Frank O'Hara

After reading the introduction to the Collected Poesm of Frank O'Hara, I was ready to thoroughly enjoy his work because of his "anti-literary and anti-artistic" as well as "unrevised" style which "ignored the rules" -- similar to the way I plunged into poetry in eighth grade. Although I know that we're perhaps supposed to be approaching our school work in a more objective frame of mind, I would be doing myself a disservice to approach another poets work without the question, "What can I learn from here?". However, I discovered it was very...distanced somehow, and I read it but wasn't 'moved'. I can't quite find what it was about his work that wasn't touching to me. Perhaps its because I've become too accustomed to my generations angsty angry frustrated underdeveloped poetry and my aesthetic taste for poetry hasn't been established. However, the poem 'Poem', dedicated to Gertrude Stein, had a flow that I found attractive. That flow, the way that it lends itself to you reading it silently the same way that you would read it aloud. Perhaps because its the most bodily poem we read of his. Perhaps because he used the word 'you'.