Flying into the Ordinary Sun: Frank O'Hara in 1966 by Kristofer Collins

Flying into the Ordinary Sun: Frank O'Hara in 1966

by Kristofer Collins

I first met the poet Frank O’Hara in the early 1990s. I was in the process of abandoning the writing program I was enrolled in at a local university for the much less muddied waters of the religious studies department; and, for his part, Frank had been dead for a little over twenty-five years.

Frank O’Hara died at 8:50 p.m. on July 25, 1966 at Bayview General Hospital on Long Island. Mark Ford, editor of O’Hara’s Selected Poems (2008), succinctly describes the events of the previous evening, a night O’Hara spent with his friends Morris Golde, J. J. Mitchell, and Virgil Thomson clubbing on Fire Island. “The beach taxi in which he and his friend J. J. Mitchell were traveling broke down. As they waited for a replacement to arrive, a Jeep approaching from the opposite direction swerved to avoid the stranded taxi and travelers, and it struck O’Hara.”

Frank and I met in a seedy bookshop on campus, a second floor walk-up promisingly dubbed Ice 9. In the airless front room of the shop were displays of toe-curlingly pornographic photo collections, dusty issues of Re/Search featuring Throbbing Gristle and Brion Gysin, and excitingly garish works by Kathy Acker, Jack Black (hobo author of ‘You Can’t Win’ fame), and J. G. Ballard. Perusing the makeshift shelves in the smaller rear room I came across a small display of poetry titles including a healthy dollop from the City Lights Pocket Poets Series. Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, I ran my finger across the familiar spines. But ho! What’s this? I had never come across this dual-toned orange and green volume before. Number nineteen in the series was by some hungry dude named O’Hara. Guess I should check it out.

I purchased my first copy (there have been many since as I gave copies away to friends) of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems for three bucks that day and quite frankly, if you’ll excuse the pun, it was the wisest investment I have ever made. To single out a poem from this collection as The Poem that spun my head around permanently, that sold me entirely on this poet’s raucous intimacy would be impossible. Lunch Poems contains such signature O’Hara poems as ‘A Step Away from Them’, ‘The Day Lady Died’, ‘Ave Maria’, and ‘Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!). But for this Pittsburgh, PA boy, perhaps it was these lines from ‘Steps’ that sealed the deal:


the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won

and in a sense we’re all winning

we’re alive


He’s referring to the Buccos win in game seven of the World Series against the New York Yankees in 1960. The home run blasted by Bill Mazeroski to finish off the Yanks at Forbes Field was hit less than half a mile from where I bought Lunch Poems. Frank O’Hara wrote about my hometown as a place of joy, a place of celebration, a place worthy of depiction in poems. This poet so associated with New York City gave me the gift of my own city.

Frank O’Hara is most closely associated with the so-called New York School of Poets, which originally consisted of O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. The New York School moniker was essentially a marketing gimmick invented by John Bernard Myers, director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, to siphon some of the heat generated in the press by the New York School of Painters, namely abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, over to this small group of young poets Myers was publishing in fine limited editions.

Frank O’Hara’s first published collection was A City Winter from Tibor de Nagy Editions in 1952. Myers would go on to publish two further collections of O’Hara’s poems, Oranges: 12 Pastorals in connection with a 1953 exhibition of collaborations with the artist Grace Hartigan and Love Poems (Tentative Title) in the spring of 1965, the last collection of O’Hara’s work published in his lifetime.

By all accounts O’Hara was a dervish of activity from 1954-64, not only producing a voluminous amount of poems, but also occasional plays, collaborating on films, teaching a poetry workshop at the New School for Social Research, acting as art editor for the quarterly Kulchur, writing monographs on Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, David Smith, and Reuben Nakian, and working at the Museum of Modern Art, first as an assistant in the International Program where he aided in organizing and overseeing many traveling exhibitions, then as an assistant curator. Whew!

