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Frank O'Hara Quotes

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet, and art critic. Because of his employment as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School—an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.

O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary". Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends". O'Hara's writing sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen , the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. Wikipedia  

✵ 27. March 1926 – 25. July 1966
Frank O'Hara photo

Works

Lunch Poems
Lunch Poems
Frank O'Hara
Frank O'Hara: 28 quotes3 likes

Famous Frank O'Hara Quotes

“It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.
I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.”

Frank O'Hara book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Meditations in an Emergency

“The beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian
heroes, lies in
lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions.”

Frank O'Hara

Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets (l. 34-36) (1960).

“Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under
them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.”

Frank O'Hara book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Meditations in an Emergency

Frank O'Hara Quotes about love

“I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up”

Frank O'Hara

“When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf
to turn away from the sun -- it loves it there.
There's nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.”

Frank O'Hara

“I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.”

Frank O'Hara book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Meditations in an Emergency

“oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much”

Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara Quotes

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.”

Frank O'Hara book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Mayakovsky, st. 4, from Meditations in an Emergency (1957).

“My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.”

Frank O'Hara book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Meditations in an Emergency

“I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totallylife. It's more important to confirm the least sincere. The clouds get enough attention as it is…”

Frank O'Hara

“I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.”

Frank O'Hara

Source: The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.”

Frank O'Hara

“… but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it…”

Frank O'Hara book Lunch Poems

Source: Lunch Poems

“I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.”

Frank O'Hara

Source: Early Writing

“Leaf! you are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!

As if there were no
such thing as integrity!”

Frank O'Hara book Lunch Poems

Source: Lunch Poems

“And
always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space.”

Frank O'Hara

A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island (l. 64-67) (1958).

“I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to.”

Frank O'Hara book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Meditations in an Emergency

“Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible”

Frank O'Hara

“You just go on your nerve.”

Frank O'Hara

“I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.”

Frank O'Hara

Personism: A Manifesto, from The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1972).

“It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet It's twelve poems, I call
it oranges.”

Frank O'Hara

Why I Am Not a Painter (l. 24-28) (1976).

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