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Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara

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!

#Americans

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Other works by Frank O'Hara...
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 cho…
Homosexuality

So we are taking off our masks, ar… our mouths shut? as if we’d been p… The song of an old cow is not more… than the vapors which escape one’s… so I pull the shadows around me li…
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 ano… I’d have the immediacy of a bad mo… not just a sleeper, but also the b…
 2
Digression on Number 1, 1948

I am ill today but I am not too ill. I am not ill at all. It is a perfect day, warm for winter, cold for fall. A fine day for seeing. I see
At Night Chinamen Jump

At night Chinamen jump on Asia with a thump while in our willful way we, in secret, play affectionate games and bruise
A City Winter

I understand the boredom of the cl… fatigue shifting like dunes within… a frightful nausea gumming up the… that once was thought aggression i… Do you remember? then how lightly…
 1
Chinamen Jump

At night Chinamen jump on Asia with a thump while in our willful way we, in secret, play affectionate games and bruise
Rhapsody

515 Madison Avenue door to heaven? portal stopped realities and eternal lice… or at least the jungle of impossib… your marble is bronze and your lia…
 1
Animals

Have you forgotten what we were li… when we were still first rate and the day came fat with an apple… it’s no use worrying about Time but we did have a few tricks up ou…
A Quiet Poem

When music is far enough away the eyelid does not often move and objects are still as lavender without breath or distant rejoinde… The cloud is then so subtly dragge…
The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshin… because I will get off the 4:19 in… at 7:15 and then go straight to di…
Meditations in an Emergency

Am I to become profligate as if I… as if I were French? Each time my heart is broken it ma… (and how the same names keep recur… list!), but one of these days ther…
Sleeping on the Wing

Perhaps it is to avoid some great… as in a Restoration tragedy the he… O for a long sound sleep and so fo… that one flies, soaring above the… veering upward from the pavement a…
To the Film Industry in Crisis

Not you, lean quarterlies and swar… with your studious incursions towa… nor you, experimental theatre in w… is wedding Poetic Insight perpetu… promenading Grand Opera, obvious…
As Planned

After the first glass of vodka you can accept just about anything of life even your own mysteriousne… you think it is nice that a box of matches is purple and brown and…
 1



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