photo: Brad Gooch (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993)

Frank (Francis Russell) O'Hara was born on June 27, 1926, in Baltimore, Maryland. He grew up in Massachusetts, and later studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. O'Hara then served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarsman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.

Following the war, O'Hara studied at Harvard College, where he majored in music and did some composing. While he also wrote poetry, he was more influenced by contemporary music, which was his first love, and art. However, he did have a few favorite poets: Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Pasternak, and Mayakovsky. While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and soon 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. He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received his M.A. in 1951. That autumn O'Hara moved into an apartment in New York. He was soon employed at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and began to write seriously.

O'Hara's early work was considered both provocative and provoking. 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 Larry Rivers, 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.

O'Hara continued working at the Museum of Modern Art throughout his life, curating exhibitions and writing introductions and catalogs for exhibits and tours. In 1966, while vacationing on Fire Island, Frank O'Hara was killed in a sand buggy accident. He was forty years old.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

A City Winter, and Other Poems (1952)
In Memory of My Feelings (1967)
Love Poems (1965)
Lunch Poems (1964)
Meditations in an Emergency (1956)
Odes (1960)
Second Avenue (1960)
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1971)

Prose

Jackson Pollack (1959)
The New Spanish Painting and Sculpture (1960)

Drama

Collected Plays (1978)