One day, while walking with my husband and 15-year-old son from the subway to the Central Park Zoo, we passed the statue of William Tecumseh Sherman in the southeast corner of the park. As one might pray when passing a church, I recited the opening of Frank O’Hara’s 1954 poem “Music”:
When I rest near The Equestrian
pausing for a liverwurst sandwich at the Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s
Growing up in a bohemian East Village family in the 1980s, I knew, as if by osmosis, the cohort of painters and poets of the 1950s and 1960s known as the New York School. O’Hara was the one I loved. In the photos and images of him I saw, O’Hara looked soft and hard at the same time: part boxer, part librarian, with his crooked nose, wide smile and pale blue eyes. His 1964 book, Lunch Poems, came closest to being a family bible.
As a young poet, my father met O’Hara, 16 years older, at a few parties. Finally, O’Hara attributed him a catalog at an opening of the Museum of Modern Art: “with palship from Frank.” A month later, on July 25, 1966, O’Hara was hit by a dune buggy in the middle of the night on Fire Island. In an obituary published in The Village Voice, my father wrote, “Everything about O’Hara is easy to demonstrate and extremely difficult to ‘understand’. And the radiance of the legendary, never far from him while he lived, now seems to be about to swallow the memory of all he was and did.”
By the time he died, O’Hara was already a key figure in American poetry and, as an unabashed man in 1950s America, a transformative figure in gay culture history. For the past several decades, he has been the lens through which many people, myself included, view New York City. The poet Ron Padgett calls O’Hara’s “a voice that often reminded me of bourbon and smoke, nightclubs, a life-changing phone call, and warmth.” His poems always sounded to me like the city is at its best – cosmopolitan, wry, romantic, full of potential, with a glittering look without being mean. Responding to a headline in the New York Post after actress Lana Turner collapsed from exhaustion, he wrote:
I’ve been to a lot of parties
and acted utterly disgraceful
but i never really broke down
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
O’Hara’s poems have an intoxicating swagger. Even whipped through snow, through city traffic, through fleeting love affairs, he shows a deep… happiness† Breaking his heart only makes him more adventurous; he’s just happy to be the first to take you to the Frick; he is thankful that he “drinks too much coffee and smokes too many cigarettes and loves you so much.”