Frank O'Hara. Selected Poems

Review of Contemporary Fiction, The, Summer, 2008 by Noah Eli Gordon

Frank O'Hara. Selected Poems. Ed. Mark Ford. Knopf, 2008.265 pp. Cloth: $30.00.

Gracious, charming, witty, sassy, spontaneous, irreverent, joyful, campy, insouciant--Frank O'Hara's poetry always brings to mind the best sort of adjectives, those that celebrate life, even as it turns toward eulogy and lament. "No more dying," dares the refrain from O'Hara's "Ode to Joy," and Mark Ford, in editing this long-overdue new selection, has done the excellent and necessary task of dusting any traces of oblivion from O'Hara's oeuvre. As Ford notes in his succinct yet personable introduction, "even [O'Hara's] close friends were surprised at the extraordinary bulk of his Collected Poems when it appeared in 1971." The massiveness of the Collected was tempered in 1974 by the now out-of-print The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Both of these volumes were edited by Donald Allen, who, in 1977, gathered two further collections, Poems Retrieved and Early Writing, which were comprised of work not appearing in either the Collected or Selected editions. For this new selection, Ford has culled work from these and all previous incarnations of O'Hara's published materials, and has thankfully opted, unlike the original Selected, to honor each poem with its own page. Also included are several of the seminal prose works and a useful short chronology. While the volume doesn't offer any newly unearthed, archeological treasures (we'll have to wait--as we have been for years!--for the letters), it does present a palpable and nicely packaged sampling of this important New York School poet. In an age where the ubiquity of information storage sparks in fledgling writers the solipsistic image of their own massive archives, O'Hara's notorious organizational nonchalance--indeed, even in keeping copies of his own poems--might seem odd; however, one need only open this book anywhere at random for evidence of life so full, so teetering on the brink of explosive jubilance, to make moot any concern for self-mythologizing beyond that already embedding within the poems. [Noah Eli Gordon]