Frank O'Hara

Francis Russell O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American poet who, along with John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch, was a key member of what was known as the New York School of poetry. He was heavily influenced by contemporary music and visual art, especially abstract expressionism, and gay male urban culture. Thus, one can hear subtle music in his poems. The urgency and quickness of his work allows the reader experience life as O'Hara did in New York. He collaborated with New York School painters to make "poem-paintings." O'Hara's most original volumes of verse, Meditations in an Emergency (1956) and Lunch Poems (1964), are impromptu lyrics, a jumble of witty talk, journalistic parodies, and surrealist imagery. Before his life was cut short by an accident in 1966, he collaborated with many artists to create various different types of art, including lithographs, films and plays, to name a few. His scope of work was large and though he was only 40 when he died, he acomplished a great deal of innovative work, which speaks highly of his brilliance and love of art.

Life

Early Years

Frank O'Hara, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine Broderick, was born in Baltimore, Maryland and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Worchester. He was educated at the private schools St. Paul’s School and St. John’s High School in Worcester, and studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. He was loyal to his country and when World War II came, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy shortly after his high school graduation in 1944. O'Hara served in the South Pacific and Japan as a third class sonarsman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II. He received an honorable discharge in 1946.

Post-Secondary Education

With the funding made available to veterans on the GI Bill, O’Hara attended Harvard, where he roomed with artist Edward Gorey. His love of contemporary music led him to a major in music, and he continued to play the piano and did some composing. Then, he met John Ashbery at Harvard and tried his hand in poetry. He especially appreciated the poets Rimbaud, Mallarme, Pasternak and Mayakovsky. Though he loved music, O’Hara later changed his major to English, and began to publish his poetry in the ‘’Harvard Advocate.’’ He founded the Poets’ Theater at Harvard , took creative writing classes from John Ciardi (whose reccommemdation later helped O'Hara get into graduate school) and graduated in 1950 with a B.A. in English.

O'Hara was given a graduate fellowship in comparative literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor While at Michigan, he won a major Hopwood Award for his collection of poems, “A Byzantine Place” and Try! Try!, a verse play. Try! Try! and Change Your Bedding, another play he wrote while at Michigan, were launched at the Poet’s Theater in Cambridge. O’Hara received his M.A. in English Literature in 1951.

New York City

In the fall of 1951, O’Hara moved into an apartment in New York City to join fellow poet and friend John Ashbery. O’Hara explored the city and was finally free to live openly as a homosexual. He moved in with Joe LeSueur, who would be his roommate and sometimes his lover for the next 11 years. O’Hara worked briefly as an assistant to photographer Cecil Beaton until he found a position at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), selling postcards, publications and tickets in December 1951. He wrote poems in his spare time at work and his friends in the art world would drop by and visit him, all the while having access to all of the paintings in the museum. In addition, he was always hanging around the artists’ studios and wanted to be as involved in the artistic process as possible, whether it meant stretching canvases or posing as a model. Thus, he was the subject of many portraits by New York School painters. O’Hara began to write seriously and published one of his first poems, “A City in Winter and Other Poems” in 1952.

In 1953, O’Hara left the MoMa to become an associate editor for Art News. He started writing art reviews and built a reputation for himself as an outstanding critic. He rejoined the staff of the MoMA in 1955 as a special assistant to the International Program, and in 1960 was appointed assistant curator of paintings and sculptures. Though O’Hara might have lacked the formal schooling usually necessary for curatorial museum work, his work was wide-ranging and critically acclaimed, as his eye for art and knowledge of painting were excellent. He selected paintings for several important exhibitions, including The New American Painting and Twentieth Century Italian Art from American Collections.

O'Hara became deeply involved in the New York art scene, and befriended many artists, such as abstract expressionists Willem De Kooning and Jackson Pollock, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers and Joan Mitchell. He was known throughout his life for his extreme sociability, passion, and warmth. He had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life, many from the New York art and poetry worlds.

