Frank O'Hara : Selected Poems

Summary

The overall arrangement of the poems is chronological. There is a brief chronology of O'Hara's short life and an index of titles. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Author Biography

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.

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 (I’m Going to New York!)
A Rant Interior (With Jane)
A Party Full of Friends
A Terrestrial Cuckoo To Dick Commercial Variations Blocks
October River Walking to Work Try! Try!
On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday (Quick! A Last Poem Before I Go)
To My Dead Father The Hunter Grand Central Homosexuality
To a Poet Aus Einem April On Rachmaninoff’s 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
At the Old Place Nocturne Poem (Johnny And Alvin Are Going Home, Are Sleeping Now)
To an Actor Who Died Thinking of
My Heart To The Film Industry in Crisis On Seeing
Washington Crossing the Delawar
Eat the Museum of Modern Art Radio Sleeping on the
[It Is 1: 55 in Cambridge, Pale and Spring Cool,] Poem (And Tomorrow Morning at 8 O’clock 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 Mitchell’s John Button Birthday
Failures of Spring Two Dreams of Waking Ode to Joy Ode to
Poem (I Live Above a Dyke Bar and I’m 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
To Gottfried Benn Heroic Sculpture
The “Unfinished” The Day Lady Died Rhapsody Song (Is It Dirty)
Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan
You Are Gorgeous and I’m Coming Poem (The Fluorescent Tubing Burns Like a Bobby-Soxer’s Ankles)
“L’amour Avait Passé par Là”
Poem (Hate Is Only One of Many Responses)
Poem (I Don’t 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 One’s
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 (That’s Not a Cross Look It’s 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
(Missive & Walk) I. # 53 Poem En Forme De Saw Metaphysical Poem
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

My Heart

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says “That’s
not like Frank!,” all to the good! I
don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart–
you can’t plan on my heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York, a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Having a Coke With You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Traversa de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

Excerpted from Frank O'Hara: Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara
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