Frank O'hara Quotes

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.

When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf to turn away from the sun -- it loves it there. There's nothing so spiritual about being happy but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.

The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.

I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.

In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.

I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.

After the first glass of vodka you can accept just about anything of life even your own mysteriousness you think it is nice that a box of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?

Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac

I embraced a cloud, but when I soared it rained.

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth. Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?

I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It's more important to confirm the least sincere. The clouds get enough attention as it is...

That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.

Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.

… and I’ll be happy here and happy there, full of tea and tears

I'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.

Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity!

Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible

And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space.

It's a bright summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.

...but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it...

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!

I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.

I am moved by the multitudes of your intelligence and sometimes, returning, I become the sea— in love with your speed, your heaviness and breath.

There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.

when I think of all the things I’ve been thinking of I feel insane

If I am ever to find these trees meaningful I must have you by the hand. As it is, they stretch dusty fingers into an obscure sky, and the snow looks up like a face dirtied with tears. Should I cry out and see what happens? There could only be a stranger wandering in this landscape, cold, unfortunate, himself frozen fast in wintry eyes.

all I want is a room up there and you in it

I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days!

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

the only thing to do is simply continue is that simple yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do can you do it yes, you can because it is the only thing to do

You just go on your nerve.

A man was the cause of it. An unarmed man with a weapon.

I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

The moon passes into clouds so hurt by the street lights of your glance oh my heart

it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

My Heart I'm not going to cry all the time nor shall I laugh all the time, I don't prefer one "strain" to another. I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie, not just a sleeper, but also the big, overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera, often. I want my feet to be bare, I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, but the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to.

and I have mastered the speed and strength which is the armor of the world.

There is a geography which holds its hands just so far from the breast and pushes you away, crying so.

life perpetuated in parti-colored loves and beautiful lies all in different languages.

I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?

I’m so damned literary and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of nothing I’m so damn empty

willow trees, willow trees they remind me of Desdemona I'm so damned literary and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of nothing

I can’t even find a pond small enough to drown in without being ostentatious

but to be part of the treetops and the blueness, invisible the iridescent darknesses beyond, silent, listening to the air becoming no air becoming air again

I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures. ... Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you. ... As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it.

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.

… my words are love which willfully parades in its room, refusing to move.

The stars blink like a hairnet that was dropped / on a seat and now it is lying in the alley behind / the theatre where my play is echoed by dying voices.

your veins are using up the redness of the world.

I miss you always when I go to the beach the sand is wet with tears that seem mine although I never weep and hold you in my heart with a very real humor you'd be proud of

For Grace, After a Party" You do not always know what I am feeling. Last night in the warm spring air while I was blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t interest me, it was love for you that set me afire, and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of strangers my most tender feelings writhe and bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand, isn’t there an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside the bed? And someone you love enters the room and says wouldn’t you like the eggs a little different today? And when they arrive they are just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather is holding.

It may be the coldest day of The year, what does he think of That? I mean, what do I? And if I do, Perhaps I am myself again.

… and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy we shall be happy but we shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be possible

I loved her fright, which was against me into the air! and the diamond white of her forelock which seemed to smart with thoughts as my heart smarted with life! and she'd toss her head with the pain and paw the air and champ the bit, as if I were Endymion and she, moon-like, hated to love me.

There’s too much lime in the world and not enough gin

Stars are out and there is sea enough beneath the glistening earth to bear me toward the future which is not so dark. I see.

to be cool, decisive, precise, yes, while the barn door hits you in the face

One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.

I take this for myself, and you take up the thread of my life between your teeth, tin thread and tarnished with abuse, you shall still hear as long as the beast in me maintains its taciturn power to close my lids in tears, and my loins move yet in the ennobling pursuit of all the worlds you have left me alone in, and would be the dolorous distraction from, while you summon your army of anguishes which is a million hooting blood vessels on the eyes and in the ears at that instant before death.

There were occasionally rifts in the cloud where the face of a woman appeared, frowning.

And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.

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. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.

Autobiographia Literaria" When I was a child I played by myself in a corner of the schoolyard all alone. I hated dolls and I hated games, animals were not friendly and birds flew away. If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out "I am an orphan." And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine!

when you are the only passenger if there is a place further from me I beg you do not go

How funny you are today New York like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days (I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still accepts me foolish and free all I want is a room up there and you in it and even the traffic halt so thick is a way for people to rub up against each other and when their surgical appliances lock they stay together for the rest of the day (what a day) I go by to check a slide and I say that painting’s not so blue where’s Lana Turner she’s out eating and Garbo’s backstage at the Met everyone’s taking their coat off so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes in little bags who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y why not the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won and in a sense we’re all winning we’re alive the apartment was vacated by a gay couple who moved to the country for fun they moved a day too soon even the stabbings are helping the population explosion though in the wrong country and all those liars have left the UN the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest not that we need liquor (we just like it) and the little box is out on the sidewalk next to the delicatessen so the old man can sit on it and drink beer and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day while the sun is still shining oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much

As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you’re experiencing is “yearning.

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time

I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life’s fabric, to the world’s beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!

Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to it's true that fresh air is good for the body but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images and when you grow old as grow old you must they won't hate you

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

If life were merely a habit, I should commit suicide; but even now, more or less desperate, I cannot but think, ‘Something wonderful may happen.’ It is not optimism, it is a rejection of self-pity (I hope) which leaves a loophole for life… I merely choose to remain living out of respect for possibility. And possibility is the great good. — Frank O’Hara, Early Writing, 108-9 (1/22/49) Bookpeople (June 1977).

Light clarity avocado salad in the morning after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness since what is done is done and forgiveness isn’t love and love is love nothing can ever go wrong though things can get irritating boring and dispensable (in the imagination) but not really for love though a block away you feel distant the mere presence changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing

Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!) Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

In retrospect, the saddest moment of one’s life would seem to be that in which one first became aware that sensibility must be protected by intelligence if it is to survive living. It is that realization that puts the bloodshed into adolescence. And the lack of that realization makes the rest of life a bloodshed.

Morning Poem" I've got to tell you how I love you always I think of it on grey mornings with death in my mouth the tea is never hot enough then and the cigarette dry the maroon robe chills me I need you and look out the window at the noiseless snow At night on the dock the buses glow like clouds and I am lonely thinking of flutes I miss you always when I go to the beach the sand is wet with tears that seem mine although I never weep and hold you in my heart with a very real humor you'd be proud of the parking lot is crowded and I stand rattling my keys the car is empty as a bicycle what are you doing now where did you eat your lunch and were there lots of anchovies it is difficult to think of you without me in the sentence you depress me when you are alone Last night the stars were numerous and today snow is their calling card I'll not be cordial there is nothing that distracts me music is only a crossword puzzle do you know how it is when you are the only passenger if there is a place further from me I beg you do not go

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry — all of the past you read is usually quite great — but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors

...they were too young then to know what they would ultimately need from a barren and heart-sore life...

You are the sick prince of my cerise innovations and in your drowning caresses I walk the sea

I wouldn't want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

Travel" Sometimes I know I love you better than all the others I kiss it’s funny but it’s true and I wouldn’t roll from one to the next so fast if you hadn’t knocked them all down like ninepins when you roared by my bed I keep trying to race ahead and catch you at the newest station or whistle stop but you are flighty about schedules and always soar away just as leaning from my taxicab my breath reaches for the back of your neck

Song " I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab which is typical and not just of modern life mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves must lovers of Eros end up with Venus muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you how I hate disease, it’s like worrying that comes true and it simply must not be able to happen in a world where you are possible my love nothing can go wrong for us, tell me

I reached our building only to find a wide-eyed Southern belle wearing a Civil Way-era dress blocking the front door. A silk parasol and a full hoopskirt completed her ensemble. I wore something like it to a costume party once, but hers was an original. Frustration was back, and now it was in my way. In the form of freaking Scarlatt O'Hara. Sighing, I stuck my hand through her stomach to turn the knob, meeting no resistance. I rolled my eyes as she gasped, fluttered her eyelashes, and disappeared in a puff of air. "You know, Scarlett, Rhett didn't give a dang, and frankly, I don't either.

Now That I Am in Madrid I Can Think " I think of you and the continents brilliant and arid and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York see a vast bridge stetching to the humbled outskirts with only you Standing on the edge of the purple like an only tree and in Toledo the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver like glasses like an old ladies hair It’s well known that God and I don’t get along together It’s just a view of the brass works for me, I don’t care about the Moors seen through you the great works of death, you are greater you are smiling, you are emptying the world so we can be alone together.

The waves wash in, warm and salty, leaving your eyebrows white and the edge of your cheekbone. Your ear aches. You are lonely. On the underside of a satin leaf, hot with shade, a scorpion sleeps. And one Sunday I will be shot brushing my teeth. I am a native of this island.

Oh say can you see Alma. The darling of Them. All her friends were artists. They alone have memories. They alone love flowers. They alone give parties and die. Poor Alma. They alone. She died, and it was as if all the jewels in the world had heaved a sigh. The seismograph at Fordham university registered, for once, a spiritual note. How like a sliver in her own short fat muscular foot. She loved the Western World, though there are some who say she isn't really dead.

