O'Hara, Frank

Lunch Poems (Pocket Poets Series: No. 19)

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a great one
and the only decision you can make is that you did it
Diversions and Daydreams
Book
classic work that changed american poetry

Lunch Poems (Pocket Poets Series: No. 19)
Frank O'Hara
Manufacturer: City Lights Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
My Life (Green Integer Books, 39)
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems (Penguin Poets)
Tender Buttons
Life Studies & For the Union Dead

ASIN: 0872860353

Book Description

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noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat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.

Customer Reviews:

a great one.......2006-12-25

buy this now. it's the essential frank o'hara. if you love poetry and/or the beat culture, you need it in your collection for any credibility.

and the only decision you can make is that you did it.......2004-04-04

O'Hara exemplifies living and writing and understanding something which you'll get once you get the book. I can hardly describe it. I can hardly quote a line or eight or forty which can explain to you why I love and you will love it. BUY THIS EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE COLLECTED POEMS. The volume itself is special. It fits right between your leg and your pants, smooth. Get this and get it.

Diversions and Daydreams.......2003-08-16

The perfect introduction to the poetry of O'Hara, "Lunch Poems" is a celebration of life in New York City with art, poetry, music, friends, and of course, the movies. This book contains 'Ave Maria' with the marvelous opening lines:

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images...

I wish I could remember what generous soul suggested that I read this little book of poems in college, but my expression of gratitude remains unfulfilled. From "Lunch Poems" I tackled the collected poems and never looked back, eventually writing my senior year thesis on O'Hara and film. This little volume, however, retains a special place in my book collection since it was my first O'Hara and my first poetry book. My copy is worn from many trips on trains and airplanes - the perfect antidote to the mind-numbing experience we call travel. To paraphrase the last line of 'A Step Away From Them':

My heart is in my pocket, it is Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara.

Book.......2001-07-09

Hello my literate friends.

I want to tell you something. This is a book of poems and I should not be writing a review for it. It is famous everywhere except here, and we are here. But I will tell you what you should know to buy this book. That is my job. Now that we have that clear.

These poems are beautiful and good. They are also talky, which is a word my friend Mark Halliday uses, which means that they might sometimes seem close to prose. They are called Lunch Poems because that is the idea, poems that you might compose on your lunch break, walking around New York with some change in your pocket, if you are Frank O'Hara. They seem silly sometimes, and they are, but they are not meaningless: they convey a voice which is suitable and believable and honest.

I think you will like this book.

I will tell you a secret: in my copy of this book, City Lights has increased (somehow) the font size, or the kerning or whatever, so that some lines run-over onto the next. In the original version this did not happen. This is a minor detail that I want to tell you about because you deserve to know. City Lights if you are reading this: hello, and, please fix it.

Thank you.

classic work that changed american poetry.......2001-03-28

I'm only writing the obvious here because I couldn't believe people were giving this book only four stars when they give all kinds of mediocre books five. This book contains the best poem of mid-20th century America--"The Day Lady Died"--and is a quintessential example of New York School poetics. Terrific, fun, funny, exciting, moving poetry.

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The missing link
A superb poet, poorly presented--not a good place to start
Just plain indispensable.
.
Great

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
Frank O'Hara
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Lunch Poems (Pocket Poets Series: No. 19)
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems (Penguin Poets)
Selected Poems (Penguin Poets)
The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch
The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets

ASIN: 0520201663

Book Description

Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.

Customer Reviews:

The missing link.......2005-10-31

Here's an idea for Ph.D. candidates in American Lit, searching for that breakthrough dissertation topic: Frank O'Hara was the (almost-literal) bridge between, on the one hand, the high aethestic seriousness that began in English with Wilde, and culminated in early Modernists like Hart Crane, Eliot and Wallace Stevens; and on the other, what we might call the pan-aesthetic, media-saturated 'hyper-culture' of serious early 21st-century thought, which is equally at ease in poetry, movies, pop music, foreign cultures, the avant-garde, and cartoons -- and blurs the barriers between all of them.

Frank did it first, in case you were wondering. He was as funny as Wilde and as dead-serious as Stevens, plus as silly as a Tarzan movie (which he loved). A hard set of balls to juggle, but juggle them he did, and brilliantly.

