Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) was a noted art critic and accomplished poet of the New York School, with a unique voice recognized because in his work he “sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be “between two persons instead of two pages.” Mark Doty writes: “Urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny, O'Hara would allow a realm of material and associations alien to academic verse to pour into his poems: 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; anything seemed ready material for inclusion into the particular order that the moment of composition would call for.”