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Frank O'Hara

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Francis Russell O'Hara was an American poet who, along with John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest and Kenneth Koch, was a key member of the New York School of poetry. O'Hara's poetry is generally autobiographical, much of it based on observations on what is happening to him in the moment. Donald Allen says in his introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, “That Frank O’Hara tended to think of his poems as a record of his life is apparent in much of his work.” [2] O'Hara discusses this aspect of his poetry in a statement for Donald Allen's New American Poetry: “What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else, they are just there in whatever form I can find them.” He goes on to say, "My formal 'stance' is found at the crossroads where what I know and can't get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred." He then says, "It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time."[3] Among his friends, O'Hara was known to treat poetry dismissively, as something to be done only in the moment. John Ashbery claims he witnessed O'Hara “Dashing the poems off at odd moments – in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people – he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them.” [2] In 1959, he wrote a mock manifesto (originally published in Yugen in 1961) called "Personism: A Manifesto." In it, he explains his position on formal structure: "I don't... like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout