Quasi-accidentally found this reading from Frank O'Hara yesterday. It struck me in its avoidance of stereotype. O'Hara looks like he's been on the losing end of some bar brawls and talks in a Baltimore-via-New York squawk. He's not the common image of a poet. (Or a gay man, but that's another subject.) The lines don't scan the way poetry is "supposed" to, either. Yet they are poetic.
2 comments:
'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 hadn't heard of him previously but now I know where I can read more. It was beautiful.
That is a nifty passage all right.
I know I'd seen him in an anthology we had in college, but I hadn't read him for years after that.
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