear about everything in his life, including his love affairs with men, but there is nothing graphic herethe reader gets the desire, the sense of immediacy, the realization that everything is always subject to change. His delight in the world and his place in it is a major element in the first poem, “Autobiographic Literaria,” which begins with a tale of a dull and lonely childhood in which the solitary boy had little companionship: “ . . . animals were/ not friendly and birds/ flew away.” The expansive conclusion comes in the style of Walt Whitman: “And here I am, the/ center of all beauty!/ writing these poems!/ Imagine!” The poems say “Imagine!” in various ways, again and again, in untoward or in eccentrically happy or unhappy circumstances.
The play Try, Try may be included to show that O’Hara, like T. S. Eliot and other poets, wrote plays, although it is less compelling than anything else in the book, including the prose. Try, Try seems to make fun of heterosexual love in the deliberately affected interchange among two lovers and her former love who has returned from the war. Like Eliot’s plays, it makes for tedious reading, and while it does begin with an Eliot-like situationinfidelityits concluding acceptance of infidelity as simply how things are is anything but Eliot-like. The play has a curiously flat effect next to the poemsthe effervescence missing and the clever, whimsical dialogue lacking persuasiveness.
However, the poetics statements are intriguing, partly because they show where O’Hara placed himself as a poeta force against the cult of Eliot and against the poetry of denial (of the world, of the self, of pleasure in the moment). “I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures,” he said in “Personism: A Manifesto,” dismissing the literary theories in Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and the poetry as well. O’Hara said, “I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve.” O’Hara believed in expressing the self in moments of heightened consciousness and providing a crackling linkage of network with other selves. This book demands to be read in short snatches, because all that energy all the time is too much for sustained attention.
Editor Ford is a poet who has also written a critical biography, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (2000). He teaches at University College London and contributes to both The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books. Ford’s selections are well chosen and will preserve the reputation of this exciting poet for generations of readers. The sensibility of a young poet completely immersed in the New York artistic life provides an insider’s look at the movements involved, and the balance of energy and implied elegy remains a powerful force. With the possible exception of the play, everything in this book bears study and rereading, and the whole presents a positive impression of O’Hara as a spokesman for and beyond his time. The Collected Poems is a daunting volume that would put off many potential readers; this carefully edited selection is vast enough to satisfy O’Hara’s fans and to draw new ones.
Bibliography
The New Republic 238, no. 9 (May 28, 2008): 47-51.
The New York Review of Books 55, no. 14 (September 25, 2008): 28-34.
The New York Times Book Review, June 29, 2008, p. 1.
Review of Contemporary Fiction 28, no. 2 (Summer, 2008): 172.
