When I taught poetry, I always arrived with pencils, pieces of paper, and a printed out poem by Frank O’Hara. If my students, middle schoolers forced to cram into libraries and over-filled classrooms, had heard of any poets before, O’Hara wasn’t one of them. With his short declarations and excited exclamations, he was a far cry from Robert Frost, Shel Silverstein, or anyone else past teachers had forced upon them.
Here, finally, was a poet without the careful composition that made poetry feel stuffy, like some hidden language adults pretended to understand. I watched their faces screw up with little laughs reading about Lana Turner’s fainting spell—a room full of twelve-year-olds giggling about 1950s movie gossip and an actress they had never heard of before. It was like an inside joke.
Anyone familiar with O’Hara’s work will recognize this feeling of camaraderie—there’s an immediacy to his work, an off-the-cuff wit that makes you, almost immediately, co-conspirators. In his artistic manifesto (which he wrote, in typical O’Hara fashion, in a single hour while Donald Allen was on his way to pick it up), he described writing a poem for a single person: as if he just as easily could have picked up a phone instead of a pen. It was unlike anything my students had read before.
How, amidst the poetic structure and planning they were used to, could it not change their idea of what poetry was? They weren’t alone. In the 100 years since his birth, and 60 since his death, generations of writers have found inspiration in his casual profundity. In many ways, he never stopped being the king of the New York art scene.
I asked them to be like Frank O’Hara, noticing colors and sounds and people we encountered.
O’Hara is most famous for his collection Lunch Poems, written in his lunch break as a receptionist from the Museum of Modern Art—proving even future curators/art critics must begin at the front desk. He’s often been called a painter’s poet, and, rejected by the conventional literary scene, found himself faster friends with the Abstract Expressionists than the literary world. Lunch Poems—reviewed by Ted Berrigan, as, emphatically “a great book!” and one of the “most important documents in contemporary poetry”—includes some of his most famous works, including “The Day Lady Died,” “Ave Maria,” and “A Step Away From Them.” This last one was my usual classroom pick. Selecting an eager student to read it aloud, a school’s worth of seventh graders would follow along on their printouts, as they began:
It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess.
O’Hara called this style “I do this, I do that” poems. He had a name for it more broadly: Personism (“a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about”), marked not by the absence of ideas, but by the absence of thinking. “You just go on your nerve,” he wrote. “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.’” You can picture him, walking down W 53rd, time ticking out on his lunch break, composing with a nerve so strong it poured out of him without trying.
Even when I hadn’t cleared it with the school administration, the next part of my lesson would be interactive. Heading out in more of a blob than a single-file line, I would gather the hordes of seventh graders out in the hallway, pens in hand, for a Poetry Walk. I asked them to be like Frank O’Hara, noticing colors and sounds and people we encountered. When we reconvened, they brought me details that they’d walked by for weeks without noticing—a crack in the wall, a spiderweb in the corner by the front door. Eight years later, and I still remember their specific examples.
I had taught them what Frank O’Hara had first taught me: poetry is not, as some may think, an arduous exercise in word choice and simile. Instead, it’s a way of looking, of noticing details we might have otherwise overlooked. It’s too tempting to get used to the sight of the hard hats, to no longer ask what, exactly, they’re protecting. The glistening torsos of the construction workers are all too easy to write off as sweaty. You need a fresh set of eyes to see. His poems sometimes took mere minutes to write in part, perhaps, because he was writing them every time he looked around. As he wrote in Autobiographia Literaria:
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
The best O’Hara acolytes are the ones who encourage us to see the beauty in the world, attuned to torsos on a New York Street or the majesty of making eggs for a loved one. The So-Called Second New York School (following behind O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch) spent their early days studying this like they were cheating on a test. Bill Berkson and O’Hara’s joint chapbook, Hymns of St Bridget, began with Berkson attempting to copy O’Hara’s way of seeing in a poem about a church steeple, what he called a “cheap imitation” of his style. “It is to you, bending limp and ridiculous, on Ninth / Street, that I turn,” he writes, finding the personality and humor to recast a landmark he walked by everyday. It’s easy to take a church seriously; it’s much harder to see it for all of its bent absurdity. (A posthumous journal of Berkson’s lists / thoughts / reflections on O’Hara—A Frank O’Hara Notebook—was published in 2019.)
