Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:
The jacket copy of the recent and brilliant edition of Frank O’Hara’s Selected Poems, edited and introduced by Mark Ford, describes O’Hara as “one of the most original and influential American poets of the twentieth century,” which is gloriously on the mark. He was also one of the most expansive and beloved personalities of his day and the spiritual anchor of what came to be known as The New York School of Poets, including in its first wave, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery, who reigns now and has for decades as one of the most original and influential poets of our time.
Gottfried Benn (1886-1956), to whom O’Hara’s poem is addressed, was a German poet and critic, also a physician, whose early verse and poetic dramas were, according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, “strongly expressionistic and even nihilistic” and his later poems and his autobiography, Doppelleben (double life) reflective of “his ambivalent though ultimately negative reactions to the National Socialist era.”
“To Gottfried Benn” by Frank O’Hara:
Poetry is not instruments
that work at times
then walk out on you
laugh at you old
get drunk on you young
poetry’s part of your selflike the passion of a nation
at war it moves quickly
provoked to defense or aggression
unreasoning power
an instinct for self-declarationlike nations its faults are absorbed
in the heat of sides and angles
combatting the void of rounds
a solid of imperfect placement
nations get worse and worsebut not wrongly revealed
in the universal light of tragedy
(From The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Photo by Alan Levine)
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