literature-students-bookshelf

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F. Scott Fitzgerald ― This Side of Paradise

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Francis Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby requested by @skywaelker

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“Nobody looks good in their darkest hours. But it’s those hours that make us what we are.”

— Karen Marie Moning, Faefever

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Frank O’Hara’s poem for his friend, John ‘Ashes’ Ashbery 

Ashes on Saturday Afternoon

The banal machines are exposing themselves on nearby hillocks of arrested color: why if we are the anthropologists canopé should this upset the autumn afternoon? It is because you are silent. Speak, if speech is not embarrassed by your attention to the scenery! in languages more livid than vomit on Sunday after wafer and prayer. What is the poet for, if not to scream himself into a hernia of admiration for all paradoxical integuments: the kiss, the bomb, cathedrals and the zeppelin anchored to the hill of dreams? Oh be not silent on this distressing holiday whose week has been a chute of sand down which no factories or castles tumbled: only my petulant two-fisted heart. You, dear poet, who addressed yourself to flowers, Electra, and photographs on less painful occasions, must save me from the void’s eternal noise.

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“After the first glass of vodka you can accept just about anything of life even your own mysteriousness you think it is nice that a box of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don’t you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?”

— Frank O'Hara

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“I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart. In storms and at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide around my fathomless arms, I am unable to understand the forms of my vanity or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder in my hand and the sun sinking. To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage of my will. The terrible channels where the wind drives me against the brown lips of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet I trust the sanity of my vessel; and if it sinks, it may well be in answer to the reasoning of the eternal voices, the waves which have kept me from reaching you.”

— Frank O’Hara

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“I am alive with you / full of anxious pleasures and pleasurable anxiety / hardness and softness”

— Frank O’Hara, St. Paul and All That (excerpt)

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Drawings and prints by various artists produced for the illustrated book by Frank O’Hara ‘In Memory of my Feelings’ (1967) published by MoMA, NY

1. Lee Krasner

2. Matsumi Kanemitsu

3. Helen Frankenthaler

exhibition  -  exhibition documents  -  preparatory drawings portfolio

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A Hill by Frank O’Hara

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To You, Frank O’Hara (transcript under the cut)

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“In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.”

— Frank O'Hara, from “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” in Meditations in an Emergency

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Frank O’Hara

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Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline lana turner has collapsed! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!], Frank O’Hara

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“oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much”

—

Frank O’Hara, “Steps”

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Morning

by Frank O’Hara

I’ve got to tell you how I love you always I think of it on grey mornings with death in my mouth the tea is never hot enough then and the cigarette dry the maroon robe chills me I need you and look out the window at the noiseless snow At night on the dock the buses glow like clouds and I am lonely thinking of flutes I miss you always when I go to the beach the sand is wet with tears that seem mine although I never weep and hold you in my heart with a very real humor you’d be proud of the parking lot is crowded and I stand rattling my keys the car is empty as a bicycle what are you doing now where did you eat your lunch and were there lots of anchovies it is difficult to think of you without me in the sentence you depress me when you are alone Last night the stars were numerous and today snow is their calling card I’ll not be cordial there is nothing that distracts me music is only a crossword puzzle do you know how it is when you are the only passenger if there is a place further from me I beg you do not go

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Frank O'Hara, 1957

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For Grace, After a Party by Frank O’Hara (transcript under the cut) 

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