O’Hara also wrote a number of plays, some of which were produced by the avant-garde Living Theatre. Unfortunately all of his careers were cut short when he tragically died following a motor accident at the age of forty. O’Hara was an artist and a mind only just coming into its own, and, of all his interests, it is his poetry which has granted him lasting fame and greatness. A prolific poet, O’Hara’s output was incredible. He wrote with a zeal and a belief that poetry should be spontaneous. He created many poems during his lunch hour at work, indeed ‘any time, any place’ as he himself wrote.

Like the more famous Beat Generation poets Ginsberg, Corso, Keroauc et al, O’Hara and his fellow New York Poets, sought to capture the ephemerality of modern life and bring it fresh to the page. O’Hara’s freewheeling life through the glamorous avant-garde circles is captured perfectly by his work, and his love of art, Hollywood cinema and music is chronicled in it.

Carcanet's 'Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems' is a fine attempt to capture the essence of a writer within a few well chosen works. Edited by Donald Allen, a close friend of the poet, the 200-page volume contains over 140 poems and has a beautiful detail from a painting by Jane Freilicher on the cover. In 1971 Allen also edited the Collected Poems which won the National Book Award for poetry that year.

O’Hara’s 'Personism: A Manifesto' serves as an Introduction and in it, the author lays down his modus operandi and his outlook on poetry and life. “Everything is in the poems”, he writes, “but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve.”

O’Hara, the modernist, lived in the fast-moving time of the fifties and sixties when the avant-garde became the mainstream. While in art the Abstract Expressionists that the poet championed were bringing their art form to a state of highly expressive abstraction, so too was the poetic form changing in its formal attributes. Out was the old academic approach to verse, with its insistence on structure, alliteration, assonance “all that stuff”. In came the new ‘bop’ approach, trying to catch ‘the moment’, the feeling, with scant regard for rhyme or any of the established formal concerns.

O’Hara’s immediate-feeling poems become a vessel for him to pour all of his anxieties and conflicts. His literary ambitions are pored over and his innermost hopes revealed. “Ah! / reader! you open the page / my poems stare at you you / stare back, do not you? my / poems speak on the silver / of your eyes your eyes repeat / them to your lover’s this / very night”.

In ‘Why I Am Not A Painter’, the poet compares his craft to that of painter and friend Michael Goldberg. “I am not a painter, I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.” He describes watching a painting take form in Goldberg’s studio. He then explains how he approaches a subject.“One day I am thinking of / a colour: orange. I write a line / about orange. pretty soon it is a / whole page of words, not lines. / Then another page. There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by. It is even in / prose, I am a real poet. My poem / is finished and I haven’t mentioned / orange yet.”

A number of the poems in the selection are paeans to the glamorous icons of the silver screen. Like Andy Warhol, O’Hara recognised a specific perverse beauty in the superficial images of celebrity. In the nascent mass media age, these were gods, bigger and more beautiful than mere mortals. In ‘For James Dean’ he writes “For a young actor I am begging / peace, gods. Alone / in the empty streets of New York / I am its dirty feet and head / and he is dead.” Elsewhere, in ‘To the Film Industry in Crisis’, he openly cites his love for the “Motion Picture Industry”. He then goes on to list some of the brightest stars of the time including “... peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet... Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage on her shuffling shoulders ... Rudolph Valentino of the moon ... Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls ... Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling ... Elizabeth Taylor blossoming”.

Many of the poems are very funny, O’Hara seeming to have possessed a wry and wicked sense of humour. Behind the laughs, however, there is a sadness which pervades the work. Many of the poems are intimate snapshots of the poet’s love life among the gay community of the city which never sleeps. Often, O’Hara presents himself as the broken hearted lover, abandoned and frightened: “’Come back’ I cried ‘for a minute! / You left your new shoes. And the / coffee pot’s yours!’” from ‘A Rant’. And“Hate is one of many responses / true, hurt and hate go hand in hand / but why be afraid of hate, it is only there” in one of many works entitled simply ‘Poem’.

The world of Frank O’Hara was a complex one, where the glamour of Hollywood shared critical space with the visceral psychological paintings of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. A world where he was the arch observer, noticing the smalls things which make the big things happen. A world where he watched humanity in all its splendour unfold, and he recorded it. At his desk, at work, “any time, any place”.

O’Hara’s was a formidable talent, and it was one of the great pities of twentieth century literature that he died so tragically young. The book finishes with a long poem, ‘Biotherm (For Bill Berkson)’, the last verse sees the poet almost calling from beyond the grave: “yes always though you said it first / you the quicksand and sand and grass / as I wave toward you freely / the ego-ridden sea / there is a light there that neither / of us will obscure / rubbing it all white / saving ships from fucking up on the rocks / on the infinite waves of skin smelly and crushed and light and absorbed”.

Sean Walsh is 30 years old and lives with his wife and two children near the town Killala in Co. Mayo. As a music and arts writer his work has appeared in publications such as artswest, CAFE News, Céide Review, magpie magazine, Hot Press and Irish Music magazine. He is also currently film critic with the Connaught Telegraph newspaper. After dropping out of college while studying Philosophy, he blagged his way into working in arts administration, which he still does. Currently completing an Open University Hons Degree in Humanities (one more module to go), he hopes to get down to serious writing soon.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.