Death

O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island in which he was struck and injured by a beach dune buggy during the early morning of July 24, 1966. He died at age 40 the following day of internal injuries and is buried in Springs Cemetery, Long Island, New York.

Work

Diction, Style and Form

O'Hara's early work was considered both provocative and provoking. His poems were often witty and he enjoyed writing about the little things in life. O'Hara incorporated daily life into his poems, even the mundane, and must of his work is, like Whitman's poems, organic; and, is often thought of as "unpoetic" because of it's originality, freedom and prose-like style. His language was often colloquial and he would incorporate very specific details of daily life into his poems. This "I-do-this-I-do-that" style combines the picaresque ramblings of traditional American poets like Walt Whitman with the aleatory stylings of O'Hara's European heroes Mallarme and Mayakovsky. Nonetheless, his informal language is often paired with campy, scholarly language, to create a sort of dreamlike, messy tone, which corresponds to his urban New York environment.

Much of his work was spontaneous and very disorderly. His writing was immediate and often quickly typed out. One collection, Lunch Poems, was so named (by City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti) because O'Hara wrote the poems the collection during his lunch hour. O'Hara would write poems in the spare moments he had between friends and the art world. Most of his work was left laying around his apartment or written out in letters to friends. He was notoriously disorganized, and legend holds that before publishing O'Hara's poems, Ferlinghetti had to fly from San Francisco to New York and search through all of O'Hara's coat pockets to find them. It is unknown how many of O'Hara's poems may have been lost. A sometimes-playwright, O'Hara once absentmindedly left his typewriter and a finished play in a train station. His devoted friends created a collection to buy him another typewriter; the play was never recovered.

However, this seemingly careless approach was not completely random in structure and his narraive pacing is brilliant. O'Hara's poetry was free verse, though sonnet form can be seen in many of his poems. Moreover, his line breaks may appear arbitrary and definately appear to follow the aleatory form of some of his predecesors, but they are very effective in bringing the reader's attention to certain the sound and immediacy of his words. Thus, his reliance upon the unexpected or chance may have been more deliberate than not. O'Hara's reaction against modernism and non-traditional techniques, nonetheless, are said to have returned American poetry towards being critical and innovative.

New York School and Abstract Expressionism

O'Hara became one of the most distinguished members of the New York School of poets, which also included Ashbery, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest and Kenneth Koch. These poets promoted instability and change, openness and movement, thus producing some of the most experimental Americn poerty written in the 1950s and 60s. All the while, the abstract expressionism movement, whose major artists included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns was flourishing in New York. O'Hara became a major contributor to the avant-garde art scene, and this art became one of the main sources of inspiration for his highly original poetry.

Not only did O'Hara's work reflect the urgency, mobility and randomness of the New York School, but he also used New York City as the subject for much of his work. He embraced urban gay male culture and highly regarded the moments, people, places and objects prevalent in New York daily life. He also incorporated the art and names of abstract expressionists into his poetry. His interest in painting allowed him to take risks and explore art in a way that changed poetry as it stood prior to the New York School movement. He attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on the canvas. His poems, like city life, spill into one another and display the various aspects of the O'Hara's extremely busy life. O'Hara loved New York City and all it had to offer. He embraced and eternalized his experiences, and in "Meditations in an Emergency" he wrote, "One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life."

emphasize the process of creation and the materiality of the artistic medium (Norton 362)

while denying in this poem that he knew anything about visual art, or had any understanding of the process, he shows elegantly and easily the relationship between twin artistic processes, elevating his writing about art to the level of the art he was writing about. (poets.org - poet among painters 2)

He attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas. In certain instances, he collaborated with the painters to make "poem-paintings," paintings with word texts. (poets.org – bio 1)

Diverges from modernist poets because of his emphasis on voice rather than on image. For all of his interest in painting , it is the immediacy of his voice that is the most striking part of his poetry (Georgetown 1)

Though many of his poems also speak to the ways in which he felt the emotional power of painting exceeded that of poetry. In "To Larry Rivers," for example, O'Hara wrote, "You do what I can only name."

