On Frank O'Hara’s birthday, revisit Dan Chiasson on the poet whose personality became famous long before his poetry.
Frank O’Hara lived in New York City for fifteen years, from 1951 until his death, in 1966. In that time, he wrote hundreds of poems, often several a day, hunting and pecking on a portable Royal with great speed. He arrived late in New York, having grown up in Grafton, Massachusetts, attended Harvard after a tour of duty in the Navy, and then spent a year in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a distant planet settled for the manufacture of master’s degrees.
Painting and painters still set the terms for reading O’Hara, which in a way is too bad. The name that has come to define his group, the New York School, was cribbed from that of a group of painters. He exacerbated the problem, praising painters lavishly at the expense of his own art. But poetry is a temporal art, like music, O’Hara’s first love. It happens in time; it waxes and wanes, gathers and vanishes.
O’Hara is known for a certain kind of elegy that arrives at its subject late, after tarrying in the meaningless, adjacent quotidian. And yet, read backward from the deaths at the end of “A Step Away from Them” , even the initial stray details of a New York street are impressed into elegiac service:where laborers feed their dirty“Glistening torsos sandwiches”: here devouring time makes sandwiches of the torsos, themselves sandwiched between the outer term of evanescence and the inner term .
O’Hara was a sort of zigzag man, and the pleasures of reading Ford’s edition of O’Hara are the pleasures of the zigzag. He swerves toward autobiography, then away; he veers toward intimacy, then corrects toward abstraction. Reeling, he says, “I wish I weren’t reeling at all.” He’ll call a poem “Autobiographia Literaria,” then flee from the trap of his title . He likes games of hide-and-seek. He is “in a corner of the schoolyard / all alone,” or “behind a / tree,” crying out, “I am / an orphan.
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