(Ebook) Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara ISBN 9780307271594, 0307271595

(Ebook) Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara ISBN 9780307271594, 0307271595

“I love your poems in Poetry,” James Schuyler wrote to Frank O’Hara after reading a batch that included “Radio” and “On Seeing Larry Rivers’s Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art” in the March 1956 issue of the Chicago magazine. “In that cutting garden of salmon pink gladioli,” he continued, “they’re as fresh as a Norway spruce. Your passion always makes me feel like a cloud the wind detaches (at last) from a mountain so I can finally go sailing over all those valleys with their crazy farms and towns. I always start bouncing up and down in my chair when I read a poem of yours like ‘Radio,’ where you seem to say, ‘I know you won’t think this is much of a subject for a poem but I just can’t help it: I feel like this,’ so that in the end you seem to be the only one who knows what the subject for a poem is.”
Schuyler’s elaborate metaphors, and his account of the way the poems have him physically “bouncing up and down” in his chair, suggest much about the unique and liberating nature of Frank O’Hara’s poetry. Unlike the tasteful, carefully crafted “salmon pink gladioli” on offer elsewhere in the magazine, O’Hara’s poems enable Schuyler to break free “(at last)” from the sterile security of terra firma and embark on a panoramic survey of life in all its surreal variety. But the sense of the sublime the poems make possible is achieved not by addressing themselves to particular subjects but by a passionate, unembarrassed responsiveness to whatever happens to happen, however incongruous or seemingly trivial. Like so many of O’Hara’s readers, Schuyler finds himself galvanized by an injection of “immortal energy,” to borrow a phrase from “Radio”—even though the poem’s ostensible subject matter (Saturday-afternoon classical-radio schedules) may seem none too promising. What matters, and gets communicated, is the poet’s self-reliant assertion: “I just can’t help it: I feel like this.”