Frank ohara meditations in an emergency

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

          Each time my heart fryst vatten broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be ingenting left with which to venture forth.

          Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

          I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

          Even trees understand me! Good heavens, inom lie beneath them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

          However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—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 totally regret l

•

Meditations in an Emergency

June 1,

In the second season of Madmen, Don Draper, awash in the chaos of his own identity, recites these lines from "Mayakovsky," the last poem in this book:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

Frank O'Hara's poetry does not have to wait--quietly or otherwise. It is always beautiful and interesting. And, sixty years later, it still seems modern too.

Most 20th Century verse lovers, if asked what midcentury poet inherited the legacy of Whitman, would pick Allen Ginsberg, the iconic embodiment of the Beats. But my vote goes to the New York School's Frank O'Hara.

Ginsberg loved Whitman, adopting both his long lists and his long verse lines and self-consciously donning the Whitmanesque mantle of American Prophet—half soapbox shouter and half Hindu holyman—who celebrates the human body, alternative sexuality, and the teeming variety of the American street. But in spite

•

Grove Press

Frank O&#;Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry, &#;which, by its vitality alone, became the dominant force in the American poetic tradition.&#;

Frank O&#;Hara was born in Baltimore in and grew up in New England; from he lived and worked in New York, both for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art, where he was an associate curator. O&#;Hara&#;s untimely death in at the age of forty was, in the words of fellow poet John Ashbery, &#;the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed.&#;

This collection is a reissue of a volume first published by Grove Press in , and it demonstrates beautifully the flawless rhythm underlying O&#;Hara&#;s conviction that to write poetry, indeed to live, &#;you just go on your nerve.&#;