Frank O’Hara

Frank O’Hara (born March 27, 1926, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died July 25, 1966, Fire Island, New York) was an American poet, curator, and art critic who gathered images from an urban environment to represent personal experience in his poetry. He was one of the leaders of the New York school of poets that emerged during the mid-20th century; its members were inspired by French Surrealism as well as the experiences of daily life. A vibrant, witty, intellectual poet with a strong queer sensibility, O’Hara included many allusions to popular culture, especially film, advertising, and music. His work retains great interest in the 21st century, perhaps because of its contemporary subject matter and modern voice. O’Hara’s friend and fellow poet Kenneth Koch once said, “Something Frank had that none of the other artists and writers I know had to the same degree was a way of feeling and acting as though being an artist were the most natural thing in the world.”

Early life and education

O’Hara’s parents, Russell O’Hara and Katherine Broderick, were devout Roman Catholics who were not married when their first child, Frank, was conceived. To avoid scandal, they moved from Massachusetts to Baltimore, Maryland, where Frank was born in March 1927. Their friends and family, however, were told that he had been born in June, after they had married. Frank O’Hara’s true birth date was not known—including to him—until the discovery of his birth certificate decades after his death.

The family returned to Massachusetts when O’Hara was very young. His father owned several businesses with O’Hara’s uncle, including a dairy farm and a hardware store. His mother struggled with alcoholism, and as an adult O’Hara also became a heavy drinker. His first main interest was music. He studied piano at the New England Conservatory of Music, although he was also drawn to both poetry and the visual arts. During World War II he served as a sonar operator on a destroyer in the South Pacific. After the war he studied music at Harvard University on the G.I. Bill before switching to English (B.A., 1950). At college he was roommates with the artist and designer Edward Gorey, and he met fellow poet John Ashbery, who was on the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate, in which O’Hara published his first poems. O’Hara then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan (M.A., 1951), after which he returned to his circle of friends at Harvard and cofounded the Poets Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Among the art milieu of New York City

Eventually, he moved to New York City, where he thrived in a bohemian scene and befriended Koch and the poets Barbara Guest and James Schuyler and the artists Grace Hartigan and Willem de Kooning among others. During the 1960s, as an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara sent his fine criticism of current painting and sculpture to such periodicals as Art News, and he wrote catalogs for exhibits that he arranged. Meanwhile, local theaters were producing many of his experimental one-act plays, including Try! Try! (1960), about a soldier’s return to his wife and her new lover.

Poetry

O’Hara, however, considered himself primarily a poet. His pieces are an exuberant mixture of quotations, gossip, phone numbers, commercials—any mote of experience that he found appealing. Their composition was sometimes “on the fly,” as if to match the dazzling energy of O’Hara’s poetic voice. (O’Hara described writing poetry as “playing the typewriter.”) For example, “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)” was written on the Staten Island ferry as O’Hara was on the way to a poetry reading. The poem’s speaker relates the experience of “trotting along” through a mix of rain, snow, and heavy traffic and spotting a sensationalistic headline about the movie star Lana Turner. Its ending is an appealing blend of sincerity and camp:

I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

O’Hara also drew inspiration from nonliterary sources, including free-form jazz and the abstract paintings of acquaintances such as Jackson Pollock and Larry Rivers, whose work he championed in art criticism. (His interest in both poetry and visual art came together with a series of “poem-paintings” he produced in collaboration with the artist Norman Bluhm in 1960.) The results vary from the merely idiosyncratic to the dynamic and humorous. Among his best-known poems is “The Day Lady Died,” a tribute to jazz singer Billie Holiday.

Gay themes and “Having a Coke with You”

As a gay man who wrote in positive, celebratory language about homosexuality and gay culture, O’Hara is considered a pioneer by many queer writers. As a child O’Hara had chafed under his parents’ religious beliefs and what he deemed to be their parochialism, and in college he was divided between hiding his gay identity from his family and exploring it among his circle at Harvard. In New York O’Hara openly expressed his sexuality, forming relationships with Rivers, the editor and writer Joe LeSueur, and the dancer Vincent Warren, the last of whom inspired his rapturous poem “Having a Coke with You.”

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it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

Death and legacy

O’Hara’s reputation grew in the 1960s to the point that he was considered one of the most important and influential postwar American poets at the time of his death, at age 40, after being hit by a car while on vacation. His work influenced many poets, including Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Jim Carroll, and Eileen Myles. Fittingly, his poems have popped up in various forms of 21st-century popular culture, from the television series Mad Men and Normal People to pop music lyrics.

O’Hara’s first volume of poetry was A City Winter and Other Poems (1952). His most celebrated collections are Meditations in an Emergency (1957) and Lunch Poems (1964). The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1971) and its successor, Selected Poems (2008), were published posthumously. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (1993), by Brad Gooch, is one of many biographies of him.