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Frank O'Hara (1926 - 1966)
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 In
Memory of My Feelings : Frank O'Hara and American Art by
Russell Ferguson
Not only was Frank O'Hara
(1926-1966) one of the most important American poets of his
generation, he was also intimately involved with the art world of
the 1950s and 1960s, a time when New York had become the cultural
capital of the world. As an associate curator at the Museum of
Modern Art, O'Hara organized a series of important exhibitions,
notably of the work of Franz Kline and of Robert Motherwell. In
Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art explores this
key period in modern art by presenting artists who were associated
with O'Hara and whose seminal works are reflected in his poetry.
Featuring over 80 works by twenty-three artists, the book focuses
on works closely tied to specific poems by Frank O'Hara, notably
Jasper Johns's In Memory of My FeelingsFrank O'Hara and Grace
Hartigan's Oranges. Included are direct collaborations between
O'Hara and various artists such as Joe Brainard, Norman Bluhm, and
Larry Rivers, as well as portraits of the poet by Elaine de
Kooning and Alex Katz. Franz Kline, Alice Neel, and Joan Mitchell
are some of the other artists highlighted. The book is a timely
re-examination of the relationship between art and poetry at this
crucial moment in American art. It also offers new insights into
the charismatic figure of Frank O'Hara and his world.
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Come and have some lunch with Frank O'Hara for
half and hour or so--get a bibliography, links to other fan sites
and poems online, play a few games, and watch the floating text
boxes go by.
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From a Statement for The New American Poetry,
1959.
Excerpt:
I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I
experience it, and at times when I would rather be dead the
thought that I could never write another poem has so far stopped
me. I think this is an ignoble attitude. I would rather die for
love, but I haven't.
I don't think of fame or posterity (as Keats so
grandly and genuinely did), nor do I care about clarifying
experiences for anyone or bettering (other than accidentally)
anyone's state or social relations, nor am I for any particular
technical development in the American language simply because I
found it necessary. 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 what ever form I can find
them. What is clear to me in my work is probably obscure to
others, and vice versa. 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. I dislike a great deal
of contemporary poetry -- all of the past you read is usually
quite great -- but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side...
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From Poetry
Exhibits at poetry.org
Excerpt:
Frank (Francis Russell) O'Hara was born on June
27, 1926, in Baltimore, Maryland. He grew up in Massachusetts, and
later studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from
1941 to 1944. O'Hara then served in the South Pacific and Japan as
a sonarsman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War
II.
Following the war, O'Hara studied at Harvard
College, where he majored in music and did some composing. While
he also wrote poetry, he was more influenced by contemporary
music, which was his first love, and art. However, he did have a
few favorite poets: Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Pasternak, and Mayakovsky.
While at Harvard, O'Hara met John
Ashbery and soon began publishing poems in the Harvard
Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major
and left Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English. He then
attended graduate school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
and received his M.A. in 1951. That autumn O'Hara moved into an
apartment in New York. He was soon employed at the front desk of
the Museum of Modern Art and began to write seriously.
O'Hara's early work was considered both
provocative and provoking. 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 Larry Rivers,
Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns, also leaders of the New York
School, became a source of inspiration for his highly original
poetry. He attempted to produce with words the effects these
artists had created on canvas. In certain instances, he
collaborated with the painters to make "poem-paintings,"
paintings with word texts. 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.
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From Art in America
Critical essay by David Lehman
Excerpt:
The impact of poet, curator and critic Frank
O'Hara on postwar American art is examined in a traveling
exhibition now at the Wexner Center. The show brings together
works of art that O'Hara inspired, collaborated on, posed for and
wrote about.
Who was Frank O'Hara that the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles should mount an exhibition
centered on him? A poet, beloved, anthologized, imitated, studied,
though still underrated by the sort of academic critic who metes
out the words major and "minor," O'Hara championed the
great avant-garde art of his time. He stood in relation to the New
York Schools of painting and poetry in the 1950s and early '60s as
the poet Guillaume Apollinaire stood in relation to Cubism in the
Paris of the teens. O'Hara could provoke paintings--and
participate in them as model, collaborator or kibbitzer--with the
same seeming ease with which he composed what he disarmingly
called his "I do this I do that" poems on his lunch
break at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he worked his
way up from postcard clerk to curator. What made him so singular a
presence among painters was his generosity of spirit, which
transcended the usual factions. When everyone else was either for
Pollock or for de Kooning, as if it were a choose-up stickball
game, O'Hara embraced both. (He wrote a monograph on the former
and was planning major retrospectives on both when he died.) His
enthusiasm for the work of others, including artists far from the
Ab-Ex orbit, never flagged. "To us," the composer Morton
Feldman said, "he seemed to dance from canvas to canvas, from
party to party, from poem to poem--a Fred Astaire with the whole
art community as his Ginger Rogers..."
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This site hosts extensive resources on O'Hara,
including biographies, a bibliography, related links, and essays.
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
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