Frank O'Hara

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.

O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary".American Council of Learned Societies. "Frank O'Hara" in ''American National Biography''. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends". O'Hara's writing sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."

''The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara'' edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. Brad Gooch's ''City Poet'' is the first substantial biography on the poet.

Early life and education

Frank O'Hara, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine (née Broderick), was born on March 27, 1926, at Maryland General Hospital, Baltimore and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He attended St. John's High School. He grew up believing he had been born in June, but in fact had been born in March - his parents disguised his true date of birth because he was conceived out of wedlock. He studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944 and served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS ''Nicholas'' during World War II.

With the funding made available to veterans he attended Harvard University, where artist and writer Edward Gorey was his roommate. 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 shock new partners by suddenly playing swathes of Rachmaninoff when visiting them). His favorite poets were Pierre Reverdy, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the ''Harvard Advocate''. Despite his love of music, O'Hara changed his major and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.

He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. While at Michigan, he won a Hopwood Award and received his master's degree in English literature in 1951.

Early career

In the autumn of 1951, O'Hara moved into an apartment in New York City with Joe LeSueur, who was his roommate and sometime lover for the next 11 years. It was during this time that he began teaching at The New School.

O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for ''ARTnews,'' and in 1960 was assistant curator of painting and sculpture exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was a friend of the artists Norman Bluhm, Mike Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Larry Rivers.

Poetry

While O'Hara's poetry is generally autobiographical, it tends to be based on his observations of New York life rather than exploring his past. In his introduction to ''The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara'', Donald Allen says "that Frank O'Hara tended to think of his poems as a record of his life is apparent in much of his work."Frank O'Hara. ''The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara''. Ed. Donald Allen. University of California Press. 1995; O'Hara discussed this aspect of his poetry in a statement for Donald Allen's '' The New American Poetry'':

What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don't think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else, they are just there in whatever form I can find them. . .My formal "stance" is found at the crossroads where what I know and can't get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred. . .It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.

His initial time in the Navy, during his basic training at Sampson Naval Training Center in upstate New York, along with earlier years spent at St. John's High School began to shape a distinguished style of solitary observation that would later inform his poems. Immersed in regimented daily routine, first Catholic school then the Navy, he was able to separate himself from the situation and make witty and often singular studies. Sometimes these were cataloged for use in later writing, or, perhaps more often, put into letters. This skill of scrutinizing and recording during the bustle and churn of daily life would, later, be one of the important aspects that shaped O'Hara as an urban poet writing off the cuff.

Among his friends, O'Hara was known to treat poetry dismissively, as something to be done only in the moment. John Ashbery says he witnessed O'Hara "Dashing the poems off at odd moments – in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people – he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them."

In the summer of 1951, O'Hara read a manifesto in ''The Kenyon Review'' written by the poet, novelist and anarchistic social critic Paul Goodman. In the essay, Goodman argues that the postwar American "advanced guard" writers must articulate the deep-seated, personal disquiet felt across the culture but left unvoiced. The essay encouraged O'Hara to write poetry that was embarrassing in its directness, and even seen as hostile to literary standards then in place. O'Hara's poetry began to erase poetry's cautious border between what is public and what is private.

In 1959, he wrote a mock manifesto (originally published in the NYC magazine ''Yūgen'' in 1961) called ''Personism: A Manifesto'', in which he explains his position on formal structure: "I don't ... like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'" He says, in response to academic overemphasis on form, "As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it." He claims that on August 27, 1959, while talking to LeRoi Jones, he founded a movement called Personism which may be "the death of literature as we know it."

He says,

It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings toward the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.Frank O'Hara. "Personism: A Manifesto". ''The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara'' (edited by Donald Allen). University of California Press. 1995;

His poetry shows the influence of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, Russian poetry, and poets associated with French Symbolism. Ashbery says, "The poetry that meant the most to him when he began writing was either French – Rimbaud, Mallarmé, the Surrealists: poets who speak the language of every day into the reader's dream – or Russian – Pasternak and especially Mayakovsky, for whom he picked up what James Schuyler has called the 'intimate yell.'" As part of the New York School of poetry, O'Hara to some degree encapsulated the compositional philosophy of New York School painters.

Ashbery says, "Frank O'Hara's concept of the poem as the chronicle of the creative act that produces it was strengthened by his intimate experience of Pollock's, Kline's, and de Kooning