Officially the first book I've finished post-graduation, and boy it's a good one. The only compilation of poetry to make Bowie's Top 100 Books list, I knew I HAD to get my hands on a copy (the favourite poetry of my favourite poet, as it were). The first thing I bought in New York was this copy of "Selected Poems" found at McNally Jackson on Prince Street.
Although the initial genius of his work took me a while to get into (much like when I first read Kerouac), once I "understood" it, grasped the rhythms of the work, I wholeheartedly embraced it. O'Hara's genius lies in the fact that he really couldn't give a damn about whether or not you like his work or if there's a "transcendental meaning" behind it. He's all about conveying his experience in the NOW. His uncanny ability to describe the character of his friends and lovers in his writing is without a doubt brilliant in their humourous observations. Moreover, his amazing ability to convey his thoughts on something that's occurring before him, to him, about him - while simultaneously referencing artist after artist, movement after movement, and culture after culture is positively disorienting. His work is any art lover's fantasy.
Yet despite his seemingly cavalier attitude towards his audience and a disdain for the idea of an intentional "larger Truth" behind his work, O'Hara's work clearly taps into something transcendental. All of his poetry unfolds before your eyes, battering your senses into submission before his sensual wordplay and witty insights on life, art, relationships, and what it truly means to live in the moment.
Below is a list of my favourites of the "Selected Works" and particularly good quotations:
"The Critic" (1951)
"Meditations in an Emergency" (1954)
"To the Film industry in Crisis" (1955)
"Digression on NUMBER 1, 1948" (1956)
"Why I Am Not a Painter" (1956)
"Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's" (1957)
"Failures of Spring" (1957)
"Two Dreams of Waking" (1957)
"Ode (to Joseph Lesueur) on the Arrow that Flieth by Day" (1958)
"A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island" (1958)
"Fou-Rire" (1958)
"To Gottfried Benn" (1958)
"The 'Unfinished'" (in memory of Bunny Lang) (1959)
"The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer's ankles..." (1959)
"'L'Amour Avait Passé Par Là'" (1959)
"I don't know as I get what D. H. Lawrence is driving at..." (1959)
"Post the Lake Poets Ballad" (1959)
"Naphitha" (1959)
"(Á la recherche d' Gertrude Stein)" (1959)
"Light clarity avocado salad in the morning..." (1959)
"Now That I am in Madrid and Can Think" (1960)
"Fond Sonore" (1960)
"St. Paul and All That" (1961)
"Poem en Forme de Saw" (1961)
"Metaphysical Poem" (1962)
" I first recognized art
as wildness, and it seemed right,
I mean rite, to me" -- "Ode to Michael Goldberg ('s Birth and Other Births)" (1958)
"But that's not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you. I'm not saying that I don't have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They're just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I've stopped thinking and that's when refreshment arrives. But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. [....] Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry....Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! [Personism is] 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. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it." -- PERSONISM: A MANIFESTO (1959)
"I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times when I would rather be dead the thought that I could never write another poem has so far stopped me. I think this is an ignoble attitude. I would rather die for love, but I haven't. [....] I don't think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else; they are just there in whatever form I can find them. What is clear to me in my work is probably obscure to others, and vice versa. [....] It may be taht poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumsttantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time." -- [STATEMENT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY] (1959)
"But it is also, like the manifesto, a diary of a particular day and the depressed mood of that day (it's a pretty depressing day, you must admit, when you feel you relate more importantly to poetry than to life), and as such may perhaps have more general application to my poetry since I have been more often depressed than happy, as far as I can tally it up. In the case of either, it's a hopeless conundrum: it used to be that I could only write when I was miserable; now I can only write when I'm happy. Where will it all end?" -- [STATEMENT FOR PATERSON SOCIETY] (1961)
"What [Larry Rivers'] work has always had to say to me, I guess, is to be more keenly interested while I'm still alive. And perhaps this is the most important thing art can say." -- "LARRY RIVERS: A MEMOIR" (1965)
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