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
My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.
The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.
I take this for myself, and you take up the thread of my life between your teeth, tin thread and tarnished with abuse, you shall still hear as long as the beast in me maintains its taciturn power to close my lids in tears, and my loins move yet in the ennobling pursuit of all the worlds you have left me alone in, and would be the dolorous distraction from, while you summon your army of anguishes which is a million hooting blood vessels on the eyes and in the ears at that instant before death.
If I am ever to find these trees meaningful I must have you by the hand. As it is, they stretch dusty fingers into an obscure sky, and the snow looks up like a face dirtied with tears. Should I cry out and see what happens? There could only be a stranger wandering in this landscape, cold, unfortunate, himself frozen fast in wintry eyes.
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.
Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!