Craft: Frank O'Hara

sometimes I think I’m “in love” with painting.—Frank O’Hara, “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul

According to the composer Morton Feldman, Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) never talked about his own work. “If ever I complimented him on something he had done he would answer, all smiles, ‘well,—thank you.’ That was the end of it. As if he were saying, ‘Now, you don’t have to congratulate me about a thing. Naturally, everything I do is first rate, but it’s you who needs looking after.’”

Modesty plus confidence pushes through all of O’Hara’s best poems. His poems—and there are a lot of them—are about an active intellectualism that powers artistic relationships. They evoke who he was with, what he was doing, things and people he was interested in, a potent attentiveness to the art of others.