Frank O’Hara

Ikigai

Whenever I play chess with my body, it always wins by making me vomit or have diarrhea or both in a phenomenon I aptly refer to as diavomarrhea. Let me give you this example:

Me: Let’s go to sleep now, body. The second half of the night was hellacious. We really need to rest.

My Body: How about, instead … just hear me out … we have violent diarrhea all morning long? Hmm? How. [claps] About. [claps] That? [claps] Let’s to that. [Jumps up and down with glee]

And here’s the thing: My body never bluffs, ever. It’s down to destroy me. It really is.

Clare, last night I saw horses, more than a dozen of them. First, I saw the dust they were raising as they ran, then I heard their hooves on earth, that dry drumming, then I saw them through the trees just on the other side of the Virgin River. They weren’t wild but they had enough space to act wild. There they were in the sage and dry grass moving like the river when it’s boated, fluid like that and strong, wanting nothing but this moment, nothing but each other. Keep writing your horse poems, Clare. A horse is a heart outside the human body who reminds us we each carry a heart within us, one that beats like a hoof hitting dirt. We need horses more than ever. We need your poems.

I am grateful for this pain. This pain is a compass. This pain is a signal. This pain is my dearest friend, my greatest protector, my guide, my heart. This pain is everything.

Me: I’m going to stay up late. I do my best writing at night

Also Me: In bed at 9:29 p.m.

I’d rather be trampled by horses than trammeled by poets.

The word of the day is ikigai, the convergence of one’s personal passions, beliefs, values, and vocations, translated loosely as one’s reason for being. What’s your reason for being?

As long as there are poets, something will survive.

There are lots of ways to lose if your focus is love. Lots of ways to gain if your focus is power. Pay attention to what you’re losing and what you’re gaining.

Bleary, I just misread “The Middle Ages” as “The Middle Oranges.” Now, I can’t stop thinking about The Middle Oranges, that period in history that can be divided into Early Oranges, High Oranges, and Late Middle Oranges.

Maybe, in all those words Frank O’Hara wrote about orange, he said something about The Middle Oranges. We’ll never know, will we?

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 Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

— Frank O’Hara, from “Why I Am Not a Painter”

Gray wind. Gray branches. A horse on the hill and no ships in sight.

My suffering dies inside Ocean Vuong’s poems.

Lay it all aside and love.

To those who live with trauma: I’m glad you survived; I’m sorry you lived through what you lived through; I see you; I love you; I carry you in my heart.

It’s OK to buy blueberries and not eat them all. We all love imperfectly.

Morning: fire. Evening: fire. The first, literal, accidental, and brief. The second, metaphorical, intentional, and eternal.

Emotion is consistent. It’s only specific emotional states, which we perceive as separate from emotion as a whole, that are inconsistent. We learn that. We learn that we feel happy or sad or joyful or sorrowful or, or, or, ad nauseam. We cleave and cleave emotion until it’s all these little slices of pie sitting beside each other or across from each other. We’re doing the separating. We’re creating the binaries, the opposites. Emotion is emotion. It’s a whole. And, as a whole, it’s a constant.

I saw two cups and, in my haste, mistook them for a single cup. In my mis-taking, I divided my perceived single cup and suddenly had two cups again. But they were crucibles. Contaminated and useless. Each half couldn’t contain anything, not even contaminants, without the other. We are ore. We are bright, sometimes. We are chlorinated, sometimes. We are isotopes, sometimes, that glow hot like embers, like iodine-131 or its cousin, I-123.

O’Grady-Orff

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

—

To name ourselves rather than be named / we must first see ourselves … / So long unmirrored in our true selves / we may have forgotten how we look. — Lorraine O’Grady, epigraph for Bluest Nude: Poems, by Ama Codjoe

My poem / is finished and I haven’t mentioned / orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call / it ORANGES. — Frank O’Hara

He folded himself from the corners inward / and then again in triangles. When the nurse came in / to check on him, he was gone, the sheets smooth / as a pond at first light. — Charlie O’Hay

They are saying          these boys

          are fictions stoning other fictions          These are the punishments

that attend          These are ghosts throwing at nothing

— Miller Oberman

You forget / the contours slowly, in / the long second leaving, / neutrality a structure / you learned to glamorize, / the way you have come to / imagine doors as rectangular. — Cindy Juyoung Ok

As anticipated as a commercial holiday. / It was always before / whatever was coming next. — Robert Okaji

He is not / a fragment, but a symptom / of light creeping across / the desert. — Robert Okaji

How difficult to be lost. / So easy to remain unseen. — Robert Okaji

Listen. / The earth, too, considers you limitless. — Robert Okaji

oh, to be / that tongue / and palate, / those lips / surrounding you, / to be your / consonant / in a field of vowels. — Robert Okaji

What you call / home I call / diminishment. What you / surrender, I bundle / and mail to strangers. — Robert Okaji

Like flowers, / We did not know we were petals / Until only the last one remained. — Star Okpeh

My work is loving the world. / Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — / equal seekers of sweetness. — Mary Oliver

Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world’s willingness to receive it–indeed the world’s need of it–these never pass. — Mary Oliver

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. — Mary Oliver

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things. — Mary Oliver

Poetry shouldn’t explain anything, particularly to those who demand explanations. — Yoshev Omed

In the wavering balance of my feelings
set against each other
lascivious love and modesty
but I choose what I see
and submit my neck to the yoke;
I yield to the sweet yoke.

—

In trutina mentis dubia
fluctuant contrarian
lascivus amor et pudicitia.
Sed eligo quod video,
collum iugo prebeo:
ad iugum tamen suave transeo.

— Carl Orff, “In Trutina,” from Camina Burana

Olim lacus colueram / olim pulcher exiteram, / dum cignus ego fueram. / Miser, miser! / Modo niger / et ustus fortiter.

Once I dwelt in the lakes, / once I was beautiful, / while I was a swan. / Miserable, miserable! / Now black / and burnt fiercely.

— Carl Orff, “Olim Lacus Colueram,” from Carmina Burana

Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its value and purpose, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives. — Gregory Orr

When poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they’re both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them. ― Gregory Orr

I open my eyes & my father is driving me / to our new home at the edge of the world. / the wind tells me this is the genesis of / my despair. — Praise Osawaru