On a summer afternoon in 1956, Frank O'Hara slipped away from his desk at the Museum of Modern Art, walked to a lunch counter on West 53rd Street, and wrote a poem on a paper bag. Or so the legend goes. Whether or not the details are accurate, the image captures something essential about O'Hara's method: poetry as a practice inseparable from the texture of daily life, written in the gaps between appointments, responsive to whatever the city happened to be doing at that moment.
O'Hara died in 1966 at the age of forty, struck by a dune buggy on Fire Island. He left behind a body of work that, in the decades since, has become one of the most influential in American poetry — not despite its apparent casualness, but because of it. He showed that a poem could be addressed to a specific person, set on a specific street corner, preoccupied with a specific can of orange juice, and still open onto something larger. His work changed what poets thought poetry was allowed to do.
Who were the New York School poets?
The term "New York School" was coined somewhat tongue-in-cheek — a nod to the Abstract Expressionist painters the poets knew and admired — and the poets themselves were never entirely comfortable with it. But the label stuck, and it designates a loose but genuine community of writers who came together in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler as the central figures of the first generation, with a second generation including Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, and Ron Padgett emerging in the 1960s.
What bound them was less a shared ideology than a shared set of enthusiasms and a shared rejection of the prevailing orthodoxies of the time. They were resistant to the heavy symbolism and mythologizing of poets like Robert Lowell or the early T.S. Eliot. They were drawn instead to French Surrealism, to the wit and surface play of Apollinaire and Reverdy, to the action and energy of Abstract Expressionist painting, and to the emerging avant-garde music of John Cage and Morton Feldman. Many of them were close friends with painters — de Kooning, Pollock, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers — and the dialogue between poetry and visual art was constant and formative.
"It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial."
O'Hara wrote that in 1950, in his college notebook. The oscillation he describes — between the tangible and the intangible, the concrete and the mysterious — is precisely the tension that animates his best work. A poem can start with a bologna sandwich and end somewhere near the infinite. The trick is not to force the transcendence, but to let the sandwich be a sandwich until it isn't.
The "I do this, I do that" poem
O'Hara's most characteristic form is what critics have called the "I do this, I do that" poem: a poem that unfolds in something close to real time, following the speaker through the city, recording encounters, observations, digressions, and sudden emotional turns. The poem doesn't build toward a conclusion so much as it accumulates — and then stops, often with a gesture of casual finality that is, on reflection, anything but casual.
The most celebrated example is "The Day Lady Died," written on July 17, 1959, the day Billie Holiday died. The poem spends most of its length doing nothing apparently significant — the speaker runs errands in Midtown Manhattan, buys cigarettes and a copy of New World Writing, orders a hamburger — and then, in its final lines, remembers hearing Holiday sing in a small club, and the memory stops everything. The poem earns its emotional weight through the accumulation of ordinary detail, so that the sudden shift into grief arrives with the force of something that was always coming.
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
The poem doesn't announce its grief. It enacts it. "Everyone and I stopped breathing" — the casual syntax, the "and I" dropped in as an afterthought, the stopped breathing that is both literal (the hush of an audience) and figurative (the intake of breath before loss) — this is O'Hara at his most quietly devastating. He had learned from Abstract Expressionism that the work's emotional content could be held in its surface, in its immediate marks, without needing to be spelled out.
Personism: a manifesto written in an afternoon
In 1959, O'Hara was asked to contribute to a collection of poetic manifestos. He wrote "Personism: A Manifesto" in approximately twenty minutes, and it remains one of the funniest and most genuinely useful statements about poetry written in the twentieth century. He describes inventing a new movement — Personism — that "has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art." Its central insight: a poem should have the same directness and intimacy as a phone call to a specific person. Rather than addressing "humanity," it addresses one person. "It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified."
The manifesto is partly a joke, but it points at something real. O'Hara's poems are almost always addressed to someone — a named friend, a lover, a passing stranger — and that specificity gives them an immediacy that more abstractly "universal" poetry often lacks. You feel you are overhearing something, that the poem exists independent of your reading it, that it was written before you arrived and will continue after you leave.
O'Hara and the painters
O'Hara worked at MoMA from 1951 until his death, eventually becoming a curator. His friendships with painters were not merely social — they were artistically generative. He wrote poems in response to specific paintings, collaborated with painters on prints and lithographs, and absorbed from the Abstract Expressionists a particular attitude toward the artwork: that it should be immediate, process-oriented, willing to include accident and error, not overly planned.
His "poem-paintings" with Larry Rivers and his ekphrastic poems responding to works by de Kooning and Franz Kline show a poet working across media, treating the poem as an object made in time rather than a vessel for pre-formed thought. This influenced generations of poets who came after him — the idea that writing could learn from visual art's relationship to its own surface and process.
John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and the wider school
O'Hara is the most immediately accessible of the New York School poets, but the movement's full range is wider and stranger. John Ashbery — who won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in a single year for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) — developed a poetry of extraordinary syntactic complexity, in which meaning slides and multiplies rather than resolving. His work draws on the same sources as O'Hara's but produces something more disorienting and durational, poems that reward sustained attention over many readings.
Kenneth Koch brought exuberance, comedy, and a kind of willful naivety to the group. Barbara Guest, often undervalued in accounts of the school, wrote poems of unusual visual and spatial sophistication, closely engaged with painting and with questions of feminine interiority. James Schuyler, the quietest and most domestic of the group, wrote lyric poems of intense observation whose influence on subsequent American poetry — particularly on the work of poets concerned with dailiness and description — is incalculable.
Why O'Hara still matters
Contemporary poets return to O'Hara for many reasons: for permission to be specific, to be funny, to include the banal alongside the beautiful; for the model of a poetry deeply embedded in friendship and artistic community; for the demonstration that lyric feeling does not require lyric solemnity. His influence is visible in the work of poets as different as Eileen Myles, David Lehman, Maggie Nelson, and Morgan Parker.
There is also something in his relationship to time — to the poem as a record of a particular moment, unrepeatable and therefore precious — that speaks to readers in an era of digital ephemerality. O'Hara's poems are intensely of their moment, which is why they remain alive. They don't try to be timeless. They try to be true to Tuesday afternoon, August 1959. And that, paradoxically, makes them last.
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Traversera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
The poem continues for many more lines, cataloguing paintings the speaker would rather not see than miss this afternoon with the person he loves. It is preposterous and moving in equal measure. It is, in the best sense, only and entirely itself.