Influence

O'Hara influenced a generation of younger poets — including Joe Brainard, also famous for his collage-based visual art, Ron Padgett, and Ted Berrigan, high school friends who moved to New York from Tulsa, Oklahoma drawn in large part by their desire to meet and work with O'Hara, who soon included them in his large circle of friends. Berrigan became well-known for employing O'Hara's "I do this, I do that" form in his own poetry.

Bibliography

Books in lifetime

• A City Winter and Other Poems. Two Drawings by Larry Rivers. New York: Editions of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1951, 1952.
• Love Poems (Tentative Title). New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery Editions, 1965.
• Lunch Poems. The Pocket Poets Series, No. 19. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964. / The Pocket Poets Series, Vol. 3, No. 19. Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint Co, 1973.
• Meditations in an Emergency. New York: Grove Press, 1957, 1967, 1996.
• Odes. Prints by Michael Goldberg. New York: Tiber Press, 1960. / New York: Poets Press, 1960.
• Oranges: 12 Pastorals. New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1953. / New York: Angel Hair Books, 1970.
• Second Avenue. Cover drawing by Larry Rivers. New York: Totem Press, 1960.

Posthumous works

• Biotherm (for Bill Berkson). Ed. Bill Berkson and Jim Dine. San Francisco: Arion Press, 1990. * The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Ed. Donald Merriam Allen. New York: Knopf, 1971. / Introduction by John Ashbery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. / Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
• Early Writing. Bolinas, Calif: Grey Fox, 1977.
• In Memory of My Feelings, A Selection of Poems. Ed. Bill Berkson. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1967, 2005.
• Poems. Ed. Willem De Kooning and Benjamin Shiff. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1988. / Poems. Ed. Willem De Kooning. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1988. / Poems. Ed. Willem De Kooning and Riva Castleman. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1988.
• Poems from the Tibor De Nagy Editions, 1952-1966: A City Winter, Oranges, Love Poems (Tentative Title). Ed. Bill Berkson and Larry Rivers. New York: Tibor de Nagy Editions, 2006.
• Poems Retrieved. Ed. Donald Merriam Allen. Bolinas, Calif: Grey Fox Press, 1977. / San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1996.
• Selected Plays. New York: Full Court Press, 1978. / Amorous Nightmares of Delay: Selected Plays. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
• The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Ed. Donald Merriam Allen. New York: Knopf, 1974. / New York: Vintage Books, 1974. / London: Penguin, 1994. / Manchester: Carcanet, 2005.
• Standing Still and Walking in New York. Bolinas, Calif: Grey Fox Press, 1975. / San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1983.
• What's with Modern Art: Selected Short Reviews & Other Art Writings. Ed. Bill Berkson. Austin, TX: Mike & Dale's Press, 1999.
• Why I Am Not a Painter. Ed. Mark Ford. New York: Martha Jackson Gallery, 1966. / Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 1996. "Why I Am Not a Painter" and Other Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2003.

Audio

• Frank O'Hara. Voice of the Poet. Santa Ana, CA: Books on Tape, 2005.
• Frank O'Hara. Voice of the Poet. By Frank O'Hara and J. D. McClatchy. New York: Random House Audio, 2004.

Minor works

• Audit/Poetry, Vol. IV, No. 1, "Featuring Frank O'Hara". Buffalo: Audit-Poetry, 1964.
• Cordial Invitation to Celebrate the Sixtieth Birthday of Edwin Denby at a Dinner to Be Given by His Friends. S.l: Privately printed, 1963.
• Down at the Box-Office ...: Collage and Poem. Yanagi IV broadside series. Berkeley: Yanagi, 1977.
• The End of the Far West: 11 Poems. S.l: s.n, 1974.
• Hartigan and Rivers with O'Hara. By Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers, and Frank O'Hara. New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1959.
• Hotel Particulier'. S.l: s.n., 1967.
• Hymns of St. Bridget. By Bill Berkson, Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers. New York: Adventures in Poetry, 1974. / Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings. Woodacre, Calif: Owl Press, 2001.
• Macaroni. By Frank O'Hara and Patsy Southgate. Calais, Vt: Z Press, 1974.

