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.

Life

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.

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 Hopwood Major 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.

In the fall of 1951, O’Hara moved into an apartment in New York City to join 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” in 1952.

Known throughout his life for his extreme sociability, passion, and warmth, O'Hara had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life, many from the New York art and poetry worlds. Soon after arriving in New York, he began to write seriously.

O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News, and in 1960 was made Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with artists like Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers and Joan Mitchell. O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island in which he was struck and injured by a beach buggy during the early morning of July 24, 1966. He died at age 40 the following day and is buried in Springs Cemetery on Long Island.

Work

O'Hara's early work was considered both provocative and provoking. At Michigan, Karl Shapiro awarded him a Hopwood Prize for his manuscript "A Byzantine Place." His writing was immediate and was often quickly typed out, as many critics have noted. One collection, Lunch Poems, was so named (by City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti) because O'Hara wrote the poems in it on his lunch hour. This seemingly careless approach to poetry rubbed some of O'Hara's contemporaries the wrong way. Robert Lowell once chastised him at a public poetry reading for reading a piece he had written on his way to the reading. High and low cultural references mingle easily in his poems, which often have dreamlike lyricism. The famous "I do this, I do that" style — a phrase he coined and a form that he arguably pioneered — combined the picaresque ramblings of traditional American poets like Walt Whitman with the aleatory stylings of O'Hara's European heroes Mallarme and Mayakovsky.

His most-anthologized poems are "Why I Am Not a Painter" and "The Day Lady Died," about singer Billie Holiday. O'Hara was notoriously disorganized. A 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. In 1952 his first volume of poetry, A City in Winter, attracted favorable attention; his essays on painting and sculpture and his reviews for ArtNews were considered brilliant.

O'Hara became one of the most distinguished members of the New York School of poets, which also included Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. O'Hara's association with the painters Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns, leaders in the New York School of painting, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry. He attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas, 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." 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.

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)

Exhibitions

• Art Chronicles, 1954-1966. New York: G. Braziller, 1975.
• Jackson Pollock. New York: G. Baziller, 1959, 1993.
• 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.
• 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.

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

• 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.

• Kamm, Anthony. Biographical Companion to English Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780585257549.

External links

• Doty, Mark and Claudia Milstead. “Frank O’Hara’s Life and Career.” Modern American Poetry. [[5]]. Retrieved 5/30/2007.

• Bergman, David, ed. “Frank O’Hara (1926-1966).” [[6]]. Retrieved 5/30/2007.

• “Frank O’Hara.” The Beat Page. [[7]]. Retrieved 5/30/2007.

• “Frank O’Hara.” Poets.Org from the Academy of American Poets. [[8]]. Retrieved 6/1/2007.

• “Frank O’Hara: A Poet Among Painters.” Poets.Org from the Academy of American Poets. [[9]]. Retrieved 6/1/2007.

• “Frank O’Hara.” Worchester Area Writers. [[10]]. Retrieved 5/30/2007.

• “O’Hara, Frank (1926-1966).” glbtq, an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trangender and queer culture. [[11]]. Retrieved 5/30/2007.

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