Frank O’Hara, a founder of the “New York School” of poets and a cornerstone of New York City’s avant-garde, was an American poet, art critic, and museum curator. O’Hara was born on June 27, 1926, in Baltimore, Maryland, although he grew up in Grafton, a suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts. His first creative passion was music: every week he took a bus and a train to lessons at the New England Conservatory, and he aspired to become a concert pianist. After a stint in the navy during WWII (serving in the South Pacific as a sonarman aboard the USS Nicholas) O’Hara enrolled at Harvard as a music major. It was not long, however, before his burgeoning literary interests convinced him to switch majors to English. O’Hara contributed poems and stories to the undergraduate literary and art magazine The Advocate, and developed an interest in verse plays. He experimented widely in poetic form, composing everything from sonnets to madrigals to heroic couplets to prose poems to French triolets. At Harvard, he met the poet John Ashbery, who was a year above him and then serving on The Advocate’s editorial board. As an undergraduate, O’Hara made trips to New York, where he met the poets Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler; together with Ashbery and Barbara Guest, they would later constitute the key members of the “first generation” of the New York School of poets. On the same visits to New York he also met the painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Michael Goldberg, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, and Grace Hartigan, among others, many of whom he later collaborated with, took inspiration from, and promoted as a critic and curator. Upon graduating from Harvard in 1950, and following the advice of his creative writing professor, the poet John Ciardi, O’Hara pursued a master’s degree at the University of Michigan. In his early months there, O’Hara began and then scrapped a novel, after which he focused on verse, writing some 90 poems and two plays and winning the university’s Avery Hopwood Prize for poetry.
In 1951, O’Hara moved to New York, where he found employment selling postcards at The Museum of Modern Art. He immediately immersed himself in the lively community of painters and poets with which he had acquainted himself in his college years. As he later wrote: “John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and I, being poets, divided our time between the literary bar, the San Remo, and the artists’ bar, the Cedar Tavern. In the San Remo we argued and gossiped: in the Cedar we often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue and gossip.” O’Hara was also a frequent visitor to The Club, an important rendezvous for New York’s Abstract Expressionist painters. In 1953, he was hired as an editorial assistant at Art News, and he contributed criticism and reviews that advocated the painting and sculpture of his contemporaries. All the while, O’Hara was producing his own poetry, for which he drew inspiration from the intersecting spheres of music, visual art, and literature. The French post-Symbolist poets Pierre Reverdy, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire, along with the Surrealists that followed them, all had a major influence on O’Hara’s work, as did the Russian writers Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak. In the American tradition, he took after the work of William Carlos Williams, Marrianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and British transplant W.H. Auden.
O’Hara released his first collection, A City Winter and Other Poems, in 1952. His poetry fed off of and included almost the totality of his personal experience: the personalities of his friends; the city streets; overheard snippets of conversation; architecture; even billboard advertisements. He incorporated these into his poems with a flexible approach that combined the techniques of the poets and painters he admired with a colloquial, distinctly American style. In the words of Ashbery, “[O’Hara’s] poetry, more than anyone else’s, reconciles all sorts of conflicting material. In it, things exist in a sort of miraculous emulsion.” Regarding his employment of surrealist techniques, Koch wrote that “he must have felt the beauty and power of unconscious phenomena in surrealist poems, but what he does is to use this power and beauty to ennoble, complicate, and simplify waking actions.” In 1953, O’Hara wrote Second Avenue, the longest and most complex of his early poems. Composed from the patio of Larry Rivers’s apartment, overlooking the titular street, Second Avenue is a panoply of juxtaposed images and sensations, some immediately recognizable, others absurd or obscure, all of which combine to create a dynamic view of the city. In spite of the unfamiliarity of some of its elements, O’Hara claimed that “everything in it either happened to me or I felt happening (saw, imagined) on Second Avenue.” The poem exemplifies his utilization of multidisciplinary inspirations: it was dedicated to Mayakovsky, but an early draft was dedicated to de Kooning. Of the two, O’Hara wrote that “where Mayakovsky and de Kooning come in, is that they both have done works as big as cities where the life in the work is autonomous (not about actual city life) and yet similar.”
O’Hara’s mode of composition was as unconventional as his style. He had an improvisatory, opportunistic approach, often completing poems in mere minutes, and writing in locations as impromptu as the Staten Island Ferry (on which he produced “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)”). He was also extraordinarily prolific. Ashbery remembered him “dashing the poems off at odd moments—in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunch time or even in a room full of people—he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them.” And Koch recalled that O’Hara had the remarkable ability “to write while other people were talking, or even to get up in the middle of a conversation, get his typewriter, and write a poem, sometimes participating in the conversation while doing so.”