For those who think this poetry is too 'casual' to be ranked as first-class, consider the following: Frank was arguably the most cultured man in America in his generation. An art curator, skilled classical pianist, Harvard grad and Navy veteran, fluent in several languages, he basically had all of English and French poetry saved to hard disk in his brain, as well as the last 400 years of Western painting and music. It's almost silly to think about. All of this material forms the background for his impressionistic, seemingly-flip meditations on rainy days, radios, painting, blueberry blintzes, Khrushchev, and love in all its manifold forms. But he's actually built a kind of socio-artistic City with this stuff: read one way, the Collected Poems is the autobiography of a culture at one of its critical historical moments (it's also the autobiography of an individual, and the autobiography of New York.)

In the great poems, the synthesis is utterly cosmic (and comic) in its scale and purpose; in the lesser poems, it's the cultural equivalent of a man lighting his cigars with $100 bills.

Frank more or less dispensed with the concept of the literary 'persona' (a la Ginsberg or Sexton or Berryman) and located his literary impulse within the personal Self. As a result, he re-discovered in literature what we all know in our hearts, but often forget: that the important crossroads of the political and the aesthetic, the public and the unconscious, is the Individual, with all his quirks and eccentricities, and vital importance to the fate of the Republic. If you meditate a while on the lesson, it maybe becomes more meaningful than the clumsy, obvious way that I've expressed it here.

Read Ginsberg's great poem "My Sad Self" (which he dedicated to O'Hara); it's the sound of Frank O'Hara's aesthetic being filtered through another man's consciousness, and then sent back to him.

"...and he will be the wings of an extraordinary Liberty"
-- O'Hara, 'Ode to Michael Goldberg's Birth'

This stuff is the secret pulse of the second half of the 20th century, as Eliot and Stevens were the pulse of the first. One way you can preserve it is to buy the book, and help keep it in print for the next generation.

A superb poet, poorly presented--not a good place to start.......2005-10-09

For those less famililar with O'Hara there is only one place to start: City Lights' superb little pocket collection, "Lunch Poems."

This collection is enormous, and much of it--especially the early work--is not stylistically representative of his best and most well-known work. It is also dreadfully organized. The poems are not presented by date of publication or date written. Nor do the poems include either date. That information is in a separate index--organized, infuriatingly, by date. So unless you've memorized the year of each of the thousands of poems in this 600 page book, it's not terribly useful. I do hope this book is re-edited substantially for future publication. In the meantime, it will have to do.

At his best, Frank O'Hara's poems are wonderfully accessible, sparklingly natural, delightful, and have the ability to delicately carve out a perfectly captured nanosecond of living breathing space and time with insight and sincerity.

Just plain indispensable........2005-04-17

When the critical dust really settles, I think O'Hara will be seen as a crucial American poet -- in the ranks of Whitman, Dickinson and Stevens. Cultured, perceptive, meaningful, playful, and always funny, he took American poetry light-years beyond the "well-made" poets of the midcentury, and the tormented stylings of the 'confessionals' (Lowell, Plath, Berryman et al.)

He introduced a new kind of literary voice into serious poetry: highly personal, specific, catty, generous, vivid and oddly friendly, with an unpretentious humor, and a sense of physical placement, that were often almost mystical. (See "A Step Away from Them.") He showed that you didn't have to be 'heavy' to be profound. In the process, this added an entirely new dimension to serious American writing, the effects of which are still only starting to be understood -- and not just in poetry, but in other forms, too.

Frank could do it all: existential crisis ("1951," "Adieu to Norman..."); artistic meditation ("Ode on Causality"); high erotic comedy ("To the Film Industry in Crisis," "Ave Maria," and the minor, but inspired, "The Lay of the Romance of the Associations"); and poignant confusion ("Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)". And this is not listing the famous "I-do-this-I-do-that" poems, or the transcendent "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island".

(One caveat for newcomers to this work: the book was compiled and edited by Donald Allen after Frank's sudden death. Mr. Allen scrupulously, and wisely, chose to include all of the materials he found, not making any editorial judgements about quality. But the fact is that O'Hara was an uneven writer, and about 20% of these poems are, well, pretty bad. You just have to exercise some caution, and avoid making snap judgements. There are classics on the same page as duds, and sometimes a 'dud' changes into a classic, right before your eyes, after you've gotten the hang of how to read O'Hara.)

Whew. Sorry about the length.

It is amazing to still hear people accuse this work of being 'shallow' (O'Hara had actually found a way of being meaningful in a different tonal range); nonetheless the charge is easily refuted by reading, say, "Ode to Willem de Kooning," or "Joe's Jacket." The best answer comes from Frank himself, at the close of "Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets":

"The only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth,
And dying in black and white, we fight for what we love, not are."

