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Frank O’Hara
Frank O’Hara was the de-facto leader of the ‘New York School’ of poets. The name was also used by the fledgling Abstract Expressionists who, alongside O’Hara and his poets, ruled the underground New York Art Scene throughout the 50s. Working as first a clerk and then an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara created a new form of poetry, less formal and more accessible than what had come before. He wrote his poems quickly, dashing them off at work, in his lunch break (famously titling his greatest poetry collection ‘Lunch Poems’) and in meetings filled with people. They read almost as prose, meditations on the contemporary world around him and highly representative of the era and, often, the very day he wrote them. Here was part of O’Hara’s genius – he removed poetry from the requirements of eternity and made it something contemporary. In his comfort with the disposability of his work, he held a mirror to his time that still reflects today.