• Belgrade, November 19, 1963. (New York: Adventures in Poetry)
• "New Paintings" by Michael Goldberg (New York: Martha Jackson Gallery, 1966) with "Why I Am Not A Painter" by Frank O'Hara on front cover dated 1956
• Two Pieces. (London: Long Hair Books, series one, 1969) includes "THOSE WHO ARE DREAMING, a play about St. Paul" and "COMMERCIAL VARIATIONS" dated 4/52)

• Try! Try! A verse play, 1951. In Artists' Theater, edited by Jerbert Machiz, published by Grove Press, 1960.
• "A Byzantine Place." Manuscript of poems, 1951.
• Change Your Bedding. 1951.
• Everyman. By John Ashberry. He composed the incidental music.
• Acted in Living Theater's production of Picasso's Desire Caught by the Tail at the Cherry Lane Theater. 1953.
• Nature and New American Painting. 1945-55 this essay was published in Folder 3.
• The Compromise. He produced and acted in this play by John Ashbery. Cambridge: Poets' Theater, 1956.
• Stones. Lithographs he made with Larry Rivers. Published by Universal Art Editions, 1958.
• "Franz Kline Talking." Published in Evergreen Review, 1958.
• Jackson Pollock: 1912-56. New York: G. Baziller, 1958-59, 1993.
• Undercover Lover. Collaborated with Arnold Weinstein and John Gruen on this musical comedy. New York: 1956.
• "About Zhivago and His Poems." Published in Evergreen Review, 1959.
• "An Interview with Larry Rivers." Published in Horizon. 1959.
• Love's Labor, an eclogue. Produced by the Living Theater, 1959.
• Awake in Spain. Produced by the Living Theater and published in Hasty Papers, 1960.
• Painted 26 poem-paintings with Norman Blum. Published by Grove Press: October, 1960.
• Last Clean Shirt. Colaborated with Al Leslie, for which he wrote the subtitles for this film. 1963-64.
• The General Returns from One Place to Another. Produced by Present Stages at the Writer's Stage Theater. Published in Art and Literature, 1965.
• Franz Kline: A Retrospective Exhibition. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1964.
• 'Art: New York Series. Inverviewed David Smith and Barnett Newman fr this National Educational Television. 1964.
• Robert Motherwell. Museum of Modern Art, 1965.
• "Memoir of Larry Rivers." Published in the catalog of the retrosepective exhibition by Brandeis University.
• Interviewed by Edward Lucie-Smith for Studio Interational. 1965.
• Collaborated with Al Leslie on the Film Philosophy in the Bedroom, for which he wrote the subtitles. 1965.
• Featured in the National Educational Television USA: Poetry Series. 1965.
• 'David Smith. Wrote the introduction for this catalog publised by the Museum of Modern Art, 1965.
• Worked with Arnold Weinstein and John Gruen on the musical play The Undercover Lover. 1966.

Exhibitions

• Art Chronicles, 1954-1966. New York: G. Braziller, 1975.
• Documenta II '59. With Porter McCray, Kassel, Germany: 1959.
• New Spanish Painting and Sculpture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966. / New Spanish Painting and Sculpture: Rafael Canogar and Others. By the Museum of Modern Art and Frank O'Hara. Garden City, N.Y.: Distributed by Doubleday, 1960.
• Reuben Nakian. By the Museum of Modern Art and Frank O'Hara. New York: Distributed by Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1966.
• Robert Motherwell: With Selections from the Artist's Writings. By Frank O'Hara and Robert Motherwell. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1965.
• The New American Painting. Europe: Museum of Modern Art, 1958-59.
• Twentieth Century Italian Art from American Collections. Milan & Rome: Museum of Modern Art, 1960.

