After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were.
After the second, you see things as they are not.
Finally, you see things as they really are,
which is the most horrible thing in the world.

And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness.

And they did live.

I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that’s sinful, then let me be damned for it!

There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Some are a little better or a little worse but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts.

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with you trapped, locked in it.

Life Story

After you’ve been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what’s your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course

there’s some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you’ve had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they’re telling you their life story, exactly as they’d intended to all along,

and you’re saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?

Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that’s how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

It was the best of times, if only someone had told me. Mistakes were made, hearts were broken, harsh lessons learned.

Personism: A Manifesto
by Frank O'Hara


Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man's Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can't be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don't even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

That's for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you're in love and somebody's mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don't say, "Hey, you can't hurt me this way, I care!" you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do may after a few months. But that's not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

I'm not saying that I don't have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They're just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I've stopped thinking and that's when refreshment arrives.

But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too 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. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you're experiencing is "yearning."

Abstraction in poetry, which Allen [Ginsberg] recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite" defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé).

Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poési pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That's part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. For a time people thought that Artaud was going to accomplish this, but actually, for all their magnificence, his polemical writings are not more outside literature than Bear Mountain is outside New York State. His relation is no more astounding than Dubuffet's to painting.

What can we expect from Personism? (This is getting good, isn't it?) Everything, but we won't get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. But it, like Africa, is on the way. The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.September 3, 1959

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

“A sensitive person receives 50 impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; the more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalised, develop scabs. Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much.”

"I would have been born in the late 40’s, a kid without a TV, surviving on mail-ordering photographs and autographs and sacred knick-knacks, corresponding with strangers, pen-pals,in a time before the porno digital revolution, when the implication was more obscure, more beautiful, and people talked, in a time when philosophy and strange habits were admired, in a time when things were inky and still poisonous, in a time before the remote control, in a time when the questions were more obscene than the answers, in an age of opinion when people really took sides, in an age of thinkers and good service, in a time when real con men and bank robbers were hard to catch, in a time before sky high security, in a time before marshal law, in a time when one could walk right off the map, in a time when entertainment was artistic, not mathematic, in a time when value was valuable, not obese with emptiness. I probably would have gone to New York in the mid-60’s, left home where my mother was holed up oil painting, my father hot-roding cars, and darted for the city alone. I would have liked to see it all begin, tired of the hippies, plunging into the first of the drug party art galleries, the Warhol dreamscape, watching Edie Sedgwick climbing walls to heaven and slipping over the side with big deer eyes in headlights, still dancing. And the Velvets playing all those weird places doing what nobody wanted but what everyone needed. And watching the darker art punks mingling with the aristos and the street people and the rich artists fucking the poor artists and then everyone changing places, fluxuating and trying each other out and everything out, leaving behind the stiff values that plagued youth yesterday. A time when no one knew what the drugs would do, before worry was born the way it is today, flourishing like a nomadic plague. See Andy and Bridget Berlin sitting in a window of a diner eating hamburgers and drinking chocolate milkshakes in upper Manhattan, admiring transvestites with bad skin walking by like cowboys, because last week they were real cowboys. And to be in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel with Stanley when he was young, witnessing the chaos there when Edie set fire to 105, and/or just the general chaos there, the abrupt art and the abrupt deaths, the calm before the storm, the storm, the blackouts, the hysteria and all the imagination it took to do all that art, those films, those books, those songs, in a time before people knew what to do with them, before the salesman was perfected, when art was an addiction and artists, mysterious, and rarely careerists, and you could still identify with, and fall in love with- the true spirit of loose canons."

I think it’s interesting the two drugs that are legal - alcohol and cigarettes, two drugs that do absolutely nothing for you at all - are legal, and the drugs that might open your mind up to realise how you’re being fucked every day of your life? Those drugs are against the law. Coincidence? See, I’m glad mushrooms are against the law, cos I took ‘em one time, you know what happened to me? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours, going, ‘My God, I love everything.’ Yeah, now if that isn’t a hazard to our countries…How are we gonna justify arms dealing if we know we’re all one?