Francis Russell O'Hara June 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966
Born in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in Massachusetts, he studied piano at the New England Conservatory from 1941 to 1944, and served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarsman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.
With funding from the GI Bill, O'Hara attended Harvard University. He majored in music and attended classes in Philosophy and theology, writing in his spare time. He was heavily influenced by contemporary music, remaining a fine piano player all his life . Some of his favorite poets were: Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and 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.
O'Hara received his M.A. in 1951 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. That autumn O'Hara moved into an apartment in New York City with Joe LeSueur with whom he had a lengthy on-off relationship. He was soon employed at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and began to write seriously.
O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News and in 1960 was made Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with artists like Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers and Bill Berkson. O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island where he was struck by a beach buggy during the early morning of July 24, 1966, He died at age 40 the following day and is buried in Springs Cemetery on Long Island.
O'Hara's early work was considered both provocative and provoking. His work was immediate and was often quickly typed out, a point critics have consistently pointed out. One collection, Lunch Poems was so named because he typed them up on his lunch hour, while Robert Lowell once chastised him at a public poetry reading for reading a piece he had written on his way to the theatre. Low and high cultural references mingle easily in his poems, with dreamlike lyricism. His famous "I do this, I do that" style, combined the picaresque ramblings of traditional American poets like Walt Whitman with the aleatory stylings of O'Hara's European heroes Mallarme and Mayakovsky.
His most anthologized poems are "Why I Am Not a Painter" and "The Day Lady Died," about singer Billie Holiday. O'Hara was notoriously disorganized. A legend states that before publishing O'Hara's poems City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti had to fly from San Francisco to New York and search through all of O'Hara's coat pockets to find them. It is unknown how many poems may have been lost. 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 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.
Quotes:
"It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so." -Frank O'Hara
Credit:
http://www.kerouacalley.com/ohara.html
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