Don't miss it.

........2004-11-21

I'm only going to restate what others have said about him. His poetry is lyrical, generous, affirming. He can be spontaneous and thoughtful, traditional and completely fresh. His poetry is a vicarious peek into the life of a vital personality; this collection also provides a view into his poetic development, his dabbling with various forms, his more formal earlier attempts and the later expansion of his meter and line. I'm flipping through the collection and will note some of my favorites: "Sonnet on a Wedding", "Second Avenue", "To the Harbormaster", "In Memory of My Feelings", "To Maxine", "Having a Coke with You", "Weather Near St. Bridget's Steeples", "Mothers of America". If any 20th c poet is a model for modern American lyricism, he is it.

Great.......2004-02-24

His work is bold and yet still accessible to all poetry fans. This collection is amazing and a true must.

Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman

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The Ever-Lasting Yes
Essential reading for Feldman fans
a primary document of the American avant-garde

Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman , and Frank O'Hara
Manufacturer: Exact Change
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Stockhausen on Music

ASIN: 1878972316
Release Date: 2004-03-02

Book Description

Morton Feldman (1926-1987) is among the most influential American composers of the 20th century. While his music is known for its extreme quiet and delicate beauty, Feldman himself was famously large and loud. His writings are both funny and illuminating, not only about his own music but about the entire New York School of painters, poets, and composers that coalesced in the 1950s, including his friends Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank O'Hara, and John Cage. Give My Regards to Eighth Street is an authoritative collection of Feldman's writings, culled from published articles, program notes, LP liners, lectures, interviews, and unpublished writings.

Customer Reviews:

The Ever-Lasting Yes.......2005-01-31

Morton Feldman's essays and liner notes are every bit as challenging as his music. In fact, I would like to turn one of Morty's quotable lines on its ear and say that "Feldman couldn't write a note unless it was literary." Of course, I'm inserting Feldman's name for the orginal Ives (see page 165 of this book), but I have to say that this composer provides in these pages the "narrative dark matter and coherent strange attractors" for his--in the main--disjunctive sounds. With this book Feldman positions himself in the same great tradition of writer-musicians as Berlioz, while all the while disparaging that very tradition! In fact, I would say that of all the recent experimentalists--Cage included--Feldman had to have been the most literary.

What a fine mind, and what a great loss to have only one side of Feldman's legendary conversational powers in this book, but, until everyone in the world has sense enough to stop what they're doing and applaud Morton Feldman's brilliance and the END of TIME COMES and Feldman himself descends from on high seated on a golden bar stool, ready to take on all comers, they will have to be content with this written fossil. And of course the music...but that's another story.

This book includes an appreciation of Morty and his work by Frank O'Hara, another person I wish I'd met.

Essential reading for Feldman fans.......2003-12-17

This book, collecting all of Morton Feldman's published writings--along with four miscellaneous pieces--is an expanded version of a book originally published in a bilingual German/English edition in 1985, edited by Walter Zimmermann. To the original book, the editor, B. H. Friedman has added his own introduction, a postface by the poet Frank O'Hara, a late friend of Feldman's, and various other writings not collected in the original book.

There is much to enjoy here, from Feldman's reminiscences of his New York School colleagues, his admiration for Varese, his not uncritical appreciation of Webern and Stockhausen and his dislike for Boulez and Schoenberg. Equally, there is much interesting material on the visual arts as well: Feldman's passions for Mondrian, Pollock, Guston and Rothko are intimately related to his music and this book illuminates this strongly. Feldman's understanding of the need for a specifically US artistic and musical tradition--and how this tradition came about--is particularly illuminating, as is his writing about his colleague and friend John Cage.

Feldman's writing style is clear and conversational--if it occasionally lacks in depth this is a minor sin in comparison to the wilfully obfuscatory writings of the young Boulez, for example. Because of its own nature as a collection of unrelated pieces, this book tends to contain a little too much repetition and some very slight pieces (often notes from recordings or performances). I would have liked a little more writing on Feldman's own music--the rare occasions where he explains his techniques are highly interesting--but even with these flaws anyone interested in Feldman's music or the New York School in general will find this book very interesting.

