"Poetry is a temporal art, like music, Ohara’s first love. It happens in time; it waxes and wanes, gathers and vanishes. One temptation is to ride the wave, and O’Hara’s poems are better at doing so, are more vigorous, than any 'improvisational' style in American poetry. Yet his real wish is somehow to stop time in its tracks. Time, inscribed upon O’Hara’s brisk syntax and jaunty prosody, hastens every poem of his forward, but the world arrests him with marvels: a liver-sausage sandwich, or the 'glistening torsos' of workmen on their lunch hour, or a display of ceramics by Miró. The poems keep changing gears, revving and slowing, caught between two values they prize equally, hurry and delay. “The only way to be quiet / is to be quick,” he writes. Nobody is quicker than O’Hara, but nobody wishes more to linger in those experiences—sensual, aesthetic, intellectual—which carry their own serene time signatures....His poems, so full of names and places and events, are exquisite ledgers for the tallying of reality. They all attempt to move the vital but fleeting items in Column A—sandwiches and torsos, lunch hours and late nights—into Column B, where works of art stand, 'strong as rocks,'against the ravages of mortality."
-Dan Chiasson
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