Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara [Paperback]

The first new selection of O’Hara’s work to come along in several decades. In this “marvellous compilation”(The New Yorker),editor Mark Ford reacquaints us with one of the most joyous and innovative poets of the postwar period.“Sensitively chosen and intelligently introduced . . . Ford’s selection makes it possible to see more clearly how inward O’Hara’s poetry was at its best . . . For O’Hara a poem was truthful when it was personal . . . [His] elegies succeed because long after he discarded any religious belief in immortality, he retained the aesthetic sensibility that took it seriously.”
—Edward Mendelson,The New York Review of BooksFrank O’Harawas the author of six volumes of poetry, the first of which was published in 1952. He was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and wrote numerous essays on painting and sculpture. He died in 1966 at the age of forty.

Mark Fordhas published several books of poetry and is the author of the critical biographyRaymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams.My HeartI’m not going to cry all the timenor shall I laugh all the time,I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,not just a sleeper, but also the big,overproduced first-run kind. I want to beat least as alive as the vulgar. And ifsome aficionado of my mess says “That’snot like Frank!,” all to the good! Idon’t wear brown and grey suits all the time,do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,often. I want my feet to be bare,I want my face to be shaven, and my heart–you can’t plan on my heart, butthe better part of it, my poetry, is open.The Day Lady DiedIt is 12:20 in New York, a Fridaythree days after Bastille day, yesit is 1959 and I go get a shoeshinebecause I will get off the 4:19 in Easthamptonat 7:15 and then go straight to dinnerand I don’t lãe