O’Hara was featured in an episode of USA: Poetry which aired on public television in 1965, a few months after his death. One brief scene perfectly encapsulates O’Hara’s artistic methods: Frank bangs away at a typewriter composing a film script with Alfred Leslie while smoking a cigarette, talking on the telephone (some of which conversation Frank then incorporates into the script which he has not stopped typing), while listening to Leslie’s idea for the scene being composed, and at the same time addressing the cameraman.

By 1966, however, O’Hara’s poetry production had slowed down considerably, while inversely his responsibilities at MOMA had greatly increased. In the spring of that year O’Hara traveled to the Netherlands to install and introduce a large exhibition of David Smith’s work. After returning to New York he curated MOMA’s retrospective of Nakian. Only three brief poems have surfaced from those final months.

'Little Elegy for Antonio Machado’ was the last poem O’Hara published in his lifetime. It was included in Homage to Antonio Machado, an exhibition announcement for the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. A reader searching for premonitions of O’Hara’s own mortality is sure to find what he is looking for in lines such as, “your mother dead on the hearth / and your heart at rest on the border of constellary futures // no domesticated cemeteries can enshroud your flight / of linear solarities and quiescent tumbrils”. The funereal imagery is of less interest to me (it is an elegy after all) and far less revealing than the actual strained quality of the lines themselves. The poet who wrote only a few years earlier,


I wish I were reeling around Paris

instead of reeling around New York

I wish I weren’t reeling at all

it is Spring the ice has melted the Ricard is being poured

we are all happy and young and toothless

it is the same as old age

the only thing to do is simply continue

is that simple

yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do

can you do it

yes, you can because it is the only thing to do

(from Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul)


feels practically straitjacketed in the lines of the later poem. There’s a stiffness to the rhythm in the lines and a labored quality to the imagery (“twisted ropes of sound encrusting our brains”), gone is the lively snap found in O’Hara’s best work.

‘[Why Are There Flies on the Floor]’, dated February 2 of ’66, surfaced in editor Donald Allen’s Poems Retrieved, his follow-up volume to the massive The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. While not as tonally dire as his Machado poem, ‘[Why Are There Flies on the Floor] still suffers from a noticeable ebb in O’Hara’s powers,


Why are there flies on the floor

In February, and the snow mushing outside

And the cats asleep?

Because you came

Back from Paris, to celebrate your return.


Dead flies, sleeping cats, snow gone to mush. This is not the imagery of celebration, for that see the poem ‘Today’ which starts “Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!’, rather this is hushed melancholy. Absent entirely from these last poems is what James Schuyler called O’Hara’s “intimate yell”. Here Frank’s voice is reduced to a whisper.

In a letter to O'Hara dated March 27, 1956, Schuyler offers as fine a description of what it feels like to read O’Hara’s best poems, “Your passion always makes me feel like a cloud the wind detaches (at last) from a mountain so I can finally go sailing over all those valleys with their crazy farms and towns.” Whether it was O’Hara’s workload at the museum, his increased drinking, loneliness (a rapprochement with his lover Vincent Warren, the subject of some of O’Hara’s finest love poems, did not pan out) or a combination of all three, the infectious buoyancy described by Schuyler has certainly disappeared.

After Frank O’Hara’s death a journal was discovered in his apartment containing his last known poem, a fragment really, dated April 7, 1966 and titled ‘Oedipus Rex’,


He falls; but even in falling

he is higher than those who

fly into the ordinary sun.


Here Frank, even though he is likely referring to the Stravinsky opera for which his friend Larry Rivers had recently designed the sets, seems to have acknowledged his own diminished powers. Brief and epitaph-like these lines fall short as far as last words go.

O’Hara’s finest poems are full of zing, full of love, excitement and surprise, full of “all / the stuff they’ve always talked about” that “still makes a poem a surprise!” Better then to remember the actual epitaph inscribed on O’Hara’s headstone from ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.”

(Originally published by The New Antiquarian)

Kristofer Collins is the editor of The Pittsburgh Book Review. His latest book 'The River Is Another Kind of Prayer: New & Selected Poems' was published by Kung Fu Treachery Press in 2020.