The Collected Poems
O'Hara was a curator at MoMA who wrote poems on his lunch break, on the subway, between phone calls ("I am not a professor of anything"), and whose work captures the texture of New York life in the 1950s and 60s with an immediacy no one else has matched. His "Personism" manifesto (the poem should be addressed to a specific person "over the telephone") is the best short anti-manifesto in American poetry. He died at 40, hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island.
One reader quit around page 200, finding “the language is so outdated even by the standards of the era” and the tone pretentious in stretches. The same reader reports needing to reread constantly, “so many lines I had to read again and again and again,” and skipped several poems rather than push through. A recurring line of criticism, echoing critic William Logan even among fans who disagree with him, holds that the sheer bulk of the Collected buries genuinely great poems under juvenilia, one summary calling the result “all too easily drowned out by the vivifying mediocrity of the rest.” The book’s size is itself a barrier, over 500 pages, intimidating just to lift off the shelf, and some readers report the collection simply doesn’t click for them, no complaint beyond flat indifference to the voice.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
