also a poet frank o hara my father and me

His favorite poets were Pierre Reverdy, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. O'Hara was heavily influenced by visual art and by contemporary music, which was his first love (he remained a fine piano player all his life and would shock new partners by suddenly playing music by Sergei Rachmaninoff when visiting them). With the funding made available to veterans he attended Harvard University, where artist and writer Edward Gorey was his roommate.

Navy in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II. He studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944 and served in the U.S. He grew up believing he had been born in June, but in fact had been born in March - his parents disguised his true date of birth because he was conceived out of wedlock. Brad Gooch's City Poet is the first substantial biography on O'Hara.įrank O'Hara, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine (née Broderick), was born on March 27, 1926, at Maryland General Hospital, Baltimore and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. O'Hara's writing sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be 'between two persons instead of two pages.' Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is 'urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny' containing 'material and associations alien to academic verse' such as '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'. O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as sounding 'like entries in a diary'. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. Green River Cemetery, Springs, New York, U.S.įrancis Russell ' Frank' O'Hara (Ma– July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic.

Also a poet frank o hara my father and me