Author of the Month: Frank O’Hara
Selected by the Bookshop
In celebration of his centenary, our Author of the Month for July is New York poet Frank O’Hara (1926-1966). As a poet of friendship, joy, and the quotidian, he has hardly been equalled.
His mischievous declaration of principles, Personism: A Manifesto (printed as the Introduction to his Selected Poems), gives a good account of his technique of composition: ‘I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even 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."’
The best place to start with O’Hara is probably still the effervescent, pocket-size collection Lunch Poems; but don’t miss his late masterpiece, ‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’, also featured in Selected Poems.
From the publisher:
London Review Bookshop Author of the Month, July 2026 (Frank O'Hara)This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that the celebrated poet Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) undertook for the Museum of Modern Art in New York and…
From the publisher:
London Review Bookshop Author of the Month, July 2026Frank O'Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and Gary Snyder, a…
From the publisher:
An unprecedented eyewitness account of the New York School, as seen between the lines of O‘Hara‘s poetryJoe LeSueur lived with Frank O‘Hara from 1955 until 1965, the years when O‘Hara wrote his greatest poems,…
From the publisher:
London Review Bookshop Author of the Month, July 2026Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more…
From the publisher:
London Review Bookshop Author of the Month, July 2026Frank O’Hara composed poems ‘any time, any place’, collaborating with – or directly inspired by – a vibrant circle of artists, dancers, musicians…
From the publisher:
For the first time, The New York Poets gathers in a single volume the best work of four extraordinary poets: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. By the early 1950s all four were settled in Manhattan, collaborating,…
From the publisher:
London Review Bookshop Author of the Month, July 2026Frank O'Hara (1926-66) is among the most delightful and radical poets of the twentieth century. He is celebrated for his apparently unpremeditated poems, autobiographical and immediate…
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