What I Know and Can't Get vs. What Is Left of That I Know and Can Bear Without Hatred

"What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else, they are just there in whatever form I can find them.... My formal 'stance' is found at the crossroads where what I know and can't get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred... It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time."

 -Frank O'Hara in Donald Allen's New American Poetry

"Is it dirty? Does it look dirty?"

"Song" by Frank O'Hara

Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that's what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirty
that's what you think of in the city
you don't refuse to breathe do you

someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes very
he's attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes

that's what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that's not a thought that's soot

and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don't refuse to breathe do you

-from Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara (1964).

Here is a recording of Frank O'Hara reading it. I like the way he reads it, so conversationally and casually emotively, but it's much different than the way I read it off the page. It seems so much flatter on the page, uninflected--like a thought.