Over the past several decades I saw much lavish praise of Frank O’Hara and the New York School, but until very recently I never read much (as in any) of O’Hara or Ashbery or Koch et al. It wasn’t until I started “hanging out” on a poetry site called The Blank Slate (alas, now defunct, as are all of the old MSN groups) where O’Hara was nearly God to some of the members, that I took it upon myself to find out what this adulation was all about. It was no mistake, either, though I would not place O’Hara on such a pedestal as either godliness or sainthood requires—he was far from either in his personal life, as he himself would be the first to tell you, I am sure. He was, however, very good when it came to expressing himself.

There are too many poems to cite them in much detail—his Collected Poems is close to 600 pages, included indices etc, but when you consider he was only 40 when he died, it was a remarkable output, and these are not the only things he wrote. In a way, I feel bad that the one poem I wrote bouncing off one of O’Hara’s poems (Why I Am Not a Painter) seems to be critical of O’Hara; in fact it is more like an homage than criticism; if criticism there is, it is of some of my old college chums who took themselves far more seriously than I thought they deserved, than criticism of O’Hara. Why I Am Not a Painter, besides being an example of the essential O’Hara style, contains one of the very best line breaks in the history of poetry, in my opinion:

"But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life."

That last line break is to die for. I wrote a teasing reply to Frank, at least I meant it to be teasing, including my attempt at mimicking his wonderful line break. There is no way mine is even close to as good as O’Hara’s, but mine went like this:

On First Reading O’Hara’s
Why I Am Not a Painter

Frank, I know why I am not a painter.
I can’t paint; not portraits or even houses in
Bold brush-strokes. And colors? Take your pick:
Orange, blue, red, peach—will they not drip
The same all over me or the floor or anything
Within 100 feet? I like the smell of paint,
But then I like the smell of gasoline, too,
So I’m not sure the love of a smell means much.
I don’t know any artists to drop in on and admire
Or be painted by and I’d just look like some naked fool
If someone drew me the way Porter did you.

I went through college with a guy named Jim who loved
To hang out with the thee-a-tuh group. They were
All the time sitting around Waiting For Godot
Or standing up and saying things like O Gawd,
I’m so sensitive I can hardly stand it!

Jim painted.
Not me, though. I calculated and wrote poems.
I still do. I don’t think that makes me either a
Mathematician or a poet; more like an engineer-fiddler
Who can’t dance but has something of an ear for music.
It’s not that I disagree with your perspective, Frank.
It’s the intensity that gets to me.

There is a fine book by David Lehman titled The Last Avant-Garde dealing principally with O’Hara, Asbery and Koch as the founding members of what became known as The New York School. Lehman himself is second- or third-generation New York School, and it was never just about poetry, but about art and life as well. I am sorry for the plug for Amazon, but the book is well worth reading.