Why I'm Not a Painter and other poems

Frank O'Hara composed poems 'any time, any place', collaborating with - or directly inspired by - a vibrant circle of artists, dancers, musicians and poets. For O'Hara, the city was a place of endless possibility, and he brilliantly captured the pace and rhythms, the quandaries and exhilarations, of mid-twentieth-century city life. His work radiates wit, immediacy and the grace of living 'as variously as possible'. As Mark Ford notes in his introduction to this new selection, 'O'Hara's hip, glamorous, freewheeling self-celebrations both reflected and helped disseminate a new kind of confidence and daring in American poetry.'

Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1926, and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He served in the US navy (1944-46) in the South Pacific, and attended the universities of Harvard and Michigan. In 1951 O’Hara settled in Manhattan, and soon became a central figure in a number of the city’s artistic circles. For most of the fifteen years that he lived in New York he worked at the Museum of Modern Art, graduating from the front desk to become Associate Curator. He was a passionate advocate of Abstract Expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline. O’Hara wrote an enormous quantity of poetry, little of which was published during his lifetime, but which was much admired by friends such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, V.R. 'Bunny' Lang, James Schuyler, Fairfield Porter and Larry Rivers. He died on 25 July 1966, from injuries sustained in a beach-buggy accident on Fire Island. He is buried at Green River Cemetery, East Hampton, Long Island. His Collected Poems (edited by Donald Allen) was published in 1971, and won the National Book Award for Poetry. Mark Ford was born in 1962. His publications include two collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto & Windus 1991, 1998) and Soft Sift (Faber & Faber 2001, Harcourt Brace 2003); a critical biography of the French poet, playwright and novelist Raymond Roussel (Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, Faber & Faber, 2000, Cornell University Press, 2001), a collection of essays, A Driftwood Altar (Waywiser Press, 2005), a 20,000-word interview with John Ashbery (Between the Lines, 2003), and, for Carcanet, The New York Poets, an anthology of poems by Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler (2003), The New York Poets II: An Anthology (2006) and 'Why I am not a painter' and other poems, a selection of the poetry of Frank O'Hara (2003). Mark Ford is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He teaches in the English department at University College, London.