Frank O'Hara
It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.Collection: Intangible Quality
oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so muchCollection: Coffee
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.Collection: Inspiring
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.Collection: Beautiful
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!Collection: Beautiful
O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoorsCollection: Piano
Grace / to be born and live as variously as possibleCollection: Grace
I embraced a cloud but when I soared it rained.Collection: Clouds
And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Beautiful
The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.Collection: Stars
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Spiritual
I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.Collection: Thinking
The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.Collection: Two
I don't ... like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'Collection: Running
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.Collection: Regret
You just go on your nerve.Collection: Nerves
life perpetuated in parti-colored loves and beautiful lies all in different languages.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Age
A man was the cause of it all. An unarmed man with a weapon.Collection: Men
There were occasionally rifts in the cloud where the face of a woman appeared, frowning.Collection: Clouds
I wish I weren’t reeling at all.Collection: Wish
And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.Collection: Worry
and I have mastered the speed and strength which is the armor of the world.Collection: Armor
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.Collection: New York
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?Collection: Heart
See how free we are! as a nation of persons.Collection: Persons
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.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Valleys
That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Night
My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.Collection: Heart
Destroy yourself, if you don't know!Collection: Knows
Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Eye
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.Collection: Lying
I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get upCollection: Party
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.Collection: Pain
I'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Mother