From 2008: Frank O’Hara was essentially a self-elegist, Dan Chiasson writes, exploring the dark sense of his “own ceaseless going”—his presence, a moment ago so real and vital, now gone.
Frank O’Hara lived in New York City for fifteen years, from 1951 until his death, in 1966. In that time, he wrote hundreds of poems, often several a day, hunting and pecking on a portable Royal with great speed. He arrived late in New York, having grown up in Grafton, Massachusetts, attended Harvard after a tour of duty in the Navy, and then spent a year in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a distant planet settled for the manufacture of master’s degrees.
It was a moment for making analogies among the arts—jazz was like painting was like dance was like poetry—and for collaborations, many important, some absurd. The common gene was spontaneity, and it made history irrelevant: Merce Cunningham had more in common with Jackson Pollock than with Diaghilev; Pollock was more like Miles Davis than like Cézanne.
His poems, so full of names and places and events, are exquisite ledgers for the tallying of reality. They all attempt to move the vital but fleeting items in Column A—sandwiches and torsos, lunch hours and late nights—into Column B, where works of art stand, “strong as rocks,” against the ravages of mortality.
Mark Ford’s marvellous compilation “Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems” puts O’Hara’s authentic achievement back in our hands. O’Hara’s “Collected Poems” , edited by Donald Allen, is a three-and-a-half-pound bulging grab bag, created to sit idle on a shelf. You can’t read it or teach from it; good poems are shimmed between bad and slight ones.
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