Frank O’Hara: The Beat Generation’s unsung great
New York has always been a bustling hub of talent, but for a bright period in the 1950s and ‘60s, the city was awash with new ideas, new movements and reams of poetry. When the world thinks about the Beat Generation, they think of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and their gang, breaking out of the confines of tradition and education to make something rebellious and fresh. But Frank O’Hara was right there ripping up the rule book, too and reshaping it to suit wherever his poetic whims took him.
The Beat crowd weren’t the only ones working away in the city at the time. In the same place for the same period, the New York School were making history-shaping moves, too. On the surface, it would seem like the two should be at odds with each other. The Beats were rebels. They fought against the system, with the spirit at the centre of their world being one that wanted to learn a lot about literature and art and culture but without the confines of stuffy establishments. When they met at Columbia University, the bonding factor between them was a desire to shred what they’d been taught and do something new and different without any rules or restrictions. It was anarchism in the literary world.
On the flipside, the New York School scene was more classy and refined. The informal group included poets, painters, dancers, and musicians, all of whom spiralled around the city’s avant-garde art world. Their motivations were the same: to do something new and interesting and limitless, but their approach embraced tradition more as they interacted with the home town’s richness in galleries and cultural establishments. They were interested in jazz, surrealism and abstract impressionism, all of which are born from the same rebellious space but have a long and important history and legacy, which the crowd guarded.
Frank O’Hara was a central figure – a writer, poet, and art critic who worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. From that post as a respected and high-powered worker at a huge art institute, his engagement with the high art world might feel like the opposite of a Beat. But his work is worthy of a place amongst the crowd’s legacy, feeling like the perfect mix of Beat rebellion with New York School taste.
What’s so special about his work is the spontaneity of it. O’Hara didn’t just rip up the rule book like all the Beats did, but he seemed to not even consider it. Instead, his work feels like a personal diary as he refused to separate his artistic world from his real one. His personal life is littered throughout his poetry as he writes about the day-to-day happenings of his life, the gossip from his friends, and even the smallest flashes of sentiment he catches in his loved ones in sonnets and scriptures. It’s a beautiful statement that everyday life has artistic value and that an artist doesn’t have to reject one’s self for their art because their art is who the are and is intrinsically interwoven with their very being. So why keep their life from the page?
But it’s the way he does it that feels so special. Just as the Beats defied traditional rules of form to create more free-flowing pieces or even mish-mash sections in Burroughs’ ‘cut up method’, O’Hara’s form is lax and beautiful that way. His pieces often read like conversations or voice notes left to friends as he not only refuses to keep his life from his page but refuses to keep his own natural tone and way of speaking from it, too.
For the sweetest example, read ‘Having a coke with you’, where the title of the stunning love poem leads right in. “Having A Coke With You / is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne,” he begins. Codifying personal images with no explanation and no desire to have them really mean anything to anyone beyond himself and the figure he’s addressing; it’s radically intimate.
“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 anyway it’s in the Frick / which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time,” he writes, creating a love poem that feels even more plain-speaking than a letter until it becomes more like a casual declaration of adoration, merely dropped into a normal conversation.
That’s the way of his work. As he abandons all sense of what a poem or a poet should be, capturing the rebellious nature of the Beats and his own New York School circle, what he’s left with is something different and softer than his peers. Rather than needing his rebellion to be bold, it’s instead captivatingly simple and calm as he writes glimmers of pure beauty and poetry into thrown-away, spontaneous verses that prove that nothing is too casual and life is an art too.
