Frank OHara

Frank O'Hara 1926-66, American poet, b. Baltimore, grad. Harvard (B.A., 1950), Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor (M.A., 1951). His poetry is spontaneous, vernacular, witty, personal, and very much of its time and place—New York City, 1951-66. Closely associated with many of the painters of his time, O'Hara was a founder of the Poet's Theatre and later the center of the New York School of Poets (consisting of himself, John Ashbery , Kenneth Koch , and James Schuyler). His writings include Collected Poems (1971), Early Writing (1977), Poems Retrieved (1977), and Selected Poems (2008).

Bibliography: See biography by B. Gooch (1993); memoir by J. LeSueur (2003); M. Perloff, Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters (1997); D. Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1999); G. Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (2d ed. 2001).

O'Hara, Frank (1926–66),poet and art critic whose poetry, published in A City Winter (1952), Meditations in an Emergency (1957), Second Avenue (1960), Odes (1960), Lunch Poems (1964), and Selected Poems (1973, National Book Award), is marked by an extremely autobiographical relation to his New York environment and an immediacy that John Ashbery compared to the painting of Jackson Pollock (about whom O'Hara wrote a book‐length catalogue, 1959), for “Like Pollock, O'Hara demonstrates that the act of communication and the finished creation are the same.” Art Chronicles (1975) collects his criticism; Standing Still and Walking in New York (1975) is a gathering of essays and notes, followed by Early Writing (1977).

O'Hara, Frank. See LESLIE.