Structure and Imagery

Rudolph Valentino To the Film Industry in Crisis by Frank O'Hara Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants, nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you, promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry, it's you I love! In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love. And give credit where it's due: not to my starched nurse, who taught me how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availed herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment, not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you, glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope, stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all your heavenly dimensions and re...

Thanks to a generous friend in Memphis and the magic of amazon.com this just jumped to the top of my reading list... Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman w/ Afterword by Frank O'Hara Feldman on Philip Guston..."Then there was Guston. He was the arch crank. Very little pleased  him. Very little satisfied him. Very little was art. Always aware in his own work of the  rhetorical nature of the complication, Guston reduces, reduces, building his own Tower of Babel and then destroying it."

Michael Goldberg, Sardines , 1955 Why I Am Not a Painter by Frank O'Hara I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well, for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. "Sit down and have a drink" he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. "You have SARDINES in it." "Yes, it needed something there." "Oh." I go and the days go by and I drop in again. The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in. The painting is finished. "Where's SARDINES?" All that's left is just letters, "It was too much," Mike says. But me? One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't ment...

Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara © The Estates of Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara