“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).

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Frank O'Hara 28
American poet, art critic and writer 1926–1966

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