Frank O'Hara - Work

Poet and art critic, born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. He worked for the Museum of Modern Art from 1951, and as an editor for art magazines (1954–64). He wrote plays and art criticism, and is noted for his Surrealist poetry, as in Selected Poems (1973).

Francis Russell O'Hara (June 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.

Frank O'Hara, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine Broderick, was born in Baltimore and grew up in Massachusetts. He studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. O'Hara was heavily influenced by visual art, and by contemporary music, which was his first love (he remained a fine piano player all his life and would often shock new partners by suddenly playing swathes of Rachmaninov when visiting them). While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. That autumn O'Hara moved into an apartment in New York City with Joe LeSueur, who would be his roommate and sometimes his lover for the next 11 years. 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 was employed at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and 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.

Work

O'Hara's early work was considered both provocative and provoking. One collection, Lunch Poems, was named (by City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti) because O'Hara typed them up on his lunch hour, while Robert Lowell once chastised him at a public poetry reading for reading a piece he had written on his way to the theatre. 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. 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.

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 concurrent New York School of painting, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry. In "To Larry Rivers", for example, O'Hara wrote, "You do what I can only name". 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. (New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery Editions, 1951 [sic, i.e. (New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery Editions, 1953; New York: Angel Hair Books, 1969) Meditations in an Emergency. (New York: Grove Press, 1957; (New York: Totem Press in Association with Corinth Books, 1960) Odes. (New York: Tiber Press, 1960) Lunch Poems. (New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery Editions, 1965)

Posthumous works

In Memory of My Feelings, commemorative volume illustrated by 30 U.S. artists and edited by Bill Berkson (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1967) The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. New York: Knopf, 1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara. edited by Donald Allen (New York: Knopf, 1974; Vintage Books, 1974) Standing Still and Walking in New York. New York: Full Court Press, 1978) Amorous Nightmares of Delay: Selected Plays. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)

Minor works

"Hartigan and Rivers with O'Hara." (1 folded sheet, 10 p.) by Frank O'Hara, Grace Hartigan, and Larry Rivers from "An Exhibition of Pictures with Poems by Frank O'Hara . November 24 through December 24, 1959" (New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1959) "A Cordial Invitation to Celebrate The Sixtieth Birthday of Edwin Denby at a Dinner to be Given By His Friends. with "Edwin's Hand" by Frank O'Hara (1963) Belgrade, November 19, 1963. (New York: Adventures in Poetry) Audit/Poetry. IV, No.1 "Featuring Frank O'Hara" (Buffalo, NY at 180 Winspear Avenue, 1964) "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 Hotel particulier. (New York by Ted Berrigan, 1974) Hymns of St. Bridget. by Bill Berkson and Frank O'Hara (New York: Adventures in Poetry, 1974) Macaroni. (New York: George Braziller, Inc. 1959) New Spanish painting and sculpture. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1960) Robert Motherwell: with selections from the artist's writings. by Frank O'Hara (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1965) Nakian. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966) Art Chronicles, 1954-1966. (New York: G. New York. ISBN 0-14-01-5102-8 (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. 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. (New York: Garland, 1979; 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)