a primary document of the American avant-garde.......2001-02-23

" The day Jackson Pollock died I called a certain man I knew- a very great painter-and told him the news. After a long pause he said, in a voice so low it was barely a whisper,' That son of a b---he did it'. . . . With this supreme gesture Pollock had wrapped up an era and walked away from it." Feldman was very much part of that era, the Fifties when American art was becoming the most important post-war art there was its unique expressions. Sure Europeans tried to copy us but only became more academic about as Boulez and his excursions into chance/aleatoric gesturing. This collection of essays very clearly reveals how important American expeimentalism was to music. Feldman's forever endeavor to merely create, create at a high intensity working like a Dutch diamond cutter,or lens grinder,toying with creative means as his use of indelible ink, this he said makes you think about what your writing than how you are writing, puts the creative process back into the head.Or composing at the piano, which slows you down so you need to think more. He followed the intellectual currents, anything that brought a sense of richness and other dimension to his art, he knew for instance Henri Bergson's concept of memory and time,how that might affect his music,and painterly means was second nature to him hanging out at the Cedar Bar in New York talking for hours on Light,texture,perception,shape,design,concept, facility,gesture,timbre,tone,chiarscuro, there is ample historical data here as well, almost like a subtext of these ,like an unwritten history of the avant-garde, a "Conversation with Stravinsky"(not really),his first meeting with John Cage(after a performance of Webern), Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, also his travels to Berlin, and England and experiencing the avant-garde through Cornelius Cardew, and British experimentalism.His last years was devoted to long durational compositions, and he merely said he had more time to compose in these years,but Feldman here is filled with marvelous quotes,things,items,shapes for the mind"I knew I was going to be a professional the day I first became practical.Practicality took the form of copying out my music neatly,keeping my desk tidy and organized-all the unimportant things that seem unrelated to the work,yet somehow do affect it.". He also knows how to look from greater heights from mountains, tothe substance of modernity, those who stopped creating and became more interested in themselves as Stockhausen were "Modernists"; for Feldman allowing your materials,the shape,structures of your music tell you the secrets of creativity was most important and became a cause.

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In Memory Of My Feelings
Frank O'Hara , Kynaston McShine , Robert Motherwell , Joe Brainard , Helen Frankenthaler , and Jasper Johns
Manufacturer: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O'hara
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The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

ASIN: 0870705105
Release Date: 2005-10-15

Book Description

Between 1952, when Frank O'Hara published his first collection of poems, and his death, in 1966, at the early age of forty, he became recognized as a quintessential American poet whose vernacular phrasing, both worldly and lyrical, beautifully told of the urban life of his generation. In addition to the contribution he made to American literature, O'Hara was a vital figure in the New York cultural scene and spent many years working at The Museum of Modern Art, where, having begun by taking a job selling postcards on the admissions desk, he ultimately became an associate curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. And when he unexpectedly died, in an accident on the beach at Fire Island, New York, he was deeply mourned by the Museum's staff and by the New York art world.

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A fitting title

Poems Retrieved
Frank O'Hara , and Donald Merriam Allen
Manufacturer: Grey Fox Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Meditations in an Emergency
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
Lunch Poems (Pocket Poets Series: No. 19)
Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara: A Memoir
Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters

ASIN: 0912516194

Book Description

This volume completes the publication of all the poems Frank O'Hara write between 1950 and his tragic death in 1966. "O'Hara the quintessential Postmodernist . . . His work is a kind of watershed, a culmination of the Modernists' efforts to exploit the city, and a prototype of the poetry to come."-Neal Bowers

Customer Reviews:

A fitting title.......2003-09-14

Frank O'Hara had a very definite conception of poetry (read the wonderful essay "Personism: a manifesto" included at the end of his Collected Poems). As a result of his convictions he often wrote a poem and gave it away immediately to a friend, acquaintance - whomever he had written it for, or about, or who he felt should have it.
This is all relevant becuase once his Collected Poems were published many people came forward with more of his poems that he had given them etc. (some of them on bar napkins - how wonderful!) These newly found poems are what comprise "Poems Retrieved."
Frank O'Hara is truly one of the most important and wonderful poets of this (or any) century and I'm happy that his influence is coming back into vogue amongst good poets.

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JACKSON POLLOCK.
Frank O'Hara
Manufacturer: George Braziller
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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A great collection.
The Perfect Lunch Date

Selected Poems
Frank O'Hara
Manufacturer: Carcanet Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Lunch Poems (Pocket Poets Series: No. 19)
Selected Poems (Centennial Books)
The Dream Songs
Selected Poems: Expanded Edition, including selections from Day by Day
Contemporary American Poetry

ASIN: 1857547713

Book Description

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

Customer Reviews:

A great collection........2004-04-20

Dear Diary: I have fallen in love with a poet named Frank O'Hara. I started with "Lunch Poems," but needed more. This volume is divine. O'Hara sneaks up on you. His style is so simple, so conversational, that you often times are surprised by the sudden depth of feeling comminicated in a final phrase. I don't know enough about poetry to prattle on and on without betraying my ignornace in short order. However, I know what I like, I know what speaks to me. I know that Frank O'Hara was a great poet.

