Why I'm Not a Painter and other poems

Frank O'Hara composed poems 'any time, any place', collaborating with - or directly inspired by - a vibrant circle of artists, dancers, musicians and poets. For O'Hara, the city was a place of endless possibility, and he brilliantly captured the pace and rhythms, the quandaries and exhilarations, of mid-twentieth-century city life. His work radiates wit, immediacy and the grace of living 'as variously as possible'. As Mark Ford notes in his introduction to this new selection, 'O'Hara's hip, glamorous, freewheeling self-celebrations both reflected and helped disseminate a new kind of confidence and daring in American poetry.'

About the Author :
Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1926, and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He served in the US navy (1944-46) in the South Pacific, and attended the universities of Harvard and Michigan. In 1951 O’Hara settled in Manhattan, and soon became a central figure in a number of the city’s artistic circles. For most of the fifteen years that he lived in New York he worked at the Museum of Modern Art, graduating from the front desk to become Associate Curator. He was a passionate advocate of Abstract Expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline. O’Hara wrote an enormous quantity of poetry, little of which was published during his lifetime, but which was much admired by friends such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, V.R. 'Bunny' Lang, James Schuyler, Fairfield Porter and Larry Rivers. He died on 25 July 1966, from injuries sustained in a beach-buggy accident on Fire Island. He is buried at Green River Cemetery, East Hampton, Long Island. His Collected Poems (edited by Donald Allen) was published in 1971, and won the National Book Award for Poetry. Mark Ford was born in 1962. His publications include two collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto & Windus 1991, 1998) and Soft Sift (Faber & Faber 2001, Harcourt Brace 2003); a critical biography of the French poet, playwright and novelist Raymond Roussel (Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, Faber & Faber, 2000, Cornell University Press, 2001), a collection of essays, A Driftwood Altar (Waywiser Press, 2005), a 20,000-word interview with John Ashbery (Between the Lines, 2003), and, for Carcanet, The New York Poets, an anthology of poems by Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler (2003), The New York Poets II: An Anthology (2006) and 'Why I am not a painter' and other poems, a selection of the poetry of Frank O'Hara (2003). Mark Ford is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He teaches in the English department at University College, London.

