Frank O’Hara and the Turn to Friendship

Abstract

A couple of bright new books on Frank O'Hara and the New York School of poets underscore two notable trends in scholarship on twentieth-century U.S. poetry and culture. The first of these trends is fairly easy to describe. Since his stunning death in 1966—struck by a beach buggy late at night on Fire Island—O'Hara has been transformed from an influential though little-known poet and supporter of experimental art into a full-fledged member of the literary canon. Donald Allen's The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1971) and Marjorie Perloff's Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters (1977) were early and indispensable steps in the rise of pop ular and scholarly interest in O'Hara, which continued apace throughout the 1980s and '90s, fueled in part by the invention of queer theory and the growing influence of cultural studies. O'Hara's poems captured a number of movements that scholars were keen to describe, flitting easily across the great divide between high art and popular culture, meditating cleverly on the practice of everyday life in the postindustrial city, and addressing both the pleasures and difficulties of articulating queer desire in the public sphere. By now we have a biography, sev eral tributes and essay collections, and recent books on O'Hara and the New York School marketed to broader audiences.1 I'm so grateful to you! O'Hara might have exclaimed to his growing audience in the new millennium, with his char acteristic combination of self-deprecating ambition and joy.2 Lytle Shaw's Frank O'Hara: The Poetics ojCoterie and Andrew Epstein's Beauti ful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry confirm O'Hara's position as a charismatic and irresistible figure in discussions of postwar American poetry. They underscore a second trend as well, at once more intriguing and more difficult to