I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well, for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. "Sit down and have a drink" he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. "You have SARDINES in it." "Yes, it needed something there." "Oh." I go and the days go by and I drop in again. The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in. The painting is finished. "Where's SARDINES?" All that's left is just letters, "It was too much," Mike says. But me? 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. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

V. R. Lang You are so serious, as if a glacier spoke in your ear or you had to walk through the great gate of Kiev to get to the living room. I worry about this because I love you. As if it weren't grotesque enough that we live in hydrogen and breathe like atomizers, you have to think I'm a great architect! and you float regally by on your incessant escalator, calm, a jungle queen. Thinking it a steam shovel. Looking a little uneasy. But you are yourself again, yanking silver beads off your neck. Remember, the Russian Easter Overture is full of bunnies. Be always high, full of regard and honor and lanolin. Oh ride horseback in pink linen, be happy! and ride with your beads on, because it rains.

To the Harbormaster" I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart. In storms and at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide around my fathomless arms, I am unable to understand the forms of my vanity or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder in my hand and the sun sinking. To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage of my will. The terrible channels where the wind drives me against the brown lips of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet I trust the sanity of my vessel; and if it sinks, it may well be in answer to the reasoning of the eternal voices, the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

In Memory of My Feelings" My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals. My quietness has a number of naked selves, so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have murder in their heart! though in winter they are warm as roses, in the desert taste of chilled anisette. At times, withdrawn, I rise into the cool skies and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification of my colleagues, the mountains. Manfred climbs to my nape, speaks, but I do not hear him, I'm too blue. An elephant takes up his trumpet, money flutters from the windows of cries, silk stretching its mirror across shoulder blades. A gun is "fired." One of me rushes to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes, and underneath their hooves as they round the last turn my lips are scarred and brown, brushed by tails, masked in dirt's lust, definition, open mouths gasping for the cries of the bettors for the lungs of earth. So many of my transparencies could not resist the race! Terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets, a flaking moon drifting across the muddied teeth, the imperceptible moan of covered breathing, love of the serpent! I am underneath its leaves as the hunter crackles and pants and bursts, as the barrage balloon drifts behind a cloud and animal death whips out its flashlight, whistling and slipping the glove off the trigger hand. The serpent's eyes redden at sight of those thorny fingernails, he is so smooth! My transparent selves flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing without panic, with a certain justice of response and presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa.

A True Account Of Talking To The Sun On Fire Island" The Sun woke me this morning loud and clear, saying "Hey! I've been trying to wake you up for fifteen minutes. Don't be so rude, you are only the second poet I've ever chosen to speak to personally so why aren't you more attentive? If I could burn you through the window I would to wake you up. I can't hang around here all day." "Sorry, Sun, I stayed up late last night talking to Hal." "When I woke up Mayakovsky he was a lot more prompt" the Sun said petulantly. "Most people are up already waiting to see if I'm going to put in an appearance." I tried to apologize "I missed you yesterday." "That's better" he said. "I didn't know you'd come out." "You may be wondering why I've come so close?" "Yes" I said beginning to feel hot wondering if maybe he wasn't burning me anyway. "Frankly I wanted to tell you I like your poetry. I see a lot on my rounds and you're okay. You may not be the greatest thing on earth, but you're different. Now, I've heard some say you're crazy, they being excessively calm themselves to my mind, and other crazy poets think that you're a boring reactionary. Not me. Just keep on like I do and pay no attention. You'll find that people always will complain about the atmosphere, either too hot or too cold too bright or too dark, days too short or too long. If you don't appear at all one day they think you're lazy or dead. Just keep right on, I like it. And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural. The Sun shines on the jungle, you know, on the tundra the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting for you to get to work. And now that you are making your own days, so to speak, even if no one reads you but me you won't be depressed. Not everyone can look up, even at me. It hurts their eyes." "Oh Sun, I'm so grateful to you!" "Thanks and remember I'm watching. It's easier for me to speak to you out here. I don't have to slide down between buildings to get your ear. I know you love Manhattan, but you ought to look up more often. And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space. That is your inclination, known in the heavens and you should follow it to hell, if necessary, which I doubt. Maybe we'll speak again in Africa, of which I too am specially fond. Go back to sleep now Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem in that brain of yours as my farewell." "Sun, don't go!" I was awake at last. "No, go I must, they're calling me." "Who are they?" Rising he said "Some day you'll know. They're calling to you too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept.