Frank O’Hara: an immediate and exploratory American poet

Poetry should be “between two persons instead of two pages.”

Author

By Frank O’Hara

Publish Date

Oct. 15, 2020

Yesterday Down at the Canal
You say that everything is very simple and interesting
it makes me feel very wistful, like reading a great Russian novel does
i am terribly bored
sometimes it is like seeing a bad movie
other days, more often, it’s like having an acute disease of the kidney
god knows it has nothing to do with the heart
nothing to do with people more interesting than myself
yak yak
that’s an amusing thought
how can anyone be more amusing than oneself
how can anyone fail to be
can i borrow your forty-five
i only need one bullet preferably silver
if you can’t be interesting at least you can be a legend
(but i hate all that crap)

Chez Jane
The white chocolate jar full of petals
swills odds and ends around in a dizzying eye
of four o’clocks now and to come. The tiger,
marvellously striped and irritable, leaps
on the table and without disturbing a hair
of the flowers’ breathless attention, pisses
into the pot, right down its delicate spout.
A whisper of steam goes up from that porcelain
urethra. “Saint-Saëns!” it seems to be whispering,
curling unerringly around the furry nuts
of the terrible puss, who is mentally flexing.
Ah be with me always, spirit of noisy
contemplation in the studio, the Garden
of Zoos, the eternally fixed afternoons!
There, while music scratches its scrofulous
stomach, the brute beast emerges and stands,
clear and careful, knowing always the exact peril
at this moment caressing his fangs with
a tongue given wholly to luxurious usages;
which only a moment before dropped aspirin
in this sunset of roses, and now throws a chair
in the air to aggravate the truly menacing.

Song (Did You See Me Walking by the Buick Repairs?)
Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs?
I was thinking of you
having a Coke in the heat it was your face
I saw on the movie magazine, no it was Fabian’s
I was thinking of you
and down at the railroad tracks where the station
has mysteriously disappeared
I was thinking of you
as the bus pulled away in the twilight
I was thinking of you
and right now

Frank O'Hara

Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) was an American poet and art critic, and considered the leading figure of the New York School, an informal arts and literature movement which stressed the avant-garde and surreal. As curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, O’Hara played a pivotal role in the success of the New York School, serving as confident and advocate for poets, dancers, playwrights, painters and other “students” of the School. More introspective than many of the poets in the New York School, O’Hara wrote poems that were at once immediate and exploratory, noting that poetry should be “between two persons instead of two pages.” His posthumous The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara was one of two books to win the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. (Fellow New Yorker, and poetry editor of The New Yorker, Howard Moss also won that year’s prize for his Collected Poems.)