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Why I'm Not a Painter and other poems

Frank O'Hara

Edited by Mark Ford

Cover Picture of Why I'm Not a Painter and other poems
10% off
Categories: 20th Century, American, LGBTQ+
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (93 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2003)
9781857546880
£9.95 £8.96
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • Audio
  • One day I am thinking of
    a color: orange. I write a line
    about orange. Pretty soon it is a
    whole page of words, not lines.
    Then another page. There should be
    so much more, not of orange, of
    words, of how terrible orange is
    and life. Days go by. It is even in prose. I am a real poet.
                                             from 'Why I Am Not a Painter'

    Frank O'Hara composed poems 'any time, any place', collaborating with - or directly inspired by - a vibrant circle of artists, dancers, musicians and poets. For O'Hara, the city was a place of endless possibility, and he brilliantly captured the pace and rhythms, the quandaries and exhilarations, of mid-twentieth-century city life. His work radiates wit, immediacy and the grace of living 'as variously as possible'. As Mark Ford notes in his introduction to this new selection, 'O'Hara's hip, glamorous, freewheeling self-celebrations both reflected and helped disseminate a new kind of confidence and daring in American poetry.'
    Frank O'Hara
    Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1926, and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He served in the US navy (1944-46) in the South Pacific, and attended the universities of Harvard and Michigan. In 1951 O’Hara settled in Manhattan, and soon became a central figure in a number of the ... read more
    Mark Ford
    Mark Ford was born in 1962. His publications include two collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto & Windus 1991, 1998) and Soft Sift (Faber & Faber 2001, Harcourt Brace 2003); a critical biography of the French poet, playwright and novelist Raymond Roussel ( Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, Faber ... read more
    '... a remarkable new poetry - both modest and monumental, with something basically usable about it - not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a liveable space.'
    John Ashbery
    Praise for Frank O'Hara 'O'Hara's hip, glamorous, freewheeling self-celebrations both reflected and helped disseminate a new kind of confidence and daring in American poetry.' Mark Ford
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