Review :
'... a remarkable new poetry - both modest and monumental, with something basically usable about it - not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a liveable space.' John Ashbery He does this, he does that Charles Bainbridge is charmed by Why I Am Not a Painter and Other Poems, a new selection of Frank O'Hara's poetry Charles Bainbridge Saturday July 12, 2003 The Guardian Frank O'Hara is a wonderful poet - funny, moving, chatty, engaging, enthusiastic, risk-taking, elegiac, supremely urban - and anything that encourages people to read him is a good thing. His poems have a disarming intimacy, a kind spontaneous enthusiasm and his work proves, with tremendous elan and energy, that you don't have to adopt a solemn tone in order to write poetry of seriousness and purpose. As O'Hara himself says of the nature of writing in the brilliantly comic "Personism: A Manifesto": "You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep'." O'Hara (1926-1966) served in the US Navy during the second world war, went to Harvard where he majored in music, before arriving in New York at one of the most exhilarating times in the city's history. In the 1950s New York, with its money, its confidence and energy, with its influx of artists, writers and thinkers from war-torn Europe, was declaring itself the inheritor of the ideals of early 20th-century Parisian modernism. His work often looks back to Paris with whimsical nostalgia ("I wish I were reeling around Paris / instead of reeling around New York"). His poetic heroes were Reverdy and Apollinaire, especially the latter with his capacity to befriend and inspire a whole range of avant-garde figures. O'Hara worked at the Museum of Modern Art and became friends with many of the key Abstract Expressionists. He was a tremendous enthusiast and socialiser and he lived immersed in the pursuit of his enthusiasms. His wide circle of friends and acquaintances, his favourite foods and film stars, his favourite painters and musicians, are a constant presence in his poetry. However, it is New York itself, with its rhythms, moods and images, that provides the life-blood of so many of his lines - "How funny you are today New York / like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime", "It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering / if I will finish this in time for lunch" (in O'Hara's city the act of composition becomes yet another hurried urban activity). For those not familiar with his work this new selection edited by Mark Ford is an enticing introduction. It gathers together many of O'Hara's most successful shorter lyrics arranged by date of composition. There are the excellent early pieces "Autobiographia Literaria" and "Les Etiquettes Jaunes"; there are glimpses of his exuberant surrealist style, "Poem (The eager note on my door said, 'Call me',)" and "Chez Jane"; there is the magnificent longer poem "In Memory of My Feelings" and, at the tail end of the book, "Personism: A Manifesto". However, the main focus of the collection is the series of wonderful "I do this I do that" poems that he started composing steadily from about 1956. Here O'Hara is at his most direct and accessible. Take "A Step Away From Them" (August 16 1956). The piece starts by lulling us into a busy New York street. "It's my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk among the hum-colored / cabs". More details take our eye. The step away from them appears to be simply the step down on to the crowded sidewalk; there are builders, shoppers, cab drivers, a glamorous actress, Puerto Ricans. Here we have all the colour and energy of the city in its perpetual cry of now, now, now. But what O'Hara does next is extraordinary. He takes the sidewalk away from under our feet. One minute New York is there in all its bustling and comforting detail, the next it has gone: There are several Puerto Ricans on the avenue today, which makes it beautiful and warm. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them? The "step away from them" is now the step down into the earth, the step away from the dead. The poem is an elegy. The use of that word "earth" is telling. It evokes, along with the rhythm of the line, a very different tradition. Think of Wordsworth's Lucy poems - "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course / with rocks and stones and trees". When the everyday details come back they have been transformed. They are now a way of surviving, of continuing, in the face of loss: And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for BULLFIGHT and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they'll soon tear down. I used to think they had the Armory Show there. A glass of papaya juice and back to work. My heart is in my pocket, it is poems by Pierre Reverdy. This is a technique O'Hara employs again and again (see the marvellous "Joe's Jacket"). O'Hara was always aware of the depths opening up beneath the glittering surface of his poems. At the same time as he celebrates that urban cry of now, now, now he is also elegising it. Now instantly becomes then. One of the most challenging and ambitious poems in this book is "In Memory of My Feelings". It is an exhilarating piece of sustained bravado, written just before "A Step Away From Them", in July 1956. We are kept constantly on the move; different worlds and perspectives continually slide and collapse into one another. Here, it is not a question of having the sidewalk suddenly taken away; there is no sidewalk to stand on in the first place. Glancing wryly back at Whitman's "Song of Myself" it sets about maintaining as many different versions of the self as it can. However, as with so much of O'Hara's work, the delight in spontaneity and abundance - "the grace to be born and live as variously as possible" - is driven forward by a sense of danger and loss - "the trying desperately to count them as they die". And this, of course, touches on the problem of any selection: what to take out, what to keep in. This is a particular problem with O'Hara; his work is so often about surprising us with its inclusiveness, with its remarkable agility in finding new ways forward. To reduce the 586 pages of The Collected Poems down to the 93 of this new Carcanet edition is a daunting challenge (even the Selected Poems is 233 pages). A vast amount of work necessarily disappears. And this is not just a question of quantity; it is also about the kind of poet Frank O'Hara was. What this book misses is his rougher more experimental edge, that sense of constant questioning and risk taking (the type of writing hinted at by "In Memory of My Feelings"). We do not, for example, have the longer, more demanding delights of "Second Avenue" or "Biotherm (For Bill Berkson)". Only one of the odes is present. However, having said that, Why I Am Not a Painter and Other Poems feels closer in spirit to those books published during O'Hara's own lifetime, such as the wonderful Lunch Poems. Its emphasis on the great series of "I do this I do that" poems is surely the best way to bring a new audience closer to the work of this immensely charismatic and engaging poet and to encourage them to explore further. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003 Mark Thwaite, ReadySteadyBook.com, 30th August 2004 Mark Ford's useful introduction to his selection of a poet I've always thought of as a "nearly Beat" (which is no sort of description at all really is it!? I suppose it is because of his being published by City Lights: his most famous Lunch Poems came out in 1964) describes O'Hara's often hastily penned work as "immediate, nervously alert, mercurial". This gets O'Hara down pretty well. Ford echoes the poet John Ashbery in half-admitting that the power of O'Hara's arguably sometimes quite slight work (what Ashbery called an "unrevised work-in-progress") tends to arise cumulatively. This is neither the serious (and often quite dry) poetry so beloved by the American New Critics and nor was O'Hara, against what I thought, actually really fully part of the Ginsberg crowd. If any collective could be said to contain O'Hara it was the so-called New York School (a term coined by gallery owner John Bernard Myers - we'll be reviewing Mark Ford's anthology The New York Poets very soon.) Although lighter in weight than some might find palatable, O'Hara himself saw his work as part of a valid artistic tradition against the mainstream. Ford quotes, "I dress in oil cloth and read music / by Guillaume Apollinaire's clay candelabra" and we sense that O'Hara is doing a lot more than simply name-dropping. Other artists - especially visual artists as the title poem shows - were an important source of inspiration for O'Hara. Again, to follow Ford, the poem vividly dramatises "O'Hara's belief that all artists develop by experiencing art forms other than their own." And it is obvious that for O'Hara the Abstract Expressionists (including a personal favourite of mine Helen Frankenthaler) served as example and inspiration: 'Memorial Day 1950', paean as it is to many greats (including Gertrude Stein, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Boris Pasternak) starts by reminding us that art - and inspiration via art - is not separable from the real: "Picasso made me tough and quick" he says, "and the world." And the world, the real, is never far away in these poems. Poetry says O'Hara, "is as useful as a machine!" Manhattan looms. O'Hara's poems are often hymns to the New York he loved. His erotically charged work (from 1959's 'Personism, A Manifesto': "only Whitman and Crane and Wiliams, of the American poets are better than the movies") celebrate the freedoms that only such a cosmopolitan city can allow and bestow. Ford's Carcanet collection - the only portable O'Hara - starts, as it should, with Autobiographia Literaria, And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine! The final, single "Imagine!" seems like a plea - we are being exhorted to actually think! There feels like there is an invisible ellipsis telling us both to imagine what words we could write or what words O'Hara did indeed write - and tempting us to look further at the poems within. And by looking we validate: O'Hara is no longer the child: in a corner of the schoolyard all alone He is a real poet. Imagine! And the sense that he wants us to accompany him in his solipsism - or in his journey away from it - has a powerful and charged homoerotic undercurrent. Recommended.