Frank O’Hara and “French in the Pejorative Sense”

Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) is emphatically identified with New York, and yet like other poets of the “New York School,” he had considerable creative investments in the foreign. A particular and recurrent strand of this interest is his identification with the “pejorative” or “degenerate” connotations of French art and literature. In response to a national-paternal homophobia at home, O’Hara used the idea of France to explore and to re-signify his lowly status, and to move toward an alternative poetic. This thematic also indicates a general model for O’Hara’s practice of poetry: the poem functions as a linguistic elsewhere, a holding-place for “where we would like to be” and “that which we would like to exist.”