Scan barcode
rodney1946's review
adventurous
funny
fast-paced
5.0
An important book. So much fun, but also heartbreaking.Lana Turner/we love you get up.
dilan11's review
3.0
Poems of youth and friendship and love. They thrum with vitality and sexuality. His favorite punctuation mark is an !. The poems seem to be spontaneous (although that is probably not entirely true) and are worth reading aloud. I wonder how his work would have evolved if he didn't die so young.
ariwito's review
5.0
Rating: 4.25/5
I loved this one. He's not the type of poet I read at all, but I fell completely in love with his style as I read poem after poem. Utterly brilliant.
I loved this one. He's not the type of poet I read at all, but I fell completely in love with his style as I read poem after poem. Utterly brilliant.
norgon123's review
5.0
I started reading this collection when quarantine began. Since I was unable to go outside and leave my apartment, I took comfort in O'Hara's poems and his descriptions of the city, the MoMa, love, and more by taking my time with just a few poems per day. A balm for a difficult time that I will never forget, and I'm glad I'm slowly reading more and more poetry.
anneliehyatt's review
3.0
Frank O'Hara is so tender. Reading poetry collections is always difficult for me, just as reading multiple books by the same author is, because usually my feelings about poems varies and I rarely like all of the poems in a collection (June Jordan's For Haruko and Richard Siken's Crush are the exception, if I want to be indulgent.)
Enough about me, though. My favorites of this collection are "Meditations in an Emergency," "Jane Awake," "To the Harbormaster," and "Sharing a Coke with You", but there are so many others that demonstrated O'Hara's tenderness for New York, his friends, and the world around him. I've loved Frank O'hara long before I read this collection, and he's personally one of my favorite poets to read -- many of these poems, though, simply didn't stand out. I guess that's expected with poetry collections though.
Enough about me, though. My favorites of this collection are "Meditations in an Emergency," "Jane Awake," "To the Harbormaster," and "Sharing a Coke with You", but there are so many others that demonstrated O'Hara's tenderness for New York, his friends, and the world around him. I've loved Frank O'hara long before I read this collection, and he's personally one of my favorite poets to read -- many of these poems, though, simply didn't stand out. I guess that's expected with poetry collections though.
minalouise's review
I want to hide Personism away with me, and return to it often. Tenderly. It is revolutionary, and I think we should be highlighting it, living it, sharing it.
“Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poési pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That's part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. […]
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. […]
What can we expect from Personism? (This is getting good, isn't it?) Everything, but we won't get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. “
I’ve had the dumbest cries lately. But reading this, I cried because of beauty. And I think this book of selected poetry cured me partially of stupidity and partially of sadness. I have been teaching myself to let go; of objects, by giving them to people
of myself, by sharing myself with people
of sadness, by crying less in the shower and more into books
of my past, by remembering— then forgetting
It’s all in here, the pain and beauty of love. And the tenderness to deal with it.
Memorial Day 1950
[…]
Our responsibilities did not begin in
dreams, though they began in bed. Love is
first of all a lesson in utility.
[…]
Poetry is as useful as a machine!
Poem
The eager note on my door said “Call me,
call me when you get in!” so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and
headed straight for the door. It wad autumn
by the time I got around the corner, […]
Poetry
The only way to be quiet
is to be quick, so I scare
you clumsily, or surprise
you with a stab. A praying
mantis knows time more
intimately than I and is
more casual. Crickets use
time for accompaniment to
innocent fidgeting. A zebra
races counterclockwise.
All this I desire. To
deepen you by my quickness
and delight as if you
were logical and proven,
but still be quiet as if
I were used to you; as if
you would never leave me
and were the inexorable
product of my own time.
I wrote down much more. But it might tell you too much about me.
“Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poési pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That's part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. […]
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. […]
What can we expect from Personism? (This is getting good, isn't it?) Everything, but we won't get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. “
I’ve had the dumbest cries lately. But reading this, I cried because of beauty. And I think this book of selected poetry cured me partially of stupidity and partially of sadness. I have been teaching myself to let go; of objects, by giving them to people
of myself, by sharing myself with people
of sadness, by crying less in the shower and more into books
of my past, by remembering— then forgetting
It’s all in here, the pain and beauty of love. And the tenderness to deal with it.
Memorial Day 1950
[…]
Our responsibilities did not begin in
dreams, though they began in bed. Love is
first of all a lesson in utility.
[…]
Poetry is as useful as a machine!
Poem
The eager note on my door said “Call me,
call me when you get in!” so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and
headed straight for the door. It wad autumn
by the time I got around the corner, […]
Poetry
The only way to be quiet
is to be quick, so I scare
you clumsily, or surprise
you with a stab. A praying
mantis knows time more
intimately than I and is
more casual. Crickets use
time for accompaniment to
innocent fidgeting. A zebra
races counterclockwise.
All this I desire. To
deepen you by my quickness
and delight as if you
were logical and proven,
but still be quiet as if
I were used to you; as if
you would never leave me
and were the inexorable
product of my own time.
I wrote down much more. But it might tell you too much about me.
More...