Existing comment:
Frank O'Hara, 1926-1966
If Jackson Pollock was an action painter, Frank O'Hara was an action poet. A member of the postwar New York School of poets and writers, he rejected academicism and theory, instead praising spontaneity and first impressions. O'Hara, who was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote a poem every day, usually basing it on the perceptions and experiences gleaned on a lunchtime walk. He called these his "I do this, I do that" poems, and in them he mixed the ephemeral with the epochal. Despite their personal point of view, O'Hara's poems, with their camera-eye take on the city, create an abstract effort not unlike the flung paint of Pollock's canvases. After O'Hara's premature death in a car accident, his executors discovered hundreds of unpublished poems, which have since appeared posthumously, cementing his stature as a major postwar modernist.
Alice Neel, 1960 |