the brink of explosive jubilance | Selected Poems

book: Selected Poems | Frank O'Hara

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	• Selected Poems Frank O'Hara Knopf, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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What A Delicious Treat....

I had no idea who Frank O'Hara was until I stumbled upon this newly released book of selected poems. What a treat! The introduction gives readers a wonderful background on him, and each page is full of delicious little gems. He writes exactly what he thinks....and he's so fresh and creative. Makes you wander and think - which is the hidden gift.
With the holidays fast approaching or a special birthday coming up, Frank O'Hara Selected Poems is an ideal gift that you'll be proud to give. The recipient will thank you every time s/he reads one of these wonderful nuggets.

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the brink of explosive jubilance

Gracious, charming, witty, sassy, spontaneous, irreverent, joyful, campy, insouciant--Frank O'Hara's poetry always brings to mind the best sort of adjectives, those that celebrate life, even as it turns toward eulogy and lament. "No more dying," dares the refrain from O'Hara's "Ode to Joy," and Mark Ford, in editing this long-overdue new selection, has done the excellent and necessary task of dusting any traces of oblivion from O'Hara's oeuvre. As Ford notes in his succinct yet personable introduction, "even [O'Hara's] close friends were surprised at the extraordinary bulk of his Collected Poems when it appeared in 1971." The massiveness of the Collected was tempered in 1974 by the now out-of-print The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Both of these volumes were edited by Donald Allen, who, in 1977, gathered two further collections, Poems Retrieved and Early Writing, which were comprised of work not appearing in either the Collected or Selected editions. For this new selection, Ford has culled work from these and all previous incarnations of O'Hara's published materials, and has thankfully opted, unlike the original Selected, to honor each poem with its own page. Also included are several of the seminal prose works and a useful short chronology. While the volume doesn't offer any newly unearthed, archeological treasures (we'll have to wait--as we have been for years!--for the letters), it does present a palpable and nicely packaged sampling of this important New York School poet. In an age where the ubiquity of information storage sparks in fledgling writers the solipsistic image of their own massive archives, O'Hara's notorious organizational nonchalance--indeed, even in keeping copies of his own poems--might seem odd; however, one need only open this book anywhere at random for evidence of life so full, so teetering on the brink of explosive jubilance, to make moot any concern for self-mythologizing beyond that already embedding within the poems.

(written for The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. XXVIII, #2)

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Frank O?Hara (1926?1966) was one of the most original and influential American poets of the twentieth century. Although he grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts, O?Hara developed into the quintessential poet of mid-century Manhattan; soon after his arrival in New York in 1951 he evolved a new kind of urban poetry that brilliantly captures the heady excitements of a golden period in the city?s artistic life. O?Hara?s style exudes an insistent, seductive glamour; his mercurial poems, at once open-ended and startlingly immediate, radiate an insouciant confidence that has lost none of its freshness over the decades. O?Hara was at the heart of a vibrant artistic circle that embraced fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, as well as experimental painters such as Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jasper Johns. Their achievements are movingly celebrated in many of his poems, while at the same time he paid loving tribute to popular idols such as James Dean and Lana Turner:

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

This generous new selection by Mark Ford reflects all the phases and varied achievements of O?Hara?s tragically foreshortened career, including his drama, and is followed by an appendix of key prose texts such as ?Personism,? in which O?Hara succinctly summed up his overall approach to poetry: ?You just go on your nerve.?