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“... I was waiting for you to get to work ‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’ Frank O’Hara 1 You know the second person in the history of the world the Sun chose to speak to personally was Frank O’Hara, the first was Orpheus [me]. You are my Sweetheart said the Sun ...”

“... I remember the pleasure of my first reading of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems when it came out in 1964 in a City Lights edition uniform (except that it was blue and red, not black and white) with Ginsberg’s Howl, Kaddish and Reality Sandwiches. Two years later O’Hara was dead, killed by a dune buggy at an all-night party on Fire Island ...”

“... Idon't care what Wystan says,’ Frank O’Hara wrote to Kenneth Koch. ‘I’d rather be dead than not have France around me like a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue ...”

“... Open Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems at random, somewhere in the middle, and you may get what looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has: How can you start hating me when I’m so comfortable in your raincoat the apples kept bumping off the old gnarled banged-up biddy-assed tree and I kept ducking and hugging and bobbing as if you were a tub of water on Hallowe’en it was fun but you threw yourself into reverse like a tractor hugging the ground in spring that was nice too more rain more raincoat                                  (‘Adventures In Living’) Who was O’Hara, and how did he learn to write like that? Born in 1926, he grew up in small towns in Massachusetts, studied piano seriously throughout high school and served in the Navy at the close of World War II ...”

“... the clips on YouTube. She slides heavy-hipped through flower-strewn pools, hardly raises a splash. Frank O’Hara is home from the South Seas: at Harvard, VA-funded, his poems ahead of him not yet talking to the sun at Key West, his liver not yet enlarged. Simone de Beauvoir travelling America, falling in love with Nelson Algren, describing the US in ...”

“... Michael Hofmann’s poetry is a lament for a lost world. Some years ago, in an article on Frank O’Hara, he talked about New York no longer being the thrilling place it had been in the days when O’Hara and the gang could go downtown to the Blue Note and hear John Coltrane or uptown to hear Billie Holiday ...”

“... First/Bunny died, then John Latouche,/then Jackson Pollock,’ Frank O’Hara reflects during a post-prandial stroll around midtown Manhattan in ‘A Step away from Them’, written in August 1956. Everyone knew Jackson Pollock and the lyricist John Latouche, but only insiders to the avant-garde coteries in which O’Hara moved would have known who Bunny was – especially since she published under the name V ...”

“... St in 1950, the year before Schuyler’s breakdown, Schuyler met John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, who had been friends at Harvard. The ‘Harvard wits’, he called them. Schuyler had attended Bethany College, a small college in West Virginia affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, where he had devoted himself to bridge and then flunked ...”

“... he studied under Delmore Schwartz. More important, he became friends with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, like-minded fellow students. On graduation Koch moved to New York, where he lived downstairs from the painter Jane Freilicher, became acquainted with the New York art scene, and liked to stare out of the window at passing trains while wearing ...”

“... some sensitivity to the tricky business of naming. ‘What if we hadn’t had such great names?’ Frank O’Hara wonders in Nat Tate, the hoax biography that took in much of New York’s art establishment a few weeks ago: ‘what if we had been called Gilbert Kline, Jonathan Pollock, Cyril O’Hara, Jennifer ...”

“... on ‘not getting it’ – in which she reproduces her college notes on ‘The Day Lady Died’, Frank O’Hara’s I-do-this-I-do-that poem. She laid bare the earnestness of the A-student – in primly rounded handwriting – with her crypto New Critical fatuities, noting, for example, the ‘lack of emotion in urban surroundings’. ‘For it would ...”

“... Padgett once called them) is often vividly captured in I Remember: I remember the first time I met Frank O’Hara. He was walking down Second Avenue. It was a cool early spring evening but he was wearing only a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue jeans. And moccasins. I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very ...”

“... said to myself Guillaume it is time that you came’). This trait Apollinaire in turn passed on to Frank O’Hara, who acknowledged the debt in ‘Memorial Day 1950’, in which O’Hara figures himself reading music by the light of ‘Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra’. Yet a note of uncertainty not really ...”

“... Editions, an imprint O’Brien set up in order to get out his own work and that of his friend Frank Kuenstler; no one else was interested in publishing it. Kuenstler, an experimental film-maker as well as a poet, was a significant influence: he seems to have encouraged the cinematic qualities in O’Brien’s poetry. Kuenstler’s short film El Atlantis ...”

“... of the American poet C.K. Williams, or having cartoonish fun with speech, a habit learned from Frank O’Hara (‘I think on the whole I would rather read/ Frank O’Hara than Geoffrey Chaucer,’ writes Geoff Hattersley). And it is true that a fighting politics seethes in poets like Sean O’Brien and Simon ...”