Who is Frank O'Hara?

Frank O’Hara was an influential New York city poet and curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who collaborated with many artists in his lifetime including Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers and Franz Kline. My series, 12 Oranges for Frank O'Hara are also an homage to those literary-visual collaborations. Several of them are on this blog.

You can see the rest of the series here but I haven't converted them all yet to something that would work as a t-shirt or product design.

One of my favorite O'Hara poems.

    ANIMALS
    
    
 Have you forgotten what we were like then
 when we were still first rate
 and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

 it's no use worrying about Time
 but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
 and turned some sharp corners

 the whole pasture looked like our meal
 we didn't need speedometers
 we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

 I wouldn't want to be faster
 or greener than now if you were with me O you
 were the best of all my days

More about Frank O'Hara here.

City Poet, by Brad Gooch, is a really entertaining book about the life of Frank O'Hara. And by that, I mean the boy really dishes. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara