a Tribute to - Poetry Society of America

a Tr i b u t e t o
F R A N K
O’H A R A

Homage
Poets Discuss
Their Favorite
Frank O’Hara
Poems
Memorial Day 1950
—John Ashbery
I
’ve always felt a special connection to Frank’s “Memorial
.Day 1950.” For one thing, I rescued it from oblivion. It
wasn’t in his papers when he died. Then I remembered I had
once typed it out in a letter to Kenneth Koch when he was in
France on a Fulbright. I had been trying to persuade
Kenneth, who at that time was insisting that he and I were
the only important young American poets, to include Frank
in our mini-cenacle, and sent him Frank’s poems in an effort
to convince him. I was successful since Kenneth returned
persuaded and kept the letter in his files.
I first read the poem in the summer of 1950 (I assume it had
been written on Memorial Day of that year), on a trip to visit
Frank in Boston. He was staying in a house on the back of
Beacon Hill that belonged to his friend Cervin (“Cerv”)
Robinson’s family, who were away. I had graduated from
Harvard in 1949 and was living in New York. Frank, though
a year older than I, graduated in 1950 since he had spent two
years in the Navy during the war. I was missing him and
Boston, and I remember our going to lots of movies (“Panic
in the Streets” and Olivier’s “Hamlet” among them) and
drinking zombies (a newly invented drink, I think) at a bar
near the State House. I too stayed at the Robinsons’ and
remember admiring Frank’s room for the kind of Spartan
chic he always managed to create around him. The room
4
looked out on a courtyard of trees and was practically bare
except for an army cot and blanket and a frying pan on the
floor, used as an ashtray, an idea he got from George
Montgomery, a sort of arbiter of Spartan chic who had been
at Harvard with us. Hence, no doubt, the line: “How many
trees and frying pans I’ve loved and lost.” There were
probably reproductions from MOMA and maybe a clay
candelabra, but I don’t remember them.
The poem’s aggressively modernist tone may seem a little
dated today, but at the time such figures as Max Ernst,
Gertrude Stein, Boris Pasternak, Paul Klee, Auden and
Rimbaud were far from being accepted cultural icons, at least
in the world of Boston-Cambridge. (The year before, Frank
and I had attended a concert that featured the premier of
Schoenberg’s String Trio. We both loved it, but I remember
Frank getting into an argument with a young member of the
Harvard music faculty who insisted that Schoenberg was
literally crazy, and that Frank was too for liking him.)
If his truculent modernist stance, through no fault of his,
inevitably seems old-fashioned today, his political
incorrectness, as illustrated in the passage about the sewage
singing under his bright white toilet seat, was decades ahead
of its time.
To paraphrase his Lana Turner poem: “oh Frank O’Hara we
love you get up.”

from Memorial Day 1950 1
Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world;
just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down
outside my window by a crew of creators.
Once he got his axe going everyone was upset
enough to fight for the last ditch and heap
of rubbish.
Through all that surgery I thought
I had a lot to say, and named several last things
Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for; but then
the war was over, those things had survived
and even when you’re scared art is no dictionary.
Max Ernst told us that.
How many trees and frying pans
I loved and lost! Guernica hollered look out!
but we were all busy hoping our eyes were talking
to Paul Klee. My mother and father asked me and
I told them from my tight blue pants we should
love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures.
Wasted child! I’ll club you on the shins! I
wasn’t surprised when the older people entered
my cheap hotel room and broke my guitar and my can
of blue paint.
At that time all of us began to think
with our bare hands and even with blood all over
them, we knew vertical from horizontal, we never
smeared anything except to find out how it lived.
Fathers of Dada! You carried shining erector sets
in your rough bony pockets, you were generous
and they were lovely as chewing gum or flowers!
Thank you! […]
The Dirty Poems
of Frank O’Hara
—Elaine Equi
Ihave always found the idea that poetry should be uplifting
.a depressing one. Our ideal self is our most boring self,
except perhaps as a study in how far we will go to maintain
clean hands, a clear conscience and an unequivocal
demarcation between our nobler (or at least our more
politically correct) instincts and our baser ones.
1 All citations from Collected Poems by Frank O’Hara. Copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith,
Administratix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of
Random House, Inc.
A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A
5
For the most part, “negative” emotions such as greed, envy,
cruelty or pettiness are rarely allowed in poetry except as bad
guys to be killed off, then transcended. Occasionally, a poet
(particularly a confessional poet) will confess to them, but
always with a sense that he or she has sinned. Unfortunately
even lust, with its blatant objectification of the other, no
longer seems quite acceptable.
Of course, not all poetry makes human emotion the focal
point of its content. But even in more abstract and
experimental styles, poets often assume the moral
high-ground of being set apart from the world of industry,
ambition and back-stabbing aggression.
Perhaps that is why, when looking over all of Frank O’Hara’s
most impressive body of work, I keep returning to the two
following rather modest lyrics on “dirt” and “hate.” First of
all, consider how amazing it is to even find “dirt” in a poem.
Easily, nonchalantly, it locates us within the urban experience.
In poems extolling nature, one finds “earth.” In the
country, there is rich “loam.” But in Frank O’Hara (and in
New York City) one finds simple and unpretentious dirt. Dirt
is pollution, the inevitable by-product of commerce. And in
poetry, commerce (as we know) is a dirty word. Yet here
there is no need to separate the two worlds. In fact, it
would be impossible to do so. “You don’t refuse to
breathe do you”?
Dirt is also slang for gossip, dish, the juicy lowdown. Dirt,
like talk, is cheap. This connotation of the word seems
exceedingly appropriate in helping to characterize O’Hara’s
style and contribution to contemporary poetry. In his work,
he gossiped about everything from artists and parties to the
weather, creating an aura of intimacy, excitement and expectation
around whatever he chose to discuss. Today we have
the tabloids to satisfy our prodigious appetite for dirt. But
perhaps, if we were less threatened by our own ambiguity,
the need to vilify others wouldn’t be quite so strong.
In “Song” the literal and figurative qualities of dirt morph
into a single character familiar to all of us: the bad influence
(“attractive as his character is bad”). It is typical of O’Hara
that the poem, in its way, celebrates the whole idea of bad
influences, finding them to be both seductive and necessary—
even educational (“is the character less bad. no. it improves
constantly”). Obviously, Frank is ready and willing to avail
himself of this and, we may assume, many other bad
influences. True, he was writing in the ’50s and ’60s when
smoking, drinking and promiscuity all seemed more sensible

modes of behavior, but the underlying message of finding
nothing pure or uncompromised has wider applications.
While hinting at a sexual encounter, the poem itself is about
those things.
In “Poem” on the other hand, Frank assumes the role of bad
influence by encouraging the person he’s addressing, as well
as the reader, to experience (actually, enjoy) darker emotions
such as hate, unkindness and selfishness. Surprisingly, it turns
out to be a sweet and gentle poem of assurance that one need
not always be good in order to be loved.
I must admit that this has always been a favorite poem. Poets
look to other, more well-known poets for permission—and
for me, this permission feels retroactively custom made. To a
woman who is tired of being passive and nurturing, and to a
poet who is tired of being sensitive, and finally to someone
who is just plain tired, living in our relentlessly competitive
and upbeat times, it offers relief. “Don’t be shy of unkindness,
either/ it’s cleansing and allows you to be direct.”
O’Hara is also a great one for mocking the heroic notion
that artists feel more deeply than your average individual
and suffer more because of it. “Think of filth, is it really
awesome/ Neither is hate.” Absurd as the idea of “poet
as Designated Empath” sounds, variations of it continue
to live in the public imagination of what a poet is and
does. That’s why refusing to take such notions seriously
is still a radical step.
Art stays art by maintaining strict borders between itself and
the rest of life. Like Duchamp who came before him, and
Andy Warhol who came after him, Frank O’Hara, whether
intentionally or not, is one of the figures who questioned and
minimized borders. In the sacred temple of fifties art,
O’Hara’s work was like a window that let in, not only fresh
air, but also dirt.
Maybe if the battle between high and low culture had ended
back then, Frank’s poems might be merely interesting or just
terribly entertaining to us today. They would have served
their purpose. Instead, when I reread them, they strike me
with a now-more-than-ever vitality.
Art is not so easily democratized. It continues to seek new
ways to reclaim its privileged status and frighten worshippers
into hushed subservience. But if there is a way to be both an
aesthete and a populist, Frank O’Hara found it.
A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A
6
In addition to the great pleasure his work gives, it also
teaches a valuable lesson. Thanks to him, when art becomes
religion (whether of the traditional or avant-garde variety), I
know what to do. I light a candle to dirt.
Poem
Hate is only one of many responses
true, hurt and hate go hand in hand
but why be afraid of hate, it is only there
think of filth, is it really awesome
neither is hate
don’t be shy of unkindness, either
it’s cleansing and allows you to be direct
like an arrow that feels something
out and out meanness, too, lets love breathe
you don’t have to fight off getting in too deep
you can always get out if you’re not too scared
an ounce of prevention’s
enough to poison the heart
don’t think of others
until you have thought of yourself, are true
all of these things, if you feel them
will be graced by a certain reluctance
and turn into gold
if felt by me, will be smilingly deflected
by your mysterious concern
Song
Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that’s what you think of in the city
does it just seem dirty
that’s what you think of in the city
you don’t refuse to breathe do you
someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very
he’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes
that’s what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that’s not a thought that’s soot
and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don’t refuse to breathe do you

True Accounts
—Mark Doty
There are moments in any artistic life when it seems
validation will never come from without, and that all
one’s striving and laboring haven’t the least thing to do with
whether anybody ever sees one’s work. When this crisis of
belief becomes acute, it becomes necessary to minister to
one’s own needs, to award oneself some form of recognition.
Nobody ever did so more good-humoredly and graciously
than Frank O’Hara, the second poet ever to be directly
addressed by the sun.
The first writer that luminary chose “to speak to personally”
was Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1920’s “An Extraordinary
Adventure Which Happened to Me, Vladimir Mayakovsky,
One Summer in the Country,” the Russian Modernist tells us
exactly where he is—“Pushkino, Mount Akula, Rumyantsev
Cottage, 20 miles down the Yaroslav Railway”—when he
yells an invitation to a sun whose predictability he’s grown
weary of. Naturally, he doesn’t expect an answer when he
shouts (in Herbert Marshall’s translation):
Listen, golden brightbrow,
instead of vainly
setting in the air,
have tea with me
right now!
But the sun, “of his own goodwill,” takes the poet up on his
invitation, comes into the garden, banking his fires, and then
right into the house, ready for tea and jam. Before long poet
and fireball are clapping each other on the back, and the sun
is comparing their vocations:
Why, comrade, we’re a pair!
Come, poet,
let us dawn
and sing
away the drabness of the universe.
A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A
7
But where these two seem like a couple of drinking buddies,
all bluster and conviviality, there’s something far subtler at
work in the visitation that same heavenly body makes to
Frank O’Hara, asleep in a summer house on Fire Island,
thirty-some years later. O’Hara unabashedly allows the sun
to come to him, and that big Russian roar is replaced by
something less ferocious than petulant, albeit steady and
warm. When he asks the barely awake Frank, “You may be/
wondering why I’ve come so close?” this sun’s character is
clinched—polite, conspiratorial, friendly albeit capable of
hauteur, and bearing a distinct message.
A message launched by a deliciously shameless pun: “Frankly
I wanted to tell you/ I like your poetry.” Imagine the potential
pitfalls facing a poem of self-praise, a poem intended to
cheer oneself up about one’s own artistic achievement!
O’Hara’s brilliant solution is not only to put the praise in
someone else’s mouth, but to make it funny from the first
word and then to keep it appealingly qualified through the
sun’s decided unwillingness to inflate the poet’s accomplishment:
“I see a lot/ on my rounds and you’re okay. You may/
not be the greatest thing on earth….”
Now the poem begins to swim into deeper waters, as the sun
turns to increasingly lovely stanzas of advice, delivered in a
colloquial tone that keeps his principles, so to speak, down
to earth. It’s here that the poet is given his highest
compliment: “And now that you/ are making your own days,
so to speak,/ even if no one reads you but me/ you won’t be
depressed.” Even if a human gaze doesn’t fall on these
poems, sunlight always will. But now the poet doesn’t even
need that external light; he is “making his own days.” He’s
become a source of illumination, one that warms and orders
the world. Mayakovsky says that both his motto and the
sun’s is “always to shine,” and here O’Hara shares that
identification, poet and sun aligned in vocation.
Characteristically, the heightened nature of this moment is
undercut by O’Hara’s swooning exclamation, and the sun’s
comic response. But just as we’re imagining a talkative sun
fitting himself between Manhattan avenues, the sun bursts
forth with a rhetorical flight of startling gravity; it is a call
for a kind of generous and detached tenderness towards the
world which one can’t quite imagine O’Hara having been
able to make without his gleaming solar mask in place.
That tiny poem left in Frank’s brain might have been quite
enough to end “A True Account” on a note of graceful
charm, but there is a further distance to travel. If this poem

is O’Hara at his warmest, it is also finally as resonant and
strange as a good dream. Whoever calls the sun also calls the
poet; it as if the poem’s pointed to voices and forces beyond
its cosmic theater, raising its own stakes. Suddenly the sun
seems a kind of intermediary between poet and larger,
unknowable forces—unknowable at least for now. There is
more to be understood; there is meaning up ahead, to be
gathered and understood. Somewhere in the world, this poet
is called, is wanted, has a purpose, a destination. This
mystery prepares us for the final sentence, the poem’s most
resonant and memorable phrase: “Darkly he rose, and
then I slept.”
And so what begins as a comical act of self-blessing—something
a poet as out-of-the-mainstream as O’Hara was in his
own day could certainly have used—becomes a statement of
a deeper sense of vocation, of connection to mystery. We all
know that “true” in a title is intended to signal exactly the
opposite, and yet O’Hara’s poem arrives, through the vigor
of its lies, at something entirely credible. Endearingly funny,
marvelously knowing in its self-regard, his poem becomes a
kind of touchstone for makers everywhere: both a slyly ironic
blessing and an evocation of the mystery of a life of art.
from A True Account of Talking
to the Sun at Fire Island
“…Frankly I wanted to tell you
I like your poetry. I see a lot
on my rounds and you’re okay. You may
not be the greatest thing on earth, but
you’re different. Now I’ve heard some
say you’re crazy, they being excessively
calm themselves to my mind and other
crazy poets think that you’re a boring
reactionary. Not me.
Just keep on
like I do and pay no attention. You’ll
find that people always will complain
about the atmosphere, either too hot
or too cold too bright or too dark, days
too short or too long.
If you don’t appear
at all one day they think you’re lazy
or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.
And don’t worry about your lineage
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on
the jungle, you know, on the tundra
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were
I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting
for you to get to work.
A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A
8
And now that you
are making your own days, so to speak,
even if no one reads you but me
you won’t be depressed. Not
everyone can look up, even at me. It
hurts their eyes.”
Essay on Style
—W.S. Merwin
For Frank O’Hara, writing poetry was tightrope walking.
What he balanced on that swaying, impossible, all-butnonexistent
surface up in the vastnesses of mid-air is part of
what those of us who love his poetry keep recognizing, step
by step, as we read his poems. All of it, apparently, is there at
once: the totally serious and the utterly goofy, high camp and
startling plainness, the dailiness of existence and the
perennial risk of once-only art. For all their singularity, their
tone and stance and daring, their difference from those of
anyone else at all, his poems often seem luminously transparent,
and it becomes clear that for Frank O’Hara life itself was
tightrope walking. Excitement and terror, the naked-new and
the fondly clung-to, were balanced in each moment without
particular regard for probability. And the hilarity, at every
move. He is one of the funniest of poets, and his seriousness
was never in danger of falling into earnestness. “You just go
on your nerve,” he says in that other great essay on style, his
“Personism: A Manifesto.” But you don’t just go on that.
There had to be the talent. And it had to be his own.
So “Essay on Style” is scarcely an essay in any ready-made
sense, but a run-through. And style is a way of moving,
appearing, performing, presenting. One of its elements is the
unexpected, but that in turn has subtle laws of its own. It
cannot just be any old unexpected thing, there has to be an
authenticity to it that is part of its surprise, becoming the
astonishing leaps and turns that we recognize as O’Hara’s
“personally.” And the voice, of course, is part of that: the

phrases that seem to have been picked out of his everyday
chatter and flung back with a new resonance, amplified, as
though he were his own parrot:
I am painting
the floor yellow, Bill is painting it
wouldn’t you know my mother would call
up
and complain?
and then it’s the play-back, and himself imitating himself
imitating his mother:
well if Mayor Wagner won’t allow private
cars on Manhattan because of the snow, I
will probably never see her again
and rapid though the flutter-stop is, situations, circumstances,
troubles, irritations, crises one after the other threaten to
enter
my growingly more perpetual state
and then with a reflection on the reality of an angel in the
Frick we are sitting in Jack Delaney’s thinking of what Edwin
is thinking about a new poem of Frank’s, and Frank begins
eliminating words from the language. Not only is the wish to
do without words (logical connectors, as and but, to start
with—after all, as he has said in the “Manifesto,” logic,
which pain “always produces,” is “very bad for you”) is
part of the style; the way he has arrived at that and the
way he pursues it are also manifestations of it, and where
it has got him:
where do you think I’ve
got to? The spectacle of a grown man
decorating
a Christmas tree disgusts me that’s
where
more words are banished from the language, and then:
treating
the typewriter as an intimate organ why not?
By the time the poem rises to its final flounce:
I am going to eat alone for the rest of my life
it is clear that the style is an essay, in the old run-through
sense. Trying it on and wearing it, going with it. It is his style
A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A
9
that makes the poems complete when he ends them, and
makes them work, as they do, again and again. When he
talks of treating the typewriter as an intimate organ because
“nothing else is (intimate)” he is describing, more or less,
what he has done. The poems work because their intimacy or
their play at intimacy, their closeness and their performance
convey something of O’Hara, naked, postured, made, and
immediately unquestionable, recognizable and pure. And
after “Essay on Style” we are on to Mary Desti’s Ass, which
we never do get news of.
from Essay on Style
[…] drinking a cognac while Edwin
read my new poem it occurred to me how impossible
it is to fool Edwin not that I don’t know as
much as the next about obscurity in modern verse
but he
always knows what it’s about as well
as what it is do you think we can ever
strike as and but, too, out of the language
then we can attack well since it has no
application whatsoever neither as a state
of being or a rest for the mind no such
things available
where do you think I’ve
got to? the spectacle of a grown man
decorating
a Christmas tree disgusts me that’s
where
that’s one of the places yetbutaswell
I’m glad I went to that party for Ed Dorn
last night though he didn’t show up do you think
,Bill, we can get rid of though also, and also?
maybe your
lettrism is the only answer treating
the typewriter as an intimate organ why not?
nothing else is (intimate)
no I am not going
to have you “in“ for dinner nor am I going “out”
I am going to eat alone for the rest of my life

Hôtel Transylvanie
—Barbara Guest
The first clue to the meaning of the poem is the title, a
nineteenth-century title. Transylvania belonged once to
the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It belonged once to Romania.
It is in the Carpathian Mountains where Dracula comes
from. Although we note O’Hara does not mention this
blood-thirsty Count.
In our times the Carpathians have been a refuge for those
fleeing the Communist regimes of Romania and Hungary.
It is just possible that this hotel with the haunted name may
have been noted by O’Hara on his walks in Paris, and that
his imagination lent to it a sinister aspect and an accord
with a rumored place of political refuge, as much as with
Count Dracula.
If the Hôtel Transylvanie were staged, and the poem is
theatrical as are many of O’Hara’s poems, the hotel guests
would wear masks. Disguise is a theme of the poem. Another
is chance. Chance has a role in gambling and poetry. In a
place like the Hôtel Transylvanie they may speak of political
duels; there is even a mention by the poet of “rigging the
deck” (of cards). These guests have escaped from a sinister
regime; they may be in disguise, in order to live.
it will take them a long time to know
who I am/ why I came there/ what and why I am and made to happen…
The residents of the Hôtel believe in chance, which may help
them to survive while gambling with cards and with life.
oh hôtel, you should be merely a bed
surrounded by walls where two souls meet […]
but not as cheaters at card have something to win….
O’Hara is wishing there were not the false note, that the
poem would not be forced to obey the omens, the music of
the poem be less forbidding. In this sort of hotel faces wear a
mask. O’Hara puts on his mask as the poem gradually edges
toward the zones of danger. The poem is now about surface
disequillibrium. The setting of the poem begins to wobble as
the inhabitants of the hotel hide in their dominos, hissing
Shall we win at love or shall we lose […]
but not as cheaters at cards have something to win…
A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A
10
their dubious origin and employment suggests a
sublime moment of dishonest hope….
This is a moment of melodrama, and one asks why, but the
poet is leading us through his own sense of the dramatic, or
melodramatic. He is aware that he will write something any
minute that will both puzzle and frighten the reader. It will
not be about the hotel, but about his own life. O’Hara has
been readying himself for this explosion about himself, the
mask he wears. He chooses now to take off his mask and
addresses himself:
you will continue to sing on trying to cheer everyone up
and they will know as they listen with excessive pleasure that you’re dead
and they will not mind that they have let you entertain
at the expense of the only thing you want in the world
This is a Shelleyan moment in O’Hara’s writing, the admitted
loss of poetic power. His time has been spent trying “to cheer
everyone up.” It is not that this poem is one of his triumphs.
In this poem he achieves what he has always attempted.
Poetry has presented him with fictions and too much reliance
on his genius. He has betrayed his abilities through pleasure
and power. It has eluded him until now, the icy experience of
the fleetingness of poetry, the possible loss, even when
addressed. Of the poetic moment. Now he confronts himself
in a moment of testing, and knows he has experienced the
loss he writes about, the loss of poetic power, and through
this moment of recognition regains it.
We realize his continued addressing of the hotel is due to an
identification with it in all its disguises, and the final disguise
is the hotel as the personification of himself when he urges:
oh hôtel […] you have only to be
as you are being, as you must be, as you always are […]
no matter what fate deals you or the imagination discards like a tyrant….
from Hôtel Transylvanie
Shall we win at love or shall we lose
can it be
that hurting and being hurt is a trick forcing the love
we want to appear, that the hurt is a card
and is it black? Is it red? Is it a paper, dry of tears
chevalier, change your expression! The wind is sweeping over
the gaming tables ruffling the cards/ they are black and red
like a Futurist torture and how do you know it isn’t always there
waiting while doubt is the father that has you kidnapped by friends

yet you will always live in a jealous society of accident
you will never know how beautiful you are or how beautiful
the other is, you will continue to refuse to die for yourself
you will continue to sing on trying to cheer everyone up
and they will know as they listen with excessive pleasure that you’re dead
and they will not mind that they have let you entertain
at the expense of the only thing you want in the world/ you are amusing
as a game is amusing when someone is forced to lose as in a game I must
[…]
The Sanity of Frank O’Hara
—Thom Gunn
At first I found it difficult relating “To the Harbormaster”
with what I had already read by Frank O’Hara. I knew,
I suppose, mainly the Lunch Poems, written in a relaxed free
verse with a gentle jokey tone, full of the trivia of his lunchhour,
which is somehow never boring. He enjoys himself in
those poems, and we enjoy ourselves too, his style being
immensely seductive (it’s the rhetoric of pretending to
have no rhetoric).
But “To the Harbormaster” is so sad! This one does not seem
improvised but is written, like late Shakespeare, in iambic lines
moving irregularly between tetrameter and pentameter, which
gives the poem a solemn and deliberate sound. “I am always
tying up/ and then deciding to depart.” Such an undecorated
statement may sound like the bemused self- deprecation of the
Lunch Poems, but it has more disastrous consequences. The
mastering image of the poem is of the body as boat— O’Hara
is both boat and captain of the boat: “with the metallic coils of
the tide/ around my fathomless arms” (the arms as ship’s
screws? He sounds a little like Inspector Gadget), “or I am hard
alee with my Polish rudder/ in my hand and the sun sinking“ he
is comically at a loss, with his penis useless in his hand: it is too
late, too late for anything, he is unable to understand the forms
of his vanity, and by that word he does not mean self-conceit,
but the essential triviality of human affairs, vanitas vanitatem.
The rhetoric of this poetry subsumes the jokes and the slightly
grotesque images in a quiet yearning despair.
A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A
11
After the sun has started sinking, the poem is able to accommodate
even the offer of his will to the Harbormaster. But who
is the Harbormaster? Before I read Brad Gooch’s book, I
couldn’t make out if the poem was addressed to a lover or to
God. Gooch tells us it is to the painter Larry Rivers, but that
still does not eliminate the presence of other possibilities: it is
spoken, after all, to one who is in charge, or seems to be, the
lover with whom he can find no repose, lover as god, rather
like the addressee of Rochester’s poem “Absent from Thee”
(his wife, perhaps, spoken in terms of a God from whom he
has estranged himself through his vanity).
All of which sets us up for the admirable stoicism of the
ending—sturdy, brave and truthful:
Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
Waves are the medium for a ship as the air is the medium for
a human being. They exist in an eternity different from
God’s, and different again from the life-span of the ship or
the man, and opposed to both, in a sense. That is the way
things are, and O’Hara had better trust in the sanity of his
body. “Sanity”—what a great word! It appears that both the
light-hearted hedonism of other poems and the stoicism of
this are equally based on this common sense, this steady
health of mind.
To The Harbormaster
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
—

The Transparent Man 1
T H E L A S T I N G A P P E A L
O F F R A N K O ’ H A R A
—Brad Gooch
When I was an aspiring teenage poet skulking in my
bedroom in sixties suburban America—Wilkes-Barre,
Pa.—there was only Bob Dylan and T. S. Eliot. Then all of a
sudden there was Frank O'Hara. His admission into the little
pantheon I kept on my shelf was accomplished by The New
American Poetry, an anthology of post-war, anti-academic
poets edited by Donald Allen—re-issued a few years ago with
the less shiny title, The Postmoderns. Of all the poets
represented—including such innovators as Charles Olson,
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer—O’Hara puzzled me the most.
From that puzzlement grew fascination and eventually,
full-blown, adolescent literary love.
Being a teenager, I was selfish. I didn’t read anything twice
that didn’t speak somehow to my cornered existence. I’d been
perfectly happy to sit at the diner with Dylan and Ginsberg,
ordering up frothy milkshakes of poetic prose and wolfing
down hamburgers spiced with the ketchup of radical politics.
But with O’Hara I felt as if I’d been invited to a more adult
restaurant—French?—where the cuisine wasn’t immediately
recognizable, but was invitingly complex, beautiful even. I
heard a poetic voice I couldn’t quite identify, but which in
retrospect was filled with ingredients I craved—Manhattan
slang, delinquent liberty, French surrealism, gay romance. I
would roll the line “My quietness has a man in it, he is
transparent” around in my head like a smooth, clear marble.
I also read in a biographical note that Kenneth Koch, a friend
of O’Hara’s, taught at Columbia College, so I resolved to
make my way somehow into his class, which, in 1971, I did.
1 This article emerged from an interview with Rebecca Wolff, PSA’s Programs Associate.
A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A
12
By assigning written imitations of Rimbaud, Pound, Stevens,
and Williams, Koch freely spilled to us all the secret
ingredients of his and O’Hara’s poetry. He talked of the
grand permission O’Hara gave to include your own most
trivial daily thoughts and experiences in poetry—the “I do
this, I do that” aesthetic. He made a few dark comments
about O’Hara’s life at which my antennae shot up. “Avoid
masochistic love affairs,” he counseled us. “They interfere
with your poetry.” (I’m still not so sure about that one.)
Kenneth was indeed the toggle switch between the poetry and
the life. At a loft party for Allen Ginsberg, he said to me,
“Who do you want to meet?” “John Ashbery,” I answered
ambitiously, and soon John and I were talking. Then one
night at The Ninth Circle, an innocuous dance bar in the
West Village that attracted college students, Ashbery
introduced me to J.J. Mitchell, a boyfriend of O’Hara’s,
who’d been with him the night of his fatal accident.
The line between life and art was
more dotted by him than by any
poet. All information was at once
gossip and aesthetic illumination.
Still a student, I was soon attending parties at the poet
Kenward Elmslie’s townhouse. These were Frank O’Hara
parties—just without O’Hara, who’d been dead for five years
by then. I could hear snippets of that “voice” I’d first heard
on the page in “The Day Lady Died” or “Poem (Lana Turner
Has Collapsed!)” emerge ventriloquially from the mouths of
Alex Katz, or Joan Mitchell, or Joe LeSueur, or Patsy
Southgate. All I could bring to the table was the accidental
distinction of being one of the first of a generation who
hadn’t known O’Hara personally, yet was steeped enough in
the poems to be able to identify LeSueur as the owner of the
seersucker jacket of “Joe’s Jacket,” or Freilicher as the Jane
of “Chez Jane.” (The revelatory Collected Poems didn’t
appear until the end of 1971.) One night at a dinner party at
LeSueur’s my ears burned as dishy tales were told of O’Hara
over cognac and joints. I remember naively thinking, “I’d like
to write his biography,” never considering that I was a
twenty-year-old poet who could barely string five pages of
prose together for an academic essay.

Fifteen years later my life had become more prosaic. I had a
literary agent, and, soon enough, a publisher, and the kind
permission of O’Hara’s sister, Maureen, to write an authorized
biography. While I was sympathetic with W.H. Auden’s
famous distaste for the exposure of poets’ lives, I felt that
part of O’Hara’s exceptionalism was that his poetry was a
teasing invitation to biography. While the footnotes—possum
prints or not—to Eliot’s The Waste Land sent the reader off
in search of St. Augustine’s Confessions or the libretto of
Wagner’s Tristan, O’Hara’s poems provoked the reader to
skim black-and-white snapshots of painters and poets clustered
in the Cedar Tavern. The line between life and art was
more dotted by him than by any poet. All information was at
once gossip and aesthetic illumination. O’Hara’s attitude on
the page made all traditional distinctions between minor and
major, life and art, seem hackneyed and fake—and so
emboldened a sympathetic biographer.
Writing a biography requires some method acting. You try to
imagine yourself in the head of the protagonist. (Having
worked my way through O’Hara’s childhood and the “letters
home” of his Navy years, I felt that I was perhaps coming at
his adult years differently from many of his contemporaries,
whose attitude about family and past, as Grace Hartigan
explained to me, tended to be, “You leave that!”) My own
social life picked up as I found myself attempting to channel
O’Hara’s buoyant, friendly, chatty demeanor at parties. I was
always memorizing one or another poem, running through it
on the subway. The words inevitably would ricochet with the
words of an O’Hara letter I was reading, or an interview, and
suddenly two dots would be connected. For instance, I read
how Daisy Alden discovered O’Hara crying at his own
thirtieth birthday party thrown at Grace Hartigan’s studio,
and saying, “Because today I am thirty years old and have so
little time left,” and I realized that this was the date he began
“In Memory Of My Feelings,” a poem written over four
days, which included the double-entendre, “Grace/to be born
and live as variously as possible.” Whatever mental light
bulbs were lit during the writing were switched on by
memorizing the poems, with the help as well of O’Hara’s
crammed date books.
One tired literary axiom is that biographers are inevitably
disillusioned by their subjects. O’Hara defied this rule as
well. For when I came to the end of City Poet: The Life and
Times of Frank O’Hara, I felt reassured that O’Hara had
pretty much been going on his nerve, just as I’d always imagined
he had, creating a life that perfectly fit the writer of
those intensely, achingly lyrical, yet oh so smartly urbane and
A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A
13
modern poems. In that sense, O’Hara’s life was an inspiration.
He was just a bit more complicated than even I’d
imagined. But how could he have had, as Larry Rivers
tabulated in his eulogy, “at least sixty people in New York
who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend,” and not
be complex?
Now when that line rolls through my head occasionally—
“My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent”—I can’t
help but continue with the nuance of the ensuing three lines,
which I didn’t understand so well before writing the biography:
“and he carries me quietly, like a gondola through the
streets./ He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like
numerals/ My quietness has a number of naked selves.”

What’s With
Modern Art? 1
T H E A RT R E V I E W S
O F F R A N K O’HARA
—Michael Price
“What matters is not eternal life but eternal vivacity”
—Friederich Nietzsche
It seems as though lately we can’t stop talking about
.Frank O’Hara. How fortunate! For O’Hara’s genius is,
as Charles Olson once advocated, to make the private act
public, and that private world we see in O’Hara’s varied
and spontaneous oeuvre is a public world of wonder.
How does this wonder figure into art reviews? With O’Hara,
it is the push magus. The poem meets the blurb meets
criticism. And what could be more earned and rewarding
than words from a poet who is so very much the movement
or impetus of the painter, of the gesture to make art, in his
life and in his poems? So it can be said that O’Hara is not a
critic. He is a poet first and also a great art mind. (Baudelaire
used to say that the best criticism of a work of art would be
another work of art). Craft and technique as concepts have
no place in an O’Hara review. Instead, thinking of his
famous quip from “Personism: A Manifesto,” O’Hara goes
on his own crepuscular nerve. His art writings are checkered
with off-hand one-liners, beautiful word-play and bona-fide
cognitive leaps that are genius. Take for example this from
“Blanche Dombek”:
They wipe from one’s mind some of their more graceful
contemporaries in the way that a gust of wind obliterates a
phrase of music when it is played in a stadium.
1 What’s with Modern Art?, edited By Bill Berkson (Mike and Dale’s Press, 1999).
A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A
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One thinks of Keats’ revelatory maxim “Beauty is truth,
truth beauty” in this excerpt from “Salvador Dali”:
...the artist himself, nude, conducts you into a beautiful candy-dream
where your faithful dog is asleep at your feet and the sea purrs at
your fingertips. There are sweet vapors and the rich revelatory grain
of woods and the vastly impressive passivity of megalomania, but it
is not exactly a revolutionary’s dream. He calls forth the minor or
repressed admirations, sexual, tactile sybaritic, technical—the subject
is no longer of paranoiac importance—and makes a monument.
The tradition of poet as art critic
has rich company in the twentieth
century: Stein, Yeats, Stevens,
Pound, Moore and Auden to name a
few. O’Hara takes an important
place in this lineage...
There is, as well, much of O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that”
sensibility in the art writings. His charm lies in his ease at
jumping from information (him telling you something you
can use) to prescience (his leaps into the unknown). Perhaps
the place this is most evident is in his comments titled David
Smith: Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing, which ran on
WNDT-TV (November 18, 1964):
It is the nature of sculpture to be there. If you don’t like it you wish
it would get out of the way, because it occupies space which your
body could occupy. Smith’s sculptures are, big or small, figurative or
abstract, very complete, very attentive to your presence, full of
interest in and for you. As an example, they have no boring views:
circle them as you may, they are never napping. They present a total
attention and they are telling you that that is the way to be. On
guard. In a sense they are benign, because they offer themselves for
your pleasure. But beneath that kindness is a warning: don’t be
bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial and be proud. The slightest loss
of attention leads to death. The primary passion in these sculptures is

to avert catastrophe, or to sink beneath it in a major way. So, as with
the Greeks, it is a tragic art.
O’Hara would famously make poems in the midst of a party.
He could also convey deep insight on visual arts on cue,
seemingly to anyone interested. His Q & A exposé in
Ingenue (December, 1964) with a group of high-school
students is at once a lesson on humor, particularity,
compassion, wit, and beauty. Take this exchange as example:
Q: Is it in poor taste to admire and like an artist who is still
alive and near to the art world, especially if what he paints
appeals to teen-agers in style and color? Jane Cee Salmy,
Morristown High School, New Jersey
A: It is never in poor taste to admire anyone, except possibly
someone like Hitler. It is especially important to admire an
artist while he is alive, so that he may have some pleasure
and comfort as a result of his efforts. If what he paints
appeals to teenagers, it should hardly be held against him
since teens are the future and an integral part of his
audience.
The tradition of poet as art critic has rich company in the
twentieth century: Stein, Yeats, Stevens, Pound, Moore and
Auden to name a few. O’Hara takes an important place in
© John Jonas Gruen
A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A
15
this lineage, especially given that the shift of consciousness
that emerged within the Abstract Expressionist phenomena in
New York could be seen, from a Western historical
perspective, as the most substantial shift in the movement of
visual art since cave etchings. And with our own dearth of
synergy (I speak for myself and you) between the two genres
today (on the West Coast there isn’t a poet and a painter
living within 400 miles of each other), O’Hara’s example
becomes particularly poignant. His is a historical model, and
my generation would do well to take heed and study it, say,
like auto mechanics or method acting.
Of course, one could just leave off with any analysis of his
prowess as a critic and simply enjoy the particular wit and
confidence in the reviews that typify an O’Hara poem. One
could just read the book. Or one could call up Bill Berkson
for a quick tutorial or the inside story, as his knowledge of
O’Hara’s life and writings is second to none. I’ve had the
luck of doing both.
Back row, left to right: Lisa de Kooning; film director Frank Perry and his wife, script writer Eleanor Perry; John Myers; Anne Porter; Fairfield Porter;
interior designer Angelo Torricini; pianist Arthur Gold; Jane Wilson; Kenward Elmslie; painter Paul Brach; Jerry Porter (behind Brach, Nancy Ward;
Katharine Porter). Second row, left to right: Joe Hazan; Clarice Rivers; Kenneth Koch; Larry Rivers. Seated on couch: Miriam Shapiro (Brach); pianist
Robert Fizdale; Jane Freilicher; Joan Ward; John Kacere; Sylvia Maizell. Kneeling on the right, back to front: Alvin Novak; Bill de Kooning; Jim Tommaney. Front
row: Stephen Rivers; Bill Berkson; Frank O’Hara; Herbert Machiz. Water Mill, Long Island, 1961.