A short life of the author
Frank O’Hara (27 June 1926 – 25 July 1966) was an American poet, art critic, and curator whose casual, conversational, radically present-tense poetry made him the central figure of the New York School of poets and one of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century. His poems — quick, witty, emotionally immediate, packed with proper nouns and the ephemera of daily life in Manhattan — invented a mode of writing that treated the texture of lived experience as sufficient poetic material, without the mythological apparatus of modernism or the confessional gravity of his contemporaries. He was killed by a dune buggy on Fire Island at forty, and the posthumous Collected Poems (1971) revealed the scale of what he’d produced in barely fifteen years.
Life and Career
O’Hara was born in Baltimore, raised in Grafton, Massachusetts, and served in the Navy in the South Pacific during World War II. He studied at Harvard (where he roomed with Edward Gorey and befriended John Ashbery) and then at the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Award for poetry. In 1951 he moved to New York and took a job at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art — beginning an association that would last the rest of his life and shape both his poetry and his career in the art world.
At MoMA he rose from selling postcards to becoming an associate curator, organizing major exhibitions of painters he admired — Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Nakian. His friendships with painters — Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell — were as important to his poetry as his friendships with other poets. The painters’ example — their spontaneity, their willingness to work from impulse, their acceptance of accident — gave O’Hara permission to write poems that felt improvised, immediate, thrown off in the course of a day rather than laboured over in a study.
His first major collections — A City Winter and Other Poems (1952), Meditations in an Emergency (1957) — established his voice: witty, camp, emotionally unguarded, packed with references to movies, music, friends, weather, the streets of Manhattan. “Having a Coke with You” is a love poem disguised as a casual observation. “The Day Lady Died” — about hearing of Billie Holiday’s death while buying a newspaper on his lunch break — is one of the great elegies in American poetry, achieving its emotional force precisely through its refusal to be elegiac until the final lines.
Lunch Poems (1964) — published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books — is his most famous single collection and includes many of his best-known poems. The title is literal: O’Hara wrote many of these poems during his lunch hour, walking through midtown Manhattan, and the poems have the rhythm of a walk — attentive, digressive, punctuated by encounters and observations.
The “I Do This I Do That” Poem
O’Hara’s signature invention is what critics call the “I do this I do that” poem — a mode that chronicles the poet’s movements through a day (or an hour, or a lunch break) with a specificity that excludes nothing: brand names, street addresses, phone calls, weather, what someone was wearing, what was on the radio. The method looks artless but requires extraordinary skill: the selection of details, the shifts in register, the management of tone (from comedy to tenderness to grief, sometimes within a single sentence) are precise and deliberate.
His “Personism: A Manifesto” (1959) — written in response to the earnest aesthetic statements of the era — declared that a poem should be addressed to a specific person, the way a phone call is, and that “I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve.” It’s a manifesto and a joke at the same time, which is pure O’Hara.
Critical Standing
O’Hara’s reputation has risen steadily since his death. The Collected Poems (1971, edited by Donald Allen) — running to over 500 pages — revealed a body of work far larger and more various than the slim volumes published during his lifetime had suggested. He is now regarded as one of the essential American poets of the century, alongside Ashbery (his New York School co-founder), Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Allen Ginsberg — poets with whom he shared little stylistically but whose ambition he matched.
His influence on subsequent generations — from Eileen Myles and Ted Berrigan to the Language poets to contemporary poets of the quotidian — is immense. He made it possible to write a poem that was intimate, funny, culturally omnivorous, and emotionally serious without being solemn.
Key Works
- Meditations in an Emergency (1957)
- Lunch Poems (1964)
- The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1971, posthumous)
- Standing Still and Walking in New York (1975, prose)
Collecting O’Hara
A City Winter and Other Poems (1952, Tibor de Nagy Gallery Editions) — his debut, published in an edition of about 300 copies with two drawings by Larry Rivers — is exceptionally rare and brings $2,000–$8,000. Meditations in an Emergency (1957, Grove Press) in fine condition with dust jacket brings $500–$1,500. Lunch Poems (1964, City Lights) — Pocket Poets Series No. 19 — brings $200–$600 for a first printing. The posthumous Collected Poems (1971, Knopf) brings $80–$200. O’Hara did not sign books frequently; signed copies command significant premiums.