O’Hara’s literary influence has been, in a word, enormous.
Ron Padgett: “reading poems like [A Step Away From Them] by Frank let me realize I could relax… and say anything I wanted.”
Alice Notley: “I was often working out in what I conceived to be O’Hara’s forms…I wanted to make work like that.”
Poets in his circle each took something different from O’Hara, adding up elements of his work to create the bedrock foundation of contemporary poetry. You can hear him in the humor that peppers literary magazines, and each literary pop culture reference. The short, conversational colloquialisms that he proved could be poetic.
The simplicity of O’Hara’s work means it’s just as exciting as it is accessible.
Nothing, however, has lived on quite like his appreciation for the mundane. While O’Hara wasn’t the first champion of the quotidian, the years following his sudden death (he was tragically hit by a jeep on a Fire Island beach at the age of 40) have made his work a blueprint for capturing modern life. This past summer, 60 years after his death, I came across a work by Pip McGough in The Brooklyn Rail that seethed with a matter-of-factness, an I-do-this, I-do-that quality that observed thick bus glass I had never thought to notice before. I see O’Hara’s influence often when I open the pages of a publication. In 2024, for instance, I remember reading Alex Dimitrov’s “Everything Always” in The New Yorker, where he writes
A man dangles a cigarette
over a fire escape on Crosby.
It’s so early, I am still in last night.
All of life honks.
The streets steam.
O’Hara is all over this, like he’s the unspoken other end of Dimitrov’s telephone call. In car honks and steaming concrete, he sees in a way that would make O’Hara proud. He’s slightly sadder, less exuberant, but he picks out details—unglamorous, unspecial, seemingly unimportant—that make you feel the NOW-ness of being alive. In a lesson plan for The Poetry Foundation, Dimitrov wrote about how O’Hara can teach students how to see the beauty in the everyday. “A poem has already happened to you today,” he begins. A poem is happening to students, poets, teachers, everyone every hour, every minute.
It’s easy to like Frank O’Hara. There’s a reason I started my students off with him: unlike his friend and New York School colleague, the famously inscrutable John Ashbery, the simplicity of his work means it’s just as exciting as it is accessible. A friend told me recently her MFA professor, a prominent documentary poet, read O’Hara when she wanted to be reminded of the “pleasure of poetry.”
This must be a contributing factor to why he’s been so much in vogue in popular culture—his rhapsodic observations are understood and enjoyed by anyone who can share in the experience of being alive. Don Draper, in Mad Men, reads a copy of Meditations in an Emergency, and “Mayakovsky” (perhaps my favorite O’Hara poem) is read aloud in an episode. Ada Calhoun’s, in her much-discussed memoir Also a Poet, uses O’Hara as the peg that an exploration of her father/daughter relationship hangs on. As Sophia Stewart writes in The LA Review of Books: Frank O’Hara is everywhere, in TV and books and articles and epigraphs.
To anyone who has spent any time with O’Hara, finding a favorite Lunch Poem or looking up his references to 1950s culture, it makes sense. I believe there are two types of enjoyment in poetry: one in the deeply analytical work, cataloguing the sheer expansiveness of references, finding a poem open wider and wider to you until you lose sight of the bottom. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” for example, or Edmund Spensers’s “The Faerie Queen.” O’Hara’s is the second kind. He’s felt rather than understood.
When O’Hara died, he left behind hundreds of unpublished poems in every nook and cranny of his apartment. I like to think about the ones stuffed in the back of his desk drawer, jotted down as if he were possessed, freed only when the errant thought hit the page. There’s no pretension to his work: just a poet, seeing the world, telling you about it. 100 years after his birth, we’re hungry for authenticity. Frank O’Hara, with each glistening torso, never fails to tell you something true.
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