Frank O

’Hara’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper

Mark Doty

Urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny, O’Hara would

allow a realm of material and associations alien to academic verse to pour into his poems:

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; anything seemed ready

material for inclusion into the particular order that the moment of composition would call

for. Dadaist even in his approach to his own work, O’Hara composed huge numbers of poems

with apparent spontaneity and ease; a friend estimates that his vast Collected Poems contains

perhaps only a third of his work, which was often scribbled or typed quickly, stuffed in

drawers or left about in stacks. This relaxed attitude toward preservation and collection

results in a chronology of composition quite different from the dates of publication, but Meditations

in an Emergency and the poems written throughout the late fifties comprise his finest

work. "The Day Lady Died," "Steps," "A True Account of Talking to

the Sun at Fire Island" (a brilliant re-visioning of Mayakovsky’s poem on the same

theme), and O’Hara’s famous lament upon reading of the collapse of Lana Turner ("I

have been to lots of parties / and acted perfectly disgraceful / but I never actually

collapsed / Oh Lana Turner we love you get up") mark O’Hara at the height of his

powers. His language is often casual, relaxed in diction, yet it presses forward with a

kind of breathless urgency, a will to celebrate the density and richness of

experience—in all its refusal to be summed up, to marshal itself into an orderly

vision—by including as much as possible. Many of these pieces have been labeled

"I do this, I do that" poems; they report whole chunks of experience, days of

walking, conversing, noticing, with careful specificity. Place-names and the names of

friends and acquaintances abound; paradoxically, their inclusion seems to make the poems more

universal, more available, convinced as we are by their artfully shaped controlling

tone of the authenticity of the speaker’s voice. The notion of contrasting and

mutually influencing elements arranged on a surface—a key concept in Abstract

Expressionism—is important in O’Hara’s work. The poems seem, indeed, to spill one

into the other, creating one immense canvas which displays in all its parts O’Hara’s

character engaged in all the business of living—alternately joyful, petulant, obtuse,

tired, awed. The finest of his love poems—"Steps," for example, which

concludes "oh god its wonderful / to get out of bed / and, drink too much coffee /

and smoke too many cigarettes / and love you so much"—disarm with their

directness. Their comic, carefully built quotidian contexts allow O’Hara to work with

direct statement in an inimitable fashion, generating a current of emotion which rises

above his camp humor, his exuberant ironies and mocking play.

from A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Ed. Jack Myers and David

Wojahn. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Copyright . 1991 by the Board of Trustees

of Southern Illinois University.

Claudia Milstead

O’HARA, Frank (27 Mar. 1926-25 July 1966), poet, was born Francis

Russell O’Hara in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Russell Joseph O’Hara and Katherine

Broderick, who both came from strict Irish-Catholic families. O’Hara always believed he

was born 27 June 1926, but his parents apparently lied about his birthdate to hide the

fact that he was conceived before their marriage. Shortly after their wedding in Grafton,

Massachusetts, in September 1925, the couple moved to Baltimore, where their child was

born six months later. They lived in Baltimore for eighteen months before being summoned

back to Grafton so that Russell O’Hara could run the family farm for his ailing uncle.

In June 1944, shortly after his high school graduation, O’Hara enlisted in the U.S.

Navy. He served as a sonarman third class on the destroyer USS Nicholas. After

receiving an honorable discharge in 1946, O’Hara went to Harvard on the GI Bill. He took

creative writing classes from John Ciardi and earned a B.A. in 1950. With Ciardi’s

recommendation, O’Hara was given a graduate fellowship in comparative literature at the

University of Michigan, where he earned an M.A. in 1951. His collection of poems, "A

Byzantine Place," and Try! Try!, a verse play, won O’Hara the Avery Hopwood

Major Award in poetry.

O’Hara then moved to New York to join fellow poet John Ashbery, whom he had met at

Harvard. Living at first on the money from the Hopwood, O’Hara wrote poetry and explored

the city. In New York O’Hara was finally free to live openly as a homosexual and to

indulge his interest in the arts. He worked briefly as an assistant to

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