Remembering Frank O’Hara – Ginsberg/O’Hara

Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)

A historic day today. We featured recently (July 17) Billie Holiday (“The Day Lady Died”). Today (July 25) is the day her eulogist, Frank O’Hara, died a now mythologized (and still shocking and senseless) death.

Andrew Epstein on his essential Locus Solus blog writes about it – here

Nick Sturm (including Ted Berrigan and Jim Brodey‘s account) writes about it here

Peter Schjeldahl‘s contemporaneous account for the Village Voice is – here

Kyle Schnitzer  tracks down “the dune buggy driver” – here

Rona Cran writes of the “radical friendship” of Allen and O’Hara in a must-read piece – “Safe in your thoughtful arms” – The Radical Friendship of Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg” –   here

from that essay:

“..O’Hara and Ginsberg, for overlapping periods of time, occupied the same places –  literally, but also in terms of influence and interest, sharing both literary forebears and friends.. Both queer, and almost exactly the same age, they first met in the early 1950s, and became further acquainted when Ginsberg returned from San Francisco to New York in 1956. Later they both lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, attended poetry readings together, and would often visit each other’s apartments, proving important to each other both creatively and personally. The friendship between them can be traced in their writing, from O’Hara’s conversation about music and the movies with a hungover Ginsberg through a bathroom door in the poem ‘Fantasy’, to Ginsberg’s 1966 elegy for O’Hara, ‘City Midnight Junk Strains’ (‘chattering Frank / stopped forever’). It can be seen, too, in a photograph of Ginsberg at O’Hara’s funeral, heavy with grief as he walks away from his graveside, his arm around another of O’Hara’s beloved friends, poet Kenneth Koch. And it is there in rare footage of Ginsberg and O’Hara together, along with Amiri Baraka and Ray Bremser, taken by Jonas Mekas at the Living Theater, in the late 1950s. They shared literary influences in anti-establishment forebears Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, dynamic synergies between their respective literary circles, a love of New York, a reciprocal belief in the inclusive nature of poetry (‘there were no kings and queens of poetry’, Ginsberg said), and common experiences of living openly queer in a society obsessed with surveillance and purges of gay men. Their poetry is at once a social text rich with interpersonal relations and a site of enquiry pertaining to Cold War culture.”

Allen Ginsberg at Frank O’Hara’s funeral, July 27, 1966 at Green River Cemetery, Springs, New York

More Frank O”Hara on The Allen Ginsberg Project – here and here

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