Shown widely after 1961 at MoMA:

• Magritte-Tanguy. New York: Museum of Modern Art,
• Abstract Watercolors by 14 Americans." New York: Museum of Modern Art,
• Gaston Lachaise.
• Drawings by Arshile Gorky.
• Drawings by David Smith.
• Franxz Kilne.
• Recent Landscapes by 8 Americans.
• Robert Motherwell: Works on Paper.
• David Smith.

• Modern Sculpture: U.S.A." Codirected with René d'Harnoncourt, Director of the MoMA. Paris, Berlin & Baden-Baden: 1965-66.

Selected U.S. representations for the following international exhibitions:

• IV Bienal, São Paulo, Brazil, 1957 & IV International Art Exhibition, Japan, 1957 (Included Jackson Pollock: 1912-56, which later traveled to Europe, 1958-59).
• XXIX Venice Biennale, 1958.

On O'Hara

• Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)
• The Poets of the New York School by John Bernard Myers (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania, 1969)
• Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters by Marjorie Perloff (New York: G. Braziller, 1977; 1st paperback ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, with a new introduction, 1998)
• Frank O'Hara by Alan Feldman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979 . . . frontispiece photo of Frank O'Hara c. by Richard Moore)
• Frank O'Hara: A Comprehensive Bibliography by Alexander Smith, Jr. (New York: Garland, 1979; 2nd print. corrected, 1980)
• Homage to Frank O'Hara. edited by Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur, cover by Jane Freilicher (originally published as Big Sky 11/12 in April, 1978; rev. ed. Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1980)
• Art with the touch of a poet: Frank O'Hara. exhibit companion compiled by Hildegard Cummings (Storrs, Conn. : The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, 1983 . . . January 24-March 13, 1983)
• Frank O'Hara: To Be True To A City edited by Jim Elledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990)
• Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets. by Geoff Ward (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993)
• City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara by Brad Gooch (1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1993; New York: HarperPerennial, 1994)
• In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art by Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles / University of California Press, 1999)
• Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: Difference, Homosexuality, Topography by Hazel Smith (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2000)
• The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets ed. Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2001)
• Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara by Joe LeSueur (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
• Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing by Michael Magee(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004)
• Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie by Lytle Shaw (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006)
• Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry by Andrew Epstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Further Reading

• Carroll, Paul. The Poem in Its Skin. Chicago, Follette Publishing Company, 1968. ISBN: 9780695871468.
• Elliott, Emory. Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. ISBN: 9780585041520.
• Ellman, Richard, Robert O’Clair and Jahan Ramazani, ed, “Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)” in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 2 Contemporary Poetry, 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2003. ISBN: 0393977927.
• Feldman, Alan. Frank O'Hara. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979 IBSN: 080577277.
• Kamm, Anthony. Biographical Companion to English Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780585257549.
• O'Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Edited by Donald Allen, with an Introduction by John Ashbery. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. ISBN: 0520201663.

External links

• Doty, Mark and Claudia Milstead. “Frank O’Hara’s Life and Career.” Modern American Poetry. [[8]]. Retrieved 5/30/2007.
• Bergman, David, ed. “Frank O’Hara (1926-1966).” [[9]]. Retrieved 5/30/2007.
• “Frank O’Hara.” The Beat Page. [[10]]. Retrieved 5/30/2007.
• “Frank O’Hara.” Poets.Org from the Academy of American Poets. [[11]]. Retrieved 6/1/2007.
• “Frank O’Hara: A Poet Among Painters.” Poets.Org from the Academy of American Poets. [[12]]. Retrieved 6/1/2007.
• “Frank O’Hara.” Worchester Area Writers. [[13]]. Retrieved 5/30/2007.
• “O’Hara, Frank (1926-1966).” glbtq, an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trangender and queer culture. [[14]]. Retrieved 5/30/2007.

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