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204 FRANK O’HARA 1926–1966 Frank o’hara—often campy and witty, frequently provocative, and sometimes tense and introverted—celebrated everyday life in New York City. Writing in the 1950s and 1960s, he chronicled dailiness in a city that was emerging as the cultural capital of the Cold War West. Like his fellow member of the New York school of poetry, John Ashbery, O’Hara was deeply involved in both the city’s art scene and its poetry scene. Art curator and critic as well as poet, O’Hara negotiated those roles simultaneously in his Manhattan-based world, serving as curator of the Museum of Modern Art and as art reviewer for ArtNews, while innovating a poetry notable for its spontaneity, sophistication, and humor. While writing some of the finest lyrics in American poetry, O’Hara also “proved that friendship is an art form,” as art critic Deborah Solomon has written. At his funeral, artist Larry Rivers said, “There are at least sixty people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend.” Not surprisingly, dozens of homages to him were written by friends and other people whose lives he touched. O’Hara lived within an urban community composed of loosely knit, sometimes conflicting friendships and alliances. He frequently served as a bridge and mediator as well as an advocate competing for position; a powerbroker himself, he both won and lost cultural wars. In addition, O’Hara’s life was complicated by his position as a self-identified gay man coping with the rigid constraints that Cold War culture imposed on homosexuals. Historic confrontations between the diverse gay communities in New York and the police took place during the 1950s and 1960s, and these simmering tensions and restrictions were part of the social fabric that O’Hara negotiated. All of the cultural arts in Manhattan competed heatedly in midcentury America for patronage, media attention, public support, and governmental and foundation funding. As the center of the arts in the Cold War, New York attracted thousands of young artists with all kinds of talents from around the world. This era saw a large-scale renaissance in the arts. O’Hara proved an inspiration to many developing artists and poets because he would both guide them and step aside to allow them their individuality. O’Hara worked across competing cultural lines within the American scene as well as across national boundaries. Associating with such New York School poets as Ashbery and with such Beat poets as Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka, he also followed literary developments in Africa and translated European writers such as Jean Genet. O’Hara mediated the long-lasting competition in the visual arts between the Jackson Pollock faction 205 Frank O’Hara Ø (allied with critic Clement Greenberg) and the Wilhem de Kooning camp (with its advocate Harold Rosenberg). In addition, he sought support for new artists from Spain and elsewhere. His interests in music and dance included Aaron Copland’s work with Agnes de Mille in postwar New York and Vaslav Nijinsky’s collaboration with Igor Stravinsky in modernist Paris. O’Hara enjoyed the benefits of a wide variety of artistic perspectives, ranging from the classical to the postmodern. At times he was a Romantic lyricist (as in “Autobiographia Literaria”). He half-facetiously founded a movement he called “Personism,” in which the poem must “address itself to one person” (as in “Avenue A” and “Having a Coke with You”), though O’Hara sardonically added that “if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead.” He also developed such modernist and postmodernist methods as bricolage, or collage-building, which layered popular and elite cultural references (as in “The Day Lady Died”). Even as O’Hara’s poetic practice places him firmly within the modernist-postmodernist spectrum, it also reveals a poetic inheritance from earlier eras. His diary-like rhetoric in the so-called “I do this/I do that” poems such as “The Day Lady Died” indicate his affinity with fellow New England poet Emily Dickinson. His embrace of global culture, especially its urbanity, is reminiscent of fellow New Yorker Walt Whitman’s vision of cultural links stretching around the world. Beyond his interest in the arts and in the social world of artists and bohemians , O’Hara also foregrounded the cultures of childhood and adolescence, and their relationship to the adult self (as in “Autobiographia Literaria”). Until the early postwar years, adolescence was not a well-defined period...

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