City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara

by Brad Gooch

The definitive biography of Frank O’Hara, one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, the magnetic literary figure at the center of New York’s cultural life during the 1950s and 1960s.

City Poet captures the excitement and promise of mid-twentieth-century New York in the years when it became the epicenter of the art world, and illuminates the poet and artist at its heart. Brad Gooch traces Frank O’Hara’s life from his parochial Catholic childhood to World War II, through his years at Harvard and New York. He brilliantly portrays O’Hara in in his element, surrounded by a circle of writers and artists who would transform America’s cultural Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, and John Ashbery.

Gooch brings into focus the artistry and influence of a life “of guts and wit and style and passion” (Luc Sante) that was tragically abbreviated in 1966 when O’Hara, just forty and at the height of his creativity, was hit and killed by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island—a death that marked the end of an exceptional career and a remarkable era.

City Poet is illustrated with 55 black and white photographs.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, History, LGBT, New York

787 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 8, 1993

About the author

Brad Gooch is the author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (Little, Brown, 2009.) His previous books include City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara; as well as Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America; three novels--Scary Kisses, The Golden Age of Promiscuity, Zombie00; a collection of stories, Jailbait and Other Stories, chosen by Donald Barthelme for a Pushcart Foundation Writer’s Choice Award; a collection of poems, The Daily News; and two memoirs, Finding the Boyfriend Within and Dating the Greek Gods.

His work has been featured in numerous magazines including: The New Republic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Travel and Leisure, Partisan Review, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Art Forum, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, and regularly on The Daily Beast.

A Guggenheim fellow in Biography, he has received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and a Furthermore grant in publishing from the J.M. Kaplan Fund.

A professor of English at William Paterson University, he earned his PhD at Columbia University, and lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Barry Pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

profoundly gossipy and overwhelmingly name-droppy, i cannot imagine a more befitting tribute to that catty bitch frank o'hara

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guillermo Cabrera Infante used to lambast over-detailed novels as suffering from the Balzac Disorder. I laughed when I first encountered the characterization. I didn't later. Mr. Gooch likes to list names, apparently without fear of being repetitious. Despite that, City Poet is a moving biography of a powerful American poet, one who I thought perhaps was a Gene Kelly of verse but was rather a talented observer, who afforded a Harvard education (via the GI Bill) wanted both the stars and the gutter--to paraphrase Celine qua Bukowski. That he managed to be Assistant Curator at the Museum of Modern Art while simultaneously drinking himself pickled and cruising for much of his adult life speaks of capacities and this man, Francis O'Hara was thus