When I like Frank O’Hara’s poems, I like them lots, yet I didn’t like this book as a whole as much as I’d expected to. What I like best are his shorter and more straightforward poems, his “I do this I do that” poems, as he called them. I like “Walking to Work” and “Music” and “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul” (which begins, “It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering\/if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch”) and “Personal Poem” and the one that starts with “Krushchev is coming on the right day!”. I love “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” too, and I like some of the poems about art: “Why I Am Not a Painter” and “Joseph Cornell” and “Digression on Number 1, 1948.” I like the sweetness and sexiness of “To the Harbormaster,” and the beautiful city-images—the whole first stanza of “Beer for Breakfast” (chestnut trees and blue skies), or this bit in “Having a Coke with You”: “in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other.” I like the concrete better than the surreal, and there’s more of the latter in these poems than I expected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I like Frank O’Hara’s poems, I like them lots, yet I didn’t like this book as a whole as much as I’d expected to. What I like best are his shorter and more straightforward poems, his “I do this I do that” poems, as he called them. I like “Walking to Work” and “Music” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}