Frank O'Hara

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Francis Russell O'Hara (born March 27, 1926 in Baltimore , † July 25, 1966 in Long Island ) was an American poet . He belongs to the first generation of the New York School of Poets , like John Ashbery , Kenneth Koch or James Schuyler and Barbara Guest . O'Hara was introduced to the German public in 1969 by Rolf Dieter Brinkmann through translations.

Life

Frank O'Hara, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine Broderick, grew up in Massachusetts . From 1941 to 1944 he studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston . O'Hara served as a naval operator on the destroyer USS Nicholas in the South Pacific and Japan during World War II . He then visited by the soldiers scholarship to Harvard University , where he met the artist and book illustrator Edward Gorey lived. He majored in music and composed a few pieces, but only occasionally took part in classes. At this time he also wrote his first poems, although he was more interested in contemporary music and art. He admired Arthur Rimbaud , Stéphane Mallarmé , Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Mayakovsky as role models . At Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poetry in the Harvard Advocate . Despite his love of music, O'Hara switched major and left Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English. He went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he obtained an MA in 1951. That same fall, he moved to an apartment in New York City . He lived with Joe LeSuer, who was also his lover at times, for the next eleven years. Soon after arriving in New York, he took up a position in the reception of the Museum of Modern Art and began writing more seriously.

O'Hara was very active in the art scene. He wrote reviews for Art News magazine and became an assistant curator for painting and sculpture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960 . He was friends with many artists such as Willem de Kooning , Larry Rivers and Bill Berkson . O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island in 1966 . He was run over by a beach buggy while taking a night out with friends.

Works

O'Hara's early works were viewed as provocative. His work was written very directly and quickly, a point that his critics often criticized. The Lunch Poems collection got its name because he wrote it during his lunch break. Two of his works should not be missing in any anthology: "Why I Am Not a Painter" and "The Day Lady Died" about the death of the singer Billie Holiday .

O'Hara was very messy. According to one anecdote, his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti had to come to New York from San Francisco to look for the poems in all of his coat pockets. It is unknown how many of them were lost. O'Hara's dealings with the artists Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns , both major protagonists of the New York School, became a source of inspiration for his extraordinary poetry. He tried to put into words what these artists brought to the canvas. There are even cases in which he worked so closely with the artists that "poem pictures" were created, pictures with text fragments. O'Hara's most original volumes of poetry, Meditations in an Emergency (1956) and Lunch Poems (1964), are a mixture of impromptu poems, a jumble of witty sayings, journalistic parodies and surrealistic images.

bibliography

Works in lifetime

  • A City Winter and Other Poems . Two drawings by Larry Rivers. Tibor de Nagy Gallery Editions, New York 1951 [actually 1952].
  • Oranges: 12 pastorals . Tibor de Nagy Gallery Editions, New York 1953; Angel Hair Books, New York 1969.
  • Meditations in an Emergency . Grove Press, New York, 1957; 1967.
  • Second avenue . Cover drawing by Larry Rivers. Totem Press in Association with Corinth Books, New York 1960.
  • Odes . Prints by Michael Goldberg. Tiber Press, New York 1960.
  • Lunch poems . City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1964. The Pocket Poets Series, No. 19th
  • Love Poems (Tentative Title). Tibor de Nagy Gallery Editions, New York 1965.

Further works and works from the estate

  • "Hartigan and Rivers with O'Hara." (1 folded sheet, 10 p.) By Frank O'Hara, Grace Hartigan, and Larry Rivers from "An Exhibition of Pictures with Poems by Frank O'Hara ... November 24 through December 24 , 1959 ”(New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1959).
  • "A Cordial Invitation to Celebrate The Sixtieth Birthday of Edwin Denby at a Dinner to be Given By His Friends. Friday March 15, 1963… with 'Edwin's Hand' “by Frank O'Hara (1963).
  • Belgrade, November 19, 1963. (New York: Adventures in Poetry).
  • Audit / poetry. Vol. IV, No.1 "Featuring Frank O'Hara" (Buffalo, NY at 180 Winspear Avenue, 1964)
  • "New Paintings" by Michael Goldberg (New York: Martha Jackson Gallery, 1966) with "Why I Am Not A Painter" by Frank O'Hara on front cover dated 1956.
  • Hotel particulier. (broadside) (Pleasant Valley, NY: Kriya Press, 1967).
  • Two pieces. (London: Long Hair Books, series one, 1969) includes "THOSE WHO ARE DREAMING, a play about St. Paul" and "COMMERCIAL VARIATIONS" dated 4/52
  • The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara . Donald Allen (Ed.), John Ashbery Introduction. Knopf, New York 1971. Repr. University of California Press, Berkeley 1995.
  • The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara . Donald Allen (Ed.). Knopf, New York 1974.
  • The End Of The Far West: 11 Poems . Private print by Ted Berrigan, New York 1974.
  • Bill Berkson and Frank O'Hara: Hymns of St. Bridget . Adventures in Poetry, New York 1974.
  • Macaroni . (broadside, includes "In Memoriam" by Patsy Southgate). Z Press, Calais, VT, 1974.
  • Standing Still and Walking in New York . Donald Allen (Ed.). Gray Fox Press, Bolinas, Calif., Berkeley 1977.
  • Early writing . Donald Allen (Ed.). Gray Fox Press, Bolinas, Calif., Berkeley 1977.
  • Poems Retrieved . Donald Allen (Ed.). Gray Fox Press, Bolinas, Calif., Berkeley 1977.
  • Down at the box office . (broadside). Yanagi, Bolinas, Calif. 1977.
  • Selected plays . Ron Padgett, Joan Siomon, Anne Waldman (Eds.). Full Court Press, New York 1978.
  • Amourous Nightmares of Delay. Selected plays . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1997.

Exhibition catalogs

  • Jackson Pollock. (New York: George Braziller, Inc. 1959)
  • New Spanish painting and sculpture. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1960)
  • Robert Motherwell: with selections from the artist's writings. by Frank O'Hara (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1965)
  • Nakian. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966)
  • Art Chronicles, 1954-1966. (New York: G. Braziller, 1975)

Translations

  • 'Lunch Poems' and other poems. Translated from the American and with an essay by Rolf Dieter Brinkmann . (Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag, Cologne, 1969).

literature

  • Marjorie Perloff : Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters , New York 1977
  • Homage to Frank O'Hara , Eds. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur, Berkeley 1980
  • Honrath, Barbara: The New York Poets and the Fine Arts , Würzburg 1994
  • David Lehman: The Last Avant-Garde. The Making of the New York School of Poets , New York 1999
  • The Scene of My Selves. New Work on New York School Poets , Eds. Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller, Orono, Maine 2001

Web links

personal data
SURNAME O'Hara, Frank
ALTERNATIVE NAMES O'Hara, Francis Russell
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Baltimore
DATE OF DEATH July 25, 1966
Place of death long Island