Alongside poets such as Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara was a leading figure in the New York School of Poets, active during the 1950s and 1960s. As an art curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara bridged a gap between the city’s poets and artists, often writing during his lunch breaks, resulting in his seminal 1964 collection, Lunch Poems.
His deep involvement in the art world informed his poetry, as did his life in New York, capturing everyday moments and conversations with beauty and celebration. Perhaps his most famous poem, ‘Having a Coke With You’ epitomises O’Hara’s delighting attitudes best. He writes: “I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world/ except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick/ which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time”.
O’Hara has left a significant legacy hanging over pop culture, his words mirroring a transformative period in American society. His appreciation for others, art and music, and New York City is evident in every poem, epitomising an era of postwar hopefulness and innovation. O’Hara’s poems are imbued with cultural and geographical references, which submerge the reader into his world while also giving them a sense of universality. His references to the mundane are utterly charming, for example, in ‘A Step Away from Them’: “It’s my lunch hour, so I go/ for a walk among the hum-colored/ cabs. First, down the sidewalk/ where laborers feed their dirty/glistening torsos sandwiches”.
According to City Lights’(publisher of Lunch Poems) editorial director Elaine Katzenberger, “O’Hara was a magnetic personality with a keen and discerning eye and an ability to capture the routines of life in plain and often humorous snapshots, and to juxtapose the mundane alongside acutely sensitive observations about much loftier human endeavours.”
Thus, it is only natural that O’Hara’s approach to capturing the everyday has been adopted by other artists, often adapting the poet’s ideas to other mediums, such as film and music. Greta Gerwig, director of the beautiful coming-of-age tale Lady Bird, cites Lunch Poems as a major inspiration for the film. Saoirse Ronan plays the eponymous protagonist, a teenage girl living in Sacramento, dreaming of escape from her suburban life to expansive and alluring New York City, the place that defined so much of O’Hara’s work. Talking to AnOther Magazine, Ronan described how Gerwig instructed her to read Lunch Poems to prepare for her role. “Greta said the Lunch Poems are where [Lady Bird] feels she’s destined to be, or the life she’s destined to live.” O’Hara’s poems often feel like love letters to his city, and it makes sense that Gerwig would position the world he weaves through his words as an ultimate goal – an escape from boredom. This is because O’Hara illuminates mundanity and makes the simplicities of life, such as drinking a coke or walking through the park, ineffably romantic.
Moreover, O’Hara provided Greta Kline with her indie namesake – Frankie Cosmos. In 2014, the singer explained how O’Hara’s poetry shaped her own work. “All of his poetry was coming from a place of mundane New York life—he wrote Lunch Poems on his lunch break every day — but there’s so much more there. There’s so much depth to the streets of New York. […] There are a lot of places you can go from just observing everyday life, which he does really well.”
O’Hara captured a specific period of American life that still feels fresh and relevant today. His musings on the routines and rhythms of everyday life have resonated with readers for decades, making him one of America’s most influential poets, finding fans in artists from Jim Jarmusch and Lou Reed to Thurston Moore, David Bowie and Bob Dylan. O’Hara’s preoccupation with cultural iconography, music and film gives his poems life outside of their pages. From references from Lana Turner to Billie Holliday, O’Hara represented the cultural zeitgeist with humour and grace, and his perennial body of work will undoubtedly inspire artists for years to come.