Although recognized as important by his peers, O’Hara’s poetry remained mostly unknown throughout his career. Just as the painters he championed were initially disregarded by the gatekeepers of the art world, so was his early poetry shunned or ignored by the literary mainstream. In 1951, describing the early days of the New York School, he wrote that “the painters were the only generous audience for our poetry, and most of us read first publicly in art galleries or at The Club. The literary establishment cared about as much for our work as the Frick cared for Pollock.” Even as his reputation grew—especially after the release of Donald Allen’s important anthology The New American Poetry (1960), which O’Hara himself played a key role in putting together—he “deliberately neglected measures,” wrote critic Peter Schjeldahl, “…by which he would have effortlessly ascended into the public view.” In the words of painter John Button, “Frank’s fame came to him unlooked-for.”
In fact, O’Hara’s reputation as a forceful and pervasive personality achieved notoriety long before his poetry. Throughout the fifties and sixties, he was a kind of juggernaut who acted as muse, mentor, coach, confidant, and intellectual sparring partner for a litany of poets and painters. He maintained an enormous network, gathered artists and writers at his apartment, and connected creatives from all different scenes. Allen Ginsberg described O’Hara as having “the genius’s insight into other genius.” Bill Berkson, a member of the New York School’s “second generation,” described O’Hara’s ability to nurture the creative talent in those around him: “If you were one of Frank’s friends, you were given a grand permission to be direct and interesting, to be full of ideas and feelings.” This love for dialogue with other artists is reflected in the many collaborations O’Hara took part in over his career. He wrote poems with Koch, Ashbery, and Berkson; in 1952, he and Hartigan created a series of 12 paintings and poems; he produced a sequence of lithographs with Rivers; and Goldberg contributed prints to his 1960 collection Odes.
The Museum of Modern Art eventually hired O’Hara as an assistant curator, and he went on to play a part in 19 shows, including the influential exhibition “The New American Painting,” which toured eight European countries from 1958 to 1959 and featured Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, and Hartigan, as well as Philip Guston and Mark Rothko, among others. In spite of O’Hara’s new professional responsibilities, he remained dedicated to poetry. In 1954, he wrote “Music,” the first of his “I do this I do that” poems, which see the poet’s persona navigating Manhattan and all its stimuli. Two years later he composed “A Step Away From Them,” the first of his so-called “lunch poems,” which were eventually published as a collection in 1965. In 1957, he published one of his most famous volumes, Meditations in an Emergency; the same year he began work on Odes, which included the autobiographical “Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘s Birth and Other Births),” and one of his most overtly political works, “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets,” which dealt with racial discord in the U.S. O’Hara is also remembered for his elegies—distinct in the delayed appearance of their subjects—most famously “The Day Lady Died” (1959), remembering the great jazz vocalist Billie Holiday. In 1961, he wrote a series of poems concentrating on gay love, many of which he addressed to his own lovers, including Rivers, O’Hara’s longtime roommate Joe LeSueur, and the dancer Vincent Warren.
During the final years of his life, O’Hara’s copious output slowed, although his creative drive was by no means in decline. From 1961 to 1962, he composed a long poem, “Biotherm,” dedicated to Berkson. In a letter to Donald Allen discussing “Biotherm,” O’Hara gives us an insight into his process: “I don’t know anything about what it is or will be but am enjoying trying to keep going and seem to have been able to keep it ‘open’ and so there are lots of possibilities, air and such.” In 1964, he released Lunch Poems, one of the few volumes that received a large print run during his lifetime. The next year, he published his Love Poems (Tentative Title). In 1966, to the shock of the art and literary community, O’Hara died while on vacation at Fire Island, New York, after being hit by a car in the dark. He was 40 years old.
In many ways, O’Hara’s approach to poetry described his approach to life: “You go on your nerve.” A friend of his once said that O’Hara “indulged every feeling he ever had.” He was a focal point for a burgeoning wave of painters and poets that changed the landscape of American arts and letters, and a beloved figure (the painter Helen Frankenthaler recalled that party invitations often included the note “Frank will be there”). As Berkson described in his eulogy of O’Hara, “as a poet, a genius, just walking around, talking, he had that magic touch: He made things and people sacred.”