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sabretoothdream's review against another edition
5.0
What is more beautiful than night
and someone in your arms
that's what we love about art
it seems to prefer us and stays
and someone in your arms
that's what we love about art
it seems to prefer us and stays
missmim's review against another edition
5.0
The last five lines of "Steps" are quite possibly my favorite lines of poetry ever. I love that O'Hara's poetry seems slap-dash and harried, but is so beautiful and precise for all of that. He's definitely one my faves.
boyeatsgod's review against another edition
5.0
i love frank o'hara so there was no way this could be wrong for me. as with all collections, some poems are stronger than others as that's just how it goes, but i found it awe-inspiring & humbling to read along as o'hara progressed as a poet in his lifetime.
glowbird's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting. Finely crafted and evocitive of the post war period. All the same, not for me.
ombudsman's review against another edition
5.0
Just an absolutely monumental work - there is so much to love about Frank. I've been an admirer of O'Hara (& New York School poetry) for years, like everyone in the world without properly sitting down and reading it (I was making my way through Ashbery's Selected earlier this year but I've misplaced it somewhere...) This makes the charm, magnetism & resources of Frank's poetry crystal clear. Yes, not every poem is a hit - but I was shocked by how much this collection offered, even today, even outside of the classic poems ('Having a Coke with You', 'The Day Lady Died', 'Meditations in an Emergency', 'Why I am Not a Painter'...)
October
Summer is over,
that moment of blindness
in a sunny wheelbarrow
aching on sand dunes
from a big melancholy
about war headlines
and personal hatreds.
Restful boredom waits
for the winter’s cold solace
and biting season of galas
to take over my nerves,
and from anger at time’s
rough passage I fight
off the future, my friend.
Is there at all anywhere
in this lavender sky
beside the UN Building
where I am so little
and have dallied with love,
a fragment of the paradise
we see when signing treaties
or planning free radio stations?
If I turn down my sheets
children start screaming through
the windows. My glasses
are broken on the coffee table.
And at night a truce
with Iran or Korea seems certain
while I am beaten to death
by a thug in a back bedroom.
October
Summer is over,
that moment of blindness
in a sunny wheelbarrow
aching on sand dunes
from a big melancholy
about war headlines
and personal hatreds.
Restful boredom waits
for the winter’s cold solace
and biting season of galas
to take over my nerves,
and from anger at time’s
rough passage I fight
off the future, my friend.
Is there at all anywhere
in this lavender sky
beside the UN Building
where I am so little
and have dallied with love,
a fragment of the paradise
we see when signing treaties
or planning free radio stations?
If I turn down my sheets
children start screaming through
the windows. My glasses
are broken on the coffee table.
And at night a truce
with Iran or Korea seems certain
while I am beaten to death
by a thug in a back bedroom.
epicpinkfluffyunicorn's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
4.0
like some poems were bad and i skipped quite a bit but o’hara can really floor me with a shorter piece or a single line. also the essays were kinda interesting
spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
3.0
Frank O'Hara really was the master of polyptoton, ploce, antanaclasis, and paronomasia. This particular poem, "Why I Am Not a Painter," one of my favourites, is antithetical to the surface-level poetry that's so widely plagued the internet: every line has another layer underneath. "I am a poet," O'Hara states, in the first line. He's a poet: there's nothing he can do about it. Near the end of the poem, he repeats himself, emphatic: "I am a real poet." The deceptively colloquial tone belies the nuances of identity (poet, painter) and the associated actions (writing poetry, painting pictures). Why is O'Hara a poet? Because he writes poetry. Because he's not a painter. This is the poem:
Simplicity is not inherently profundity, but O'Hara masters both.I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.