The Collected Poems
O'Hara was a curator at MoMA who wrote poems on his lunch break, on the subway, between phone calls ("I am not a professor of anything"), and whose work captures the texture of New York life in the 1950s and 60s with an immediacy no one else has matched. His "Personism" manifesto (the poem should be addressed to a specific person "over the telephone") is the best short anti-manifesto in American poetry. He died at 40, hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island.
Five hundred plus poems, many dashed off between phone calls and never revised, and the Collected makes you read all of them to find the forty great ones. Half the lines are inside jokes about painters and party guests you had to be there for. O'Hara's charm never says no to itself; the Selected is the kinder volume.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
