Tributes
Frank O'Hara: Poems Retrieved
Ode
I don't eat wheat
and I wear my violin strings
around my neck in case I need them
Snow is being sent from the mountains
I lie down like the flowers
it is an elevator shaft, this island
Sweet nursery rhyme describing manna
and how far away all that is good is
and music, too
when I am absent weeps
as if the children overburdened
by my incessant playing
Oh heart described
you are being pushed out of existence
by a mysterious swelling
Men are angels
[New York, July 1954]
From Poems Retrieved by Frank O'Hara (City Lights). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the the publisher.
The retrievals that Donald Allen made of Frank O'Hara's poems began in 1968 with his sorting through the manuscripts of poetry and prose in cartons and files that Kenneth Koch took away for safekeeping in two suitcases from Frank's loft at 791 Broadway the night in July, 1966, after Frank died––the nearly 700 items that first Kenneth and I and then Frank's sister Maureen and her husband at the time Walter Granville-Smith subsequently photocopied a few weeks later. Together with the versions already published in books, magazines and anthologies, these manuscripts formed the textual basis for what Donald Allen––Don, as I came to know him as a neighbor in Bolinas in the 1970s––would call, when it first appeared, in 1971, "the splendid palace known as The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara." A pared-down volume The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara, also edited by Don, came out in 1974, followed the next year by the book of uncollected prose, Standing Still and Walking in New York. It was in the latter book that Don first used the term "retrieved."
—an excerpt from the Introduction by Bill Berkson to Poems Retrieved, Frank O'Hara.
Poems Retrieved by Frank O'Hara, published in the City Lights/Grey Fox Series, May 2013.
