Top 6 - Frank O'Hara

I've had a strange fascination with the poems of Frank O'Hara for several years, never quite sure if their casual vernacular could really be great poetry and not being a big fan of many of the names he is associated with.

It's unlikely that I'll ever read all 500 pages of the Collected but it is highly likeable, an often optimistic attitude and ad hoc quality that doesn't seem to be interested in immortality or lasting greatness. Although, of course, that might be the trick.

The best poems seem to be tributes to others, O'Hara being involved with art galleries and interested obviously in all aspects of modernist art.

The Day Lady Died is like twitter well before the fact. Perhaps his best known poem and definitive of the method he used of describing what he's doing right now. But For Poulenc is perhaps the one I like best, almost feeling its way towards some appearance of formal structure. It achieves a beautiful effect from its minimal lyricism.

It's not necessarily my fault I'm not the most ardent John Ashbery fan. I sometimes think I've appreciated the great playful nuance of his linguistic tours de force but I'm usually left feeling that I haven't quite seen the point of it. O'Hara might be of some help with this, though, in A Note to John Ashbery which is a tribute perhaps framed in similarly exotic imagery but a more accessible style.

River is desperately erotic and maybe Keatsian in a way, almost too much hyperbole but far, far lovelier than anything produced by Ginsberg, whose immediacy and much-vaunted energy was actually the result of much re-drafting and not quite as 'off the cuff' as it purported to be.

A Short History of Bill Berkson is an inventive narrative in fragmentary, drunken excerpts and Why I am Not a Painter is an equally effective little vignette. It is remarkable, that having died in 1966 in an apparently freak accident, how many of his poems are like much of what appeared in fashionable magazines in the 70's and yet are so much better than them.

There will be much more to discover in this thick book but I've seen enough to understand that O'Hara was a fine and genuine poet, whose imitators weren't really up to the job; one who established a style and was different to and better than many he was associated with; who might have gone on to considerably bigger and better things, like many who died prematurely, but I do sincerely hope that this book won't make me try to write like him- even just the once- because there is no point in gilding the lily or taking cues from someone whose sensibility is so far removed from one's own.