'Poetry is not instruments
that work at times
then walk out on you
laugh at you old
get drunk on you young
poetry's part of your self'
from 'To Gottfried Benn'
Frank O'Hara (1926-66) is among the most delightful and radical poets of the twentieth century. He is celebrated for his apparently unpremeditated poems, autobiographical and immediate (written 'any time, any place'), full of surprise, hearbreak and laughter.
He is resolutely metropolitan, and his metropolis is New York City. O'Hara captures the pace and rhythms, quandaries and exhilarations, of its mid-twentieth-century life. His work is enriched by his experience of the painters he championed, Pollock, Kline and de Kooning among them, and shares their recognition of their own dynamic creativity, borrowing, improvising and renewing.
'O'Hara had a shrew understanding of the city as a theatre of change in art as well as life, and his themes are sketched out in a bold urban graffiti... He was an essential contact man between the worlds of painting and poetry.' - Evan Boland
'O'Hara's hip, glamorous, freewheeling self-celebrations both reflected and helped disseminate a new kind of confidence and daring in American poetry.' Mark Ford
'... a remarkable new poetry - both modest and monumental, with something basically usable about it - not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a liveable space.'
John Ashbery
