Background
O'Hara was born on March 27, 1926 in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine (née Broderick).
( Available for the first time in paperback, The Collecte...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520201663/?tag=2022091-20
( Frank OHara was one of the great poets of the twentiet...)
Frank OHara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry, ?which, by its vitality alone, became the dominant force in the American poetic tradition. Frank OHara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in New England; from 1951 he lived and worked in New York, both for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art, where he was an associate curator. OHaras untimely death in 1966 at the age of forty was, in the words of fellow poet John Ashbery, ?the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed. This collection is a reissue of a volume first published by Grove Press in 1957, and it demonstrates beautifully the flawless rhythm underlying OHaras conviction that to write poetry, indeed to live, ?you just go on your nerve.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802134521/?tag=2022091-20
( Important poems by the late New York poet published in ...)
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noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat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. "OHara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few books of his era show less age." --Dwight Garner, New York Times "As collections go, none brings. . .quality to the fore more than the thirty-seven Lunch Poems, published in 1964 by City Lights." --Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review "What O'Hara is getting at is a sense of the evanescence, and the power, of great art, that inextricable contradiction ? that what makes it moving and transcendent is precisely our knowledge that it will pass away. This is the ethos at the center of ?Lunch Poems: not the informal or the conversational for their own sake but rather in the service of something more intentional, more connective, more engaged." --David L. Ulin, Los Angeles TImes "The collection broadcasts snark, exuberance, lonely earnestness, and minute-by-minute autobiography to a wide, vague audience?much like today's Twitter and Facebook feeds." --Micah Mattix, The Atlantic Among the most significant post-war American poets, Frank O'Hara grew up in Grafton, MA, graduating from Harvard in 1950. After earning an MA at Michigan in 1951, O'Hara moved to New York, where he began working for the Museum of Modern Art and writing for Art News. By 1960, he was named Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions at MOMA. Along with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, he is considered an original member of the New York School. Though he died in a tragic accident in 1966, recent references to O'Hara on TV shows like Mad Men or Thurston Moores new single evidence our cultures continuing fascination with this innovative poet.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0872860353/?tag=2022091-20
O'Hara was born on March 27, 1926 in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine (née Broderick).
As a youth O'Hara studied piano, aspiring to be a composer, and began writing poetry. He graduated from Harvard University in 1950.
After graduating from Harvard University, where he had met the poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, O'Hara moved to New York City in 1951 and soon occupied a central position in the artistic life there as poet, playwright, art critic, and, eventually, Associate Curator at the Museum of Modern Art. His poetry is "of" New York in its alertness, manners, and richness of occasions. His first book of poems, A City Winter and Other Poems, appeared in 1952, followed by Meditations in an Emergency (1957), Odes, Second Avenue (both 1960), Lunch Poems (1964), and Love Poems (Tentative Title) (1965). His Art Chronicles: 1954-1966 (1975), a group of essays on the leading figures of the abstract expressionist movement, reflects his early, keen perception of and personal involvement in the New York art scene during a period when New York became the capital of modernism in the arts. O'Hara died on July 25, 1966, after being hit by a beach-buggy on Fire Island, New York. O'Hara wrote many different kinds of poems, some narrative, others introspective, and others, especially some of the longer ones, both. There is the grand, abstract rhetoric of of the Odes and the earthier language of the "I do this I do that" poems. "Sleeping on the Wing" is both elegaic and assertive. O'Hara's influence has been immense, partly due to the great scope of his work revealed in such posthumous volumes as Collected Poems (1972) and Poems Retrieved (1977).
( Frank OHara was one of the great poets of the twentiet...)
( Available for the first time in paperback, The Collecte...)
( Important poems by the late New York poet published in ...)