Frank O'Hara
Frank O'Hara
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Harawas an American writer, poet and art critic. Because of his employment as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School—an informal group of artists, writers and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting and contemporary avant-garde art movements...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth27 March 1926
CountryUnited States of America
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
life perpetuated in parti-colored loves and beautiful lies all in different languages.
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life's fabric, to the world's beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!
Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity!
...but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it...
Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac
I don't think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.
The artificial is always innocent.
Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.
See how free we are! as a nation of persons.
The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.
My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.