Poems Retrieved

by Frank O'Hara

This volume completes the publication of all the poems Frank O’Hara write between 1950 and his tragic death in 1966. "O’Hara the quintessential Postmodernist . . . His work is a kind of watershed, a culmination of the Modernists’ efforts to exploit the city, and a prototype of the poetry to come."—Neal Bowers

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

254 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Collections of American poet Francis Russell O'Hara include Meditations in an Emergency (1957) and Lunch Poems (1964); playfulness, irony, sophistication, and a shared interest in the visual arts mark works of the New York School, an active group that included O'Hara during the 1950s and 1960s.

Parents reared O'Hara in Grafton, Massachusetts. O'Hara served in the south Pacific and Japan as a sonar man on the destroyer United States Ship Nicholas during World War II.

With the funding, made available to veterans, he attended Harvard University and roomed with artist-writer Edward Gorey. He majored in music and composed some works despite his irregular attendance was and his disparate interests. Visual art and contemporary music, his first love, heavily influenced O'Hara, a fine piano player all his life; he suddenly played swathes of Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff when visiting new partners, often to their shock.

At Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.

He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At Michigan, he won a Hopwood award and received his Master of Arts in English literature 1951. In that autumn, O'Hara moved into an apartment in city of New York with Joe LeSueur, his roommate and sometimes his lover for the next 11 years. Known throughout his life for his extreme sociability, passion, and warmth, O'Hara had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life, many from the New York art and poetry worlds. Soon after he arrived in New York, the Museum of Modern Art employed him at the front desk, and he began to write seriously.

O'Hara, active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News, and in 1960 was made Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with artists like Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers, and Joan Mitchell. O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island in which he was struck and seriously injured by a man speeding in a beach vehicle during the early morning hours of July 24, 1966. He died the next day of a ruptured liver at the age of 40 and was buried in the Green River Cemetery on Long Island.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know you don't love me still, I'm not so vain, I just
know that you'll be mightily intrigued. And you are one of the
few living mortals of whom the word "mightily" indicates a
quality. You see, even now, I am never ironic.

These are poems found after the publication of the Collected Poems, often extracted from within letters or forgotten at a residence after a weekend's revelry. The early efforts are for completionists and scholars tracking the arc of themes. Many are derivative. The collection ends extremely well and I found myself sad, that likely there weren't any more to be discovered.

[Roisin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked it up because of the picture of Frank and his cat on the cover but it ended up changing my life

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just about the only thing better than reading 400-something pages of Frank poems is finding out right after you finish it that there's a whole other book with 200-something more pages of Frank poems and then reading that.

[City Lights Booksellers & Publishers · Rating 5 out of 5]

"While the reputation of many mid-twentieth century poets has declined, Frank O'Hara's keeps rising and rising: today's readers cannot get enough of his brave, jaunty, self-lacerating, funny, poignant, mysterious, and always surprising lyric. Poems Retrieved, originally published in 1977 by the late Don Allen's Grey Fox Press and long out of print, contains more than 200 pages of poems that Allen found after he had assembled the monumental Collected Poems for Alfred A. Knopf in 1971. As Allen noted in his Preface, and as Bill Berkson shows us in his excellent new introduction, these 'poems retrieved,' ranging as they do over O'Hara's entire career, are a necessary complement to the Collected, an integral component of the poet's oeuvre. No one interested in O’Hara’s poetry—indeed, no one interested in the poetic ethos of the American 1950s and '60s—can afford to be without this volume."—Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University, and author of Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters



"The gentle intelligence and hip urbanity that Frank O’Hara expressed in his writing, indeed as a person, has nearly vanished, as much as the city that inspired him. His love for the wild vision, in all its artful abstraction, and his erudite passion for the common muse, has proven to be the true resonant poetry of our anxious human condition. We need him."—Thurston Moore, musician

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 2 out of 5]

I look at Frank O’Hara and I would rather read Frank O’Hara than all the poets in the world, and I’m grateful this collection of lost and found poems was published (poems written on postcards to his friends, poems he left unpublished in drawers, poems he wrote on napkins, etc). Unfortunately these feel to me like outtakes and not a single one knocked me out in the way his best poems do! I love Frank for his conversational tone that masks this gordian knot of emotions (sadness! longing! horniness! is horniness an emotion?), and none of these had that tone or cadence or power. Worse than that, I reallllly don’t like his early 50s style which feels so affected and like they’re trying to read as Serious Poems before he found his more approachable voice. Anyway! Still glad I read it because I love to commune with and feel recentered by Frank. <3

[Jonathan Holleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

An essential poetry book for anyone who loves a lot of the beats or New York School poets...as well as anyone who loves 50s/60s poetry...A wide range of subjects & styles...This book has made me a big Frank O' Hara fan...I never knew that he wrote so many excellent poems in so many styles...

[Scott Ballard · Rating 2 out of 5]

from My Country
“…but to create vast seabeds / of the future, into which all mountains eventually must / relinquish their monuments, their thoughts of air / then facing total blackness, I am at last my self…”

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

therapy is expensive but this book is free

[Villa Lena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended by Lilli Heinemann

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bunch of stuff he didn't try to publish (for good reason). Seems like a lot of this was written during the time before he WAS a poet, when he was still TRYING to be a poet.

[Emilia]

trying not to cry because my dissertation is so bad

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very exciting that Donald Allen found over 200 pages of previously unpublished poetry by the late, great Frank O'Hara to publish in this book. Since O'Hara is my favorite poet (most of the time, anyway), it is no surprise that I enjoyed this book. Some of the poems are wonderful, and some perhaps not his best work, but enough of the former to make the book a pleasure for his fans. Not sure about the rest of you, but then again, why aren't you an O'Hara fan, if you are not? You are missing out, in my humble opinion.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Someone had compared a poem I wrote to Frank O'Hara's work, and having never read anything of his, I thought I'd investigate. I think he wrote some excellent poems, but there were a lot of mediocre ones too. At times the syntactic experimentation felt like too much; I can only take so many garden-path sentences/fragments before I start to want to enjoy language again. So in the end, I'm not sure what to make of the comparison.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gray Fox Press is one of my favorite small presses, and sometime in the 70's or was it even in the 80's they put out this great collection of O'Hara's poetry. How great is this guys' work? Super great. He's almost a super duper social historian on top of his great writing. To be in NYC at that time.... wow.

[Steven Pattison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read a few books from O'Hara and I'm trying to read more poetry but I've enjoyed each one so far - his poems have light tone with a sense of humor and a bit offbeat which add some character to a literary genre that I would otherwise be uninterested in reading

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

good left-overs (not finished)

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot to love in here and then some more that's just okay. It's very playful poetry that is occasionally intensely beautiful.

This mad had a heart big as an ocean and made for dancing.

[Grant · Rating 1 out of 5]

too disjointed, lacking unity, many poems utterly incomprehensible, clearly written hastily and without much thought on the back of dime-store napkins.

[Kit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poems that Frank O'Hara did not elect to publish... he was mostly right about that.