Growing Up with Frank O’Hara

One of culture’s biggest lies is that great poets and artists are somehow more interesting than the rest of us—deserving to be scanned, emulated, interpreted, explained, and packed up in big valise-size biographies with the usual accessories: indexes, bibliographies, chronologies of where they went and what they ate, and directions to the nearest library-sponsored, well-humidified collections of their tattered letters and scribbly notepads. In fact, it’s often hard to read a prominent poet or enjoy a properly curated assemblage of their works without climbing through several decades of analysis, failed marriages, and/or psychological breakdowns—an empire of words established by people who make it difficult for us to enjoy poetry or art without their help.

And yet the most profound aspect of Frank O’Hara’s poems, and the personality that shaped them, is how deeply and immediately they have spoken to their audiences over the decades, without any need for interlocutors. His intelligent, loosely formal, sometimes chaotic poems often bear unpretentious titles, such as simply “Poem,” or a phrase that announces the occasion or location for which they were written (“Seventh Street,” “The Day Lady Died”). O’Hara referred to many of these as his “went there and did that poems”—peripatetic exercises in observation, reflection, and random urban experience that can only be enjoyed in big cities like New York, London, or Paris.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/a6oGeAX