.jpg)
Recent from talks
Frank O'Hara
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Frank O'Hara
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.
O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary". Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends". O'Hara sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. Brad Gooch's City Poet is the first substantial biography on O'Hara.
Frank O'Hara, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine (née Broderick), was born on March 27, 1926, at Maryland General Hospital, Baltimore and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He attended St. John's High School. He grew up believing his birthday was in June, when, in fact, he had been born in March—as his parents disguised his true date of birth because he had been conceived out of wedlock. He studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944 and served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.
With the funding made available to veterans he attended Harvard University, where artist and writer Edward Gorey was his roommate. O'Hara was heavily influenced by visual art and by contemporary music, which was his first love (he remained a fine piano player all his life and would shock new partners by suddenly playing music by Sergei Rachmaninoff when visiting them). His favorite poets were Pierre Reverdy, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love of music, O'Hara changed his major and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.
He then attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he won a Hopwood Award and, in 1951, received a master's degree in English.
In the autumn of 1951, O'Hara moved into an apartment in New York City with Joe LeSueur, who was his roommate and sometime lover for the next 11 years. It was during this time that he began teaching at The New School.
O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for ARTnews, and in 1960 was assistant curator of painting and sculpture exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was a friend of the artists Norman Bluhm, Mike Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Larry Rivers.
Hub AI
Frank O'Hara AI simulator
(@Frank O'Hara_simulator)
Frank O'Hara
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.
O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary". Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends". O'Hara sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. Brad Gooch's City Poet is the first substantial biography on O'Hara.
Frank O'Hara, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine (née Broderick), was born on March 27, 1926, at Maryland General Hospital, Baltimore and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He attended St. John's High School. He grew up believing his birthday was in June, when, in fact, he had been born in March—as his parents disguised his true date of birth because he had been conceived out of wedlock. He studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944 and served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.
With the funding made available to veterans he attended Harvard University, where artist and writer Edward Gorey was his roommate. O'Hara was heavily influenced by visual art and by contemporary music, which was his first love (he remained a fine piano player all his life and would shock new partners by suddenly playing music by Sergei Rachmaninoff when visiting them). His favorite poets were Pierre Reverdy, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love of music, O'Hara changed his major and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.
He then attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he won a Hopwood Award and, in 1951, received a master's degree in English.
In the autumn of 1951, O'Hara moved into an apartment in New York City with Joe LeSueur, who was his roommate and sometime lover for the next 11 years. It was during this time that he began teaching at The New School.
O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for ARTnews, and in 1960 was assistant curator of painting and sculpture exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was a friend of the artists Norman Bluhm, Mike Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Larry Rivers.
Recent media