Frank O'Hara's Voice of America

This essay investigates Frank O'Hara's views on how American poetic voice travels alongside other institutional, governmental, and mass modes of circulating and mediating American speech. Through engaging with O'Hara's writing on poetry translation, the Voice of America broadcasts, and archival research into the publication of the mass-market little magazine New World Writing, I reread some of O'Hara's most famous poems, including "The Day Lady Died," to show how he orients his poetry within a world of global media. Ultimately, this essay positions poetic voice within a distinctly American Cold War context, engaging with questions of global reception and translatability.