it is hard to believe when Iโm with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 oโclock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
Frank O'HaraToo many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.
Frank O'HaraBut it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it.
Frank O'HaraNow I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.
Frank O'HaraHowever, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishesโI canโt even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know thereโs a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what theyโre missing? Uh huh.
Frank O'Hara