Frank O'Hara

O’Hara met longtime partner Vincent Warren in the summer of 1959. Warren, a Canadian ballet dancer, was the inspiration for several of O'Hara's poems, including "Poem (A la Recherche d’Gertrude Stein)", "Les Luths", "Poem (So many echoes in my head)", and "Having a Coke With You". Warren died on October 25, 2017, 51 years after O'Hara's death.

The poetry of Frank O'Hara features prominently in Rachel Bonds's 2017 play At the Old Place.

Irish artist David Kitt released "Having a Coke with You", sampling O'Hara's poem, under his New Jackson moniker in 2014.

On June 10, 2014, a plaque was unveiled outside one of O'Hara's New York City residences, at 441 East Ninth Street. Poets Tony Towle, who inherited the apartment from O'Hara, and Edmund Berrigan read his works at the event.

In the 2011 film Beastly, the lovestruck main characters read O'Hara's poem "Having a Coke with You" aloud to each other.

Rilo Kiley's 2004 album More Adventurous is titled after a line in O'Hara's poem "Meditations in an Emergency": "Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous..." The title track references the same line: "I read with every broken heart, we should become more adventurous"

O'Hara is a minor character in William Boyd's 2002 novel Any Human Heart.

"For Frank O'Hara" is a 1973 chamber ensemble work by American composer Morton Feldman.

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.

In Martha's song "1967, I Miss You, I'm Lonely", the lyric, "I look at you and I am confident that I'd rather look at you than all the portraits in existence in the world, except possibly O'Hara by Grace Hartigan," references both O'Hara's poem, "Having a Coke With You", and Grace Hartigan's portrait of O'Hara.

In the early morning hours of July 24, 1966, O'Hara was struck by a jeep on the Fire Island beach, after the beach taxi in which he had been riding with a group of friends broke down in the dark. He died the next day at age 40 of a ruptured liver at Bayview Hospital in Mastic Beach, Long Island. Attempts to bring negligent homicide charges against 23-year-old driver Kenneth L. Ruzicka were unsuccessful; many of O'Hara's friends felt the local police had conducted a lax investigation to protect one of their own locals. O'Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery on Long Island. The painter Larry Rivers, a longtime friend and lover, delivered one of the eulogies, along with Bill Berkson, Edwin Denby, and René d'Harnoncourt.

Several episodes of Mad Men (season 2) reference O'Hara's collection of poetry, Meditations in an Emergency. The first episode shows a character reading from it over lunch in a bar (recalling O'Hara's 1964 collection Lunch Poems) as does the last episode, which uses the book's title as its episode title. In the twelfth episode, Don Draper finds his copy of Meditations in an Emergency in Anna Draper's home in California.

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.

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."

From 1959 to 1963, the two lived at 441 East 9th Street in the East Village. 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 Museum of Modern Art, selling postcards at the admissions desk, and began to write seriously.

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.

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.

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.

Frank O'Hara met Joe LeSueur in 1951, and the two maintained a relationship until 1965, living together on and off from 1955 to 1965.

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.

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.

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.