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A review by jenniferaimee
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara by Donald M. Allen, Frank O'Hara
5.0
O'Hara has been one of my favorite poets since I first read "The Day Lady Died" and "Why I am Not a Painter" in my freshman poetry class. Poems Retrieved is the first poetry book I read for fun, and it is also the first book I read after finishing college, and so of course I loved The Collected Poems. I've said before that long poetry collections are difficult for me to finish—I prefer to read my poetry in infrequent poem-packed sprints, and shorter books are better suited to that. (Long books can obviously be read the same way, I just get frustrated when it takes over a year to finish a 500-page book.) Still, I enjoyed reading this, and as I was approaching the end, I started feeling sad at the thought of not having any new O'Hara to read. I also got extra melancholy over the fact that he didn't know his last poem was going to be his last and that I was coming to the end of his life via poetry.
O'Hara's poems are personal, chatty, and remind me of the impressionist movement because he wrote about everyday events. The poems conjure the atmosphere of O'Hara's New York City—both the busyness of life in Manhattan and the vibrancy of his social life. I love the sense of community he created in his writing, the poems for his friends, and the offhand way he mentioned them in his poems. O'Hara's poems seem genuine; I appreciated how little pretension there was in his writing, despite his privileged upbringing, his career at MoMA, and his deep involvement in the art world (which, actually, may have tempered some of the pretension).
He wrote, "Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them." I do, though, and I find O'Hara's poems relatable and fun/easy to read.
Some of my favorites are: "[When your left arm twitches]"; ["Is it dirty"]; "At Joan's"; "Lines for the Fortune Cookies"; "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island"; and "Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul."
O'Hara's poems are personal, chatty, and remind me of the impressionist movement because he wrote about everyday events. The poems conjure the atmosphere of O'Hara's New York City—both the busyness of life in Manhattan and the vibrancy of his social life. I love the sense of community he created in his writing, the poems for his friends, and the offhand way he mentioned them in his poems. O'Hara's poems seem genuine; I appreciated how little pretension there was in his writing, despite his privileged upbringing, his career at MoMA, and his deep involvement in the art world (which, actually, may have tempered some of the pretension).
He wrote, "Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them." I do, though, and I find O'Hara's poems relatable and fun/easy to read.
Some of my favorites are: "[When your left arm twitches]"; ["Is it dirty"]; "At Joan's"; "Lines for the Fortune Cookies"; "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island"; and "Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul."