Remembering Frank O'Hara

It’s sweltering in Washington today and through the upcoming week, and for some reason I was thinking of Frank O’Hara and his lovely and refreshing love poem, “Having a Coke With You.” O’Hara worked in an art museum and the poem riffs in its long lines between the lived experience of lives and relationships against the cultured world of painted portraits and statuary. Typically for an O’Hara poem, the subject and point of view shift back and forth: I “look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world/except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyways it’s in the Frick. . .” O’Hara worked at the Museum of Modern Art, rising to the position of curator, and he knew everyone in New York, so he was always at the center of things, observing. He was the master of the poem that seems lightly observational—he would go for a walk on his lunch hour and then write poems about what he saw and felt that seem slight, but aren’t. He was a master of poetry in a minor key, melancholy like a trumpet solo by Chet Baker—breathy, ephemeral with the details of daily life but poignant with effects that stay with you.

His wonderful poem “In Memory of My Feelings” (which became the subject for a monumental painting by his friend, artist Jasper Johns) begins: “My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent/and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets./He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals. . .” This awareness of multiple identities, suggested in these lines, was in part due to O’Hara being gay and his sense of marginality, of being distanced and observational, being in but not completely of all the societies in which he lived and worked. He was known during his lifetime primarily as a curator and cultural instigator, although he did regularly publish poetry.

Frank O’Hara died fifty years ago today, July 25, 1966, at age forty, having been hit by a dune buggy after a late-night party on Fire Island the night before. When his friends went through his apartment to clear out his things, they found hundreds of poems, which were then collected and published. O’Hara’s posthumous Collected Poems won the National Book Award in 1971 and established his reputation as a major American poet and a distinctive modern voice.

The National Portrait Gallery is fortunate to have several fine portraits of Frank O’Hara, including this painting by the artist Alice Neel.