Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry. Edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his monumental The New American Poetry in 1960, it contains some of the poet's best known works including "The Day Lady Died," "Ave Maria" and "Poem" Lana Turner has collapsed ]. This new limited 50th anniversary edition contains a preface by John Ashbery and an editor's note by City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, along with facsimile reproductions of a selection of previously unpublished correspondence between Ferlinghetti and O'Hara that shed new light on the preparation of Lunch. "Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, the little black dress of American poetry books, redolent of cocktails and cigarettes and theater tickets and phonograph records, turns 50 this year. It seems barely to have aged . . . This is a book worth imbibing again, especially if you live in Manhattan, but really if you're awake and curious anywhere. O'Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few books of his era show less age."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times "City Lights' new reissue of the slim volume includes a clutch of correspondence between O'Hara and Lawrence Ferlinghetti . . . in which the two poets hash out the details of the book's publication: which poems to consider, their order, the dedication, and even the title. 'Do you still like the title Lunch Poems?' O'Hara asks Ferlinghetti. 'I wonder if it doesn't sound too much like an echo of Reality Sandwiches or Meat Science Essays.' 'What the hell, ' Ferlinghetti replies, 'so we'll have to change the name of City Lights to Lunch Counter Press.'"--Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review "Frank O'Hara's famed collection was first published in 1964, and, to mark the fiftieth anniversary, City Lights is printing a special edition."--The New Yorker "The volume has never gone out of print, in part because O'Hara expresses himself in the same way modern Americans do: Like many of us, he tries to overcome the absurdity and loneliness of modern life by addressing an audience of anonymous others."--Micah Mattix, The Atlantic "I hope that everyone will delight in the new edition of Frank's Lunch Poems. The correspondence between Lawrence and Frank is great. Frank was just 33 when he wrote to Lawrence in 1959 and 38 when LUNCH POEMS was published The fact that City Lights kept Frank's LUNCH POEMS in print all these years has been extraordinary, wonderful and a constant comfort. Hurray for independent publishers and independent bookstores. Many thanks always to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and everyone at City Lights."--Maureen O'Hara, sister of Frank O'Hara "Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems--which has just been reissued in a 50th anniversary hardcover edition--recalls a world of pop art, political and cultural upheaval and (in its own way) a surprising innocence."--David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.

Originally published: New York: Grove Press, 1957.

Previously known as an art-world figure, but now regarded as an important poet, Frank O'Hara is examined in this study. It traces the poet's "French connection" and the influence of the visual arts on his work. This edition includes a new introduction with a reconsideration of O'Hara's lyric.

An unprecedented eyewitness account of the New York School, as seen between the lines of O'Hara's poetry Joe LeSueur lived with Frank O'Hara from 1955 until 1965, the years when O'Hara wrote his greatest poems, including "To the Film Industry in Crisis," "In Memory of My Feelings," "Having a Coke with You," and the famous Lunch Poems—so called because O'Hara wrote them during his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator. (The artists he championed include Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg.) The flowering of O'Hara's talent, cut short by a fatal car accident in 1966, produced some of the most exuberant, truly celebratory lyrics of the twentieth century. And it produced America's greatest poet of city life since Whitman. Alternating between O'Hara's poems and LeSueur's memory of the circumstances that inspired them, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara is a literary commentary like no other—an affectionate, no-holds-barred memoir of O'Hara and the New York that animated his work: friends, lovers, movies, paintings, streets, apartments, music, parties, and pickups. This volume, which includes many of O'Hara's best-loved poems, is the most intimate, true-to-life portrait we will ever have of this quintessential American figure and his now legendary times.

Providing a synthesis of New York's artistic and literary worlds, this book uses social and philosophical problems involved in reading a coterie to propose a language for understanding the poet, art critic, and Museum of Modern Art curator, Frank O'Hara.

A reissue of this classic, essential companion to Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems, with a new introduction by Bill Berkson.

Published in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While recent works of criticism on Frank O'Hara have focused on the technical similarities between his poetry and painting, or between his use of language and poststructuralism, Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Saying 'I' argues that what is most significant in O'Hara's work is not such much his 'borrowing' from painters or his proto-Derridean use of language, but his preoccupation with self exploration and the temporal effects of his work as artifacts. Following Pasternak's understanding of artistic inspiration as an act of love for the material world, O'Hara explores moments of experience in an effort to both complicate and enrich our experience of the material world. On the one hand, in poems such as Second Avenue, for example, O'Hara works to 'muddy' language through which experience is, in part, mediated with the use of parataxis, allusions, and absurd metaphors and similes. On the other, in his 'I do this I do that' poems, he names the events of his lunch hour in an effort, among other things, to experience time as a moment of fullness rather than as a moment of loss. The book argues, furthermore, that O'Hara's view of the self as both an expression of the creative force at work in the world and as the temporal aggregate of finite experiences, places him between so-called 'Romantic' and 'postmodern' theories of the lyric. While it is often argued that O'Hara is a forerunner of a new, critically informed, 'materialist' poetics, this study concludes that O'Hara's work is somewhat less radical in its understanding of poetic meaning than is often claimed. Moreover, while O'Hara is preoccupied with his experience in his poems, the book argues that he espouses, in some respects, a rather traditional view of love. In addition to being a metaphor for the creative act, love, for O'Hara, is the chance coming together of two entities. Yet, one of the ironies of this is that while love is, for O'Hara, a feeling that is the result of movement, or the unexpected coming together of two otherwise separate entities, and is itself characterized in his work as a moving, 'life-giving vulgarity,' it produces a feeling of peace and stillness—a feeling that will not remain because of the fact that the self changes and that love is itself a moving, living thing. Thus, love contains within itself the ominous promise of future loss and is, therefore, the highest feeling that contains within itself the seeds of the lowest.