5 Oranges for Frank O'Hara

I have brought you
green flowers
Orange seeds fall on your face
like hopeful tears

4 Oranges for Frank O'Hara

wine
held to
the light
turns my world
orange

Who is Frank O'Hara?

Frank O’Hara was an influential New York city poet and curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who collaborated with many artists in his lifetime including Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers and Franz Kline. My series, 12 Oranges for Frank O'Hara are also an homage to those literary-visual collaborations. Several of them are on this blog.

You can see the rest of the series here but I haven't converted them all yet to something that would work as a t-shirt or product design.

One of my favorite O'Hara poems.

    ANIMALS
    
    
 Have you forgotten what we were like then
 when we were still first rate
 and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

 it's no use worrying about Time
 but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
 and turned some sharp corners

 the whole pasture looked like our meal
 we didn't need speedometers
 we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

 I wouldn't want to be faster
 or greener than now if you were with me O you
 were the best of all my days

More about Frank O'Hara here.

City Poet, by Brad Gooch, is a really entertaining book about the life of Frank O'Hara. And by that, I mean the boy really dishes. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara

3 Oranges for Frank O'Hara

2 Oranges for Frank O'Hara

1 Orange for Frank O'Hara

While 12 Oranges For Frank O’Hara was inspired by the O’Hara poem "Why I am not a Painter," each painting itself references one of the poems from O’Hara’s "Oranges: 12 Pastoral"

O’Hara, an influential New York city poet and curator at the Museum of Modern Art, collaborated with many artists in his lifetime including Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers and Franz Kline. These pieces are also an homage to those literary-visual collaborations.

The Poem:

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. 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 mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems. I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mikes’ painting, called SARDINES.

The Poems:

Oranges: 12 Pastorals by Frank O'Hara

More about Frank O'Hara

Modern American Poetry