The New York School, a group of artists, writers, and other creatives active in New York City during the 1950 and 1960s, is known for the avant-garde, experimental work its members created. Some of its most notable figures include the Abstract Expressionist painters Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and the poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. Several key figures, O’Hara included, worked across mediums: John Ashbery also created collages, while Joe Brainard also wrote poetry.
But this wasn’t a group whose art arose spontaneously: it was shaped by post-World War II America, modernist art and ooetry, and the parallel creative circles of art and drama. O’Hara was especially influenced by French Modernists in both his art and his poetry: the frequent references to writers and artists like Paul Verlaine and Marcel Duchamp ground O’Hara’s work in a prior tradition of artistic composition, and reveal the ideological roots of his poetry, the enduring fascinations that appear in his lines.
Though O’Hara is commonly understood as a leading figure in the New York School, John Ashbery suggests a distinct difference between O’Hara’s poetry and the work of his contemporaries: O’Hara’s work is “almost exclusively biographical,” and primarily informed by “the life of the city.”
In the introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, Ashbery writes that O’Hara’s poetry “is anything but literary. It is part of a modern tradition which is anti-literary and anti-artistic, and which goes back to Apollinaire and the Dadaists, to the collages of Picasso and Braque with their perishable newspaper clippings.”
How exactly is O’Hara’s poetry, as Ashbery suggests, “anti-literary” and “anti-artistic”? And why is this important?
O’Hara’s style combines techniques of both art and literature. The impression of improvisation his poetry evokes echoes the gestures of action painting, while the specificity of character, place, and surrounding details grounds his work the way a brushstroke adds texture to a canvas. O’Hara’s casual, disorganized approach to organizing his poetry speaks to his investment in the act of writing itself: Donald Allen, O’Hara’s friend and fellow poet, recalled that Lunch Poems, O’Hara’s most celebrated collection, was only published five years after its commission, and assembled with Allen’s help.
This is not to suggest that O’Hara didn’t take his work seriously: on the contrary, O’Hara’s concern with the immediacy of work diverged from the academic climate that had developed around poetry, creating a style whose accessibility is derived from a combination of personal and universal experiences, from the street language that succinctly captures a wide range of complex emotions in a few, brief lines.
For example, in “The Day Lady Died,” O’Hara’s decision to set the poem in media res goes against the usual literary conventions for elegy: by presenting Holiday’s death as a sudden shock that drives the speaker’s busy afternoon to standstill, O'Hara allows readers to experience this news with the speaker. The last stanza is saturated with feeling from the speaker’s subtle description of the night he witnessed Holiday perform. The hyperbole and cliché of “everyone and I stopped breathing” is apt and effective because of the casual, yet busy, tone of the previous lines. Readers may not ordinarily expect a high level of depth and complexity from a line like this, but O’Hara makes them feel it, and by extension he makes them believe.
Like the rest of the New York School, O’Hara’s work is known for its distinct style and voice, but O’Hara perhaps is the poet in this group who is most compelled by the power of the everyday. Perhaps his most experimental quality is the trust he places in ordinary language, in the simple specificity that propels each poem to a level of immediate, accessible truth.
