The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry

"During the halcyon days of the Abstract Expressionist and Imaginative Realism movements, Frank O'Hara was the laureate of the New York art scene."--New York Times

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, edited by Donald Allen and with an introduction by John Ashbery, captures the full range of one of postwar America's most original and influential poets. Born in Massachusetts in 1926, O'Hara became the quintessential voice of mid-century Manhattan, evolving a witty, mercurial, and glamorous urban poetry that captured the artistic scene of 1950s to '60s New York. Including poems from his dazzling early experimental verses of the late 1940s to his more reflective work before his untimely death at the age of forty, the collection reveals O'Hara's inventive voice, blending French post-symbolism, surrealist, and Dada techniques and the everyday American experience into a uniquely postmodern poetics. First published posthumously in 1972, this landmark collection affirms Frank O'Hara's central place in American poetry: witty, fantastical, vital.

From the Back Cover

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry

Review Quotes

"During the halcyon days of the Abstract Expressionist and Imaginative Realism movements, Frank O'Hara was the laureate of the New York art scene. . . . A Pan piping on city streets, he luxuriates in the uninhibited play of his imagination. 'My force is in mobility, ' he remarks, and indeed his world is full of events--parties, thoughtful acts, homosexual encounters, a painting or film to be commented on--that he reports with a sophisticated naive wonder and generous emotion." --Herbert A. Liebowitz, "New York Times"

"O'Hara's work seems to me to represent the last stage in the adaptation of twentieth-century avant-garde sensibility to poetry about contemporary American experience. In its music and its language and in its conception of the relation of poetry to the rest of life, it is a poetry which has already changed poets and others, and which promises to go on moving and changing them for a long time to come."--Kenneth Koch, "New Republic"

"Slangy and sharp, genially surreal, the work of the quintessential New York poet shines like polished granite."-- "Entertainment Weekly"

About the Author

Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) was a dynamic leader of the "New York School" of poets, a group that included John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. The abstract expressionist painters in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s used the title, but the poets borrowed it. From the beginning, O'Hara's poetry was engaged with the worlds of music, dance, and painting. In that complex of associations, he devised an idea of poetic form that allowed the inclusion of many kinds of events, including everyday conversations and notes about New York advertising signs. Since his death in 1966 at the age of forty, the depth and richness of his achievements as a poet and art critic have been recognized by an international audience. As the painter Alex Katz remarked, "Frank's business was being an active intellectual." His articulate intelligence made new proposals for poetic form possible in American poetry.

Donald Allen (1912-2004) was director of Grey Fox Press. Among the literary collections he has edited are The Postmoderns, The Poetics of the New American Poetry, and The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca; he is the translator of Four Plays of Eugène Ionesco.