Frank O'Hara
Personal Information
Description
Francis Russell O'Hara was an American poet who, along with John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest and Kenneth Koch, was a key member of the New York School of poetry. O'Hara's poetry is generally autobiographical, much of it based on observations on what is happening to him in the moment. Donald Allen says in his introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, “That Frank O’Hara tended to think of his poems as a record of his life is apparent in much of his work.” O'Hara discusses this aspect of his poetry in a statement for Donald Allen's New American Poetry: “What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else, they are just there in whatever form I can find them.” He goes on to say, "My formal 'stance' is found at the crossroads where what I know and can't get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred." He then says, "It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time."Among his friends, O'Hara was known to treat poetry dismissively, as something to be done only in the moment. John Ashbery claims he witnessed O'Hara “Dashing the poems off at odd moments – in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people – he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them.” In 1959, he wrote a mock manifesto (originally published in Yugen in 1961) 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. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'" He also says, in response to an academic over-emphasis on form, "As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it." He claims that on August 27, 1959, while talking to LeRoi Jones, he founded a movement called Personism which may be "the death of literature as we know it." He says, "It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings toward the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person."His poetry shows the influence of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, Russian poetry, and poets associated with French Symbolism. Ashbery says, “The poetry that meant the most to him when he began writing was either French – Rimbaud, Mallarmé, the Surrealists: poets who speak the language of every day into the reader’s dream – or Russian – Pasternak and especially Mayakovsky, for whom he picked up what James Schuyler has called the ‘intimate yell.’”As part of the New York School of poetry, O'Hara to some degree encapsulated the compositional philosophy of New York School painters.Ashbery says, “Frank O’Hara’s concept of the poem as the chronicle of the creative act that produces it was strengthened by his intimate experience of Pollock’s, Kline’s, and de Kooning’s great paintings of the late 40s and early 50s and of the imaginative realism of painters like Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers.”This interaction between poet and painter is most evident in the poem 'Why I am Not A Painter' in which O'Hara parallels the process of writing a poem called 'Oranges' with a description of his friend Mike Goldberg's creation of a painting entitled 'Sardines'. Both described works contain no internal reference to their title.
Books
Selected poems
Standing still and walking in New York
Michael Rumaker centers his memoir in 1957 San Francisco, where many fellow Black Mountain students are migrating since the close of the College. Allen Ginsberg, after the notorious readings of his poem HOWL in 1956, has departed for Tangier, but the young Beats are invading North Beach and a dope scene is blooming. The Place is where the poets and painters hang out and Jack Spicer directs the Blabbermouth nights. This is the summer of the famous HOWL trial where Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao, of City Lights, are prosecuted for selling Allen Ginsberg's book. Meanwhile the police are stepping up their hassling of hippies on upper Grant Avenue and arresting gays on Polk Street. Rumaker positions his in-depth, eloquent portrait of Robert Duncan against this turbulent city background, and contrasts Robert's open gay life as a poet with his own painful covert sexuality.
Lunch poems
"Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places. Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal."--Jacket.
Jackson Pollock
Poems
Selected plays
The 18 plays are: The Shadowy Waters; Cathleen in Houlihan; The Hour Glass; On Baile's Strabd; The Green Helmet; Deirdre; At the Hawk's Well; The Dreaming of the Bones; The Cat and the Moon; The Only Jealousy of Emer; Calvary; Sophocles' King Oedipus; The Resurrection; The Words Upon the Windwo-FPane; The King of the Great Clock Tower; The herne's Egg; Purgatory; The Death of Cuchulain.
Introduction to economics
Amorousnightmares of delay
This volume brings together twenty-four of Frank O'Hara's plays, from one act dramas to brief "eclogues." While several were produced in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, most are intended as poetic works cast in dramatic form. With his interest in camp, collage, and dramatic and verse forms, O'Hara created characters that range from classical allusions (Daphnis and Chloe) to historical figures (Benjamin Franklin and a thinly disguised General Douglas MacArthur) to his own contemporaries (Jackson Pollack, Ted Berrigan, and others). Like collections of his poetry, Amorous Nightmares of Delay captures the irreverent voice and joyful lyricism of one of America's great authors. An introduction by O'Hara's longtime friend Joe LeSueur places the works in the context of New York's art and literary scene of the 1950s and early 1960s.