Selected Poems

Description

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 ('any time, any place'). This is not the whole O'Hara: he may have scribbled poems on serviettes, but others he worked on with intense concentration, creating sequences that are inexhaustibly nuanced, full of surprise, heartbreak and laughter. There are analogies between his work and that of the painters he championed, Pollock, Kline and de Kooning among them. He is resolutely metropolitan, and his metropolis is New York City. He brilliantly captured the pace and rhythms, quandaries and exhilarations, of its mid-twentieth-century life.

FRANK O'HARA was born in Maryland in 1926, and studied music and then English at Harvard University. His first book of poems was published in 1952. He worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, edited Art News and wrote extensively on painting. He died in 1966 and most of his poetry was collected by Donald Allen and appeared posthumously.

Wonderful, original poems' He was an essential contact-man between the worlds of painting and poetry. And he suggested a rich and fascinating dialogue between them.' Eavan 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.