The Perfect Lunch Date.......2000-04-23

It's not exactly pocket-sized, but this volume can be conveniently and inconspicuously carried to lunch uptown, midtown, downtown, or out of town. There is a great collection of poems here (no plays), from the short and sweet to the longer and sweeter. All set in beautiful type on nice, formal heavier paper and with the inclusion of "Personism: A Manifesto" for an introduction and the cover art by O'Hara's personal friend. The cover is more than just interesting, however, it really informs some of the questions about confessional poetry raised by O'Hara's work. Just look at it for awhile... By the way, if you haven't yet read Frank O'Hara's poetry, this volume is an excellent and accessible place to start. Grab a fork, a cup of coffee, and dig in!

Voice of the Poet: Frank O'Hara (Voice of the Poet)

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Beautiful writer

Voice of the Poet: Frank O'Hara (Voice of the Poet)

Manufacturer: RH Audio Voices
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: 0739308041
Release Date: 2004-03-16

Customer Reviews:

Beautiful writer.......2005-04-05

I think this series is brilliant. Hearing Frank O'hara read in his own voice is uplifting, but somewhat exclusive. I love his writing, and how this cd shows the time of vocal recording and how it is so much more perfected today. i write and read aloud poetry, prose, and short stories, and unless there is a malfuction in recording equipment my stuff will never sound as timeless as this collection. If you like poetry and don't know Frank O'hara, I think you should check him out. If you don't know what he is talking about sometimes...then...research it. Otherwise just enjoy it. He died at around forty years old so, what you see is what you get..there is no more. Check his books out too. It's worth it.

Collected Stories of John O'Hara (G K Hall Large Print Book Series)

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good
a shame this book is out-of-print

Collected Stories of John O'Hara (G K Hall Large Print Book Series)
John O'Hara
Manufacturer: G K Hall & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Gibbsville, PA: The Classic Stories

ASIN: 0816140197

Customer Reviews:

good.......2001-09-25

Some good stories fill this volume. But the recent attempt at a John O'Hara revival failed for a reason. He's not that good. If you've read one O'Hara story, you've read them all. O'Hara's same obsessions are played out in every story. His two obsessions were 1) Status 2) The obsession with and assumption that if a male and female are left alone together, one will immediately try and jump the other's bones. Maybe I've led a dull life, but I've actually been left alone with girls and women when neither I nor they tried to bed the other. The other thing is O'Hara thought he was one of the greatest writers ever...but, by his own admission, was not that well read. He mainly read Hemingway and Fitzgerald over and over. Not bad role models at all. But O'Hara famously said in a review of a Hemingway book that Hemingway was the greatest writer since Shakespeare (suggesting, of course, that O'Hara was the SECOND greatest writer since Shakespeare!). But O'Hara once responsed to a critic who said his writing resembled Tolstoy's (pulEEASE!) that, "Gee, I've never even READ Tolstoy." Now how could O'Hara say Hemingway was the greatest writer since Shakespeare when O'Hara had never read Tolstoy?!!! Even ego-ridden Hemingway admitted Tolstoy was a greater writer than himself. And how can a literary writer dare sit down to write when he hasn't yet read the master, Tolstoy. O'Hara was okay, but not great. Yeah, no wonder that revival attempt in the mid-90's flopped.

a shame this book is out-of-print.......2000-06-06

This is an astonishing collection of short stories from a past master that everyone has forgotten, but could surely learn from, or relish. I liked the novellas best, including "Imagine Kissing Pete", "Ninety Minutes Away", and "Natica Jackson." What I was astonished by was how quickly they were read; it was like watching and feeling life unfolding before my eyes. The first masterpiece in this collection is "Over the River and Through the Wood" that must be one of the most disturbing stories ever written. It is disgusting to me that not a single O'Hara story was included in the recent "Best American Short Stories of the Century"; if a claim can be made that Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald must be included, then so must O'Hara. John O'Hara is an American legend. He should be revived.

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Collected Stories Of John O'Hara
John (Edited by Frank MacShane) O'HARA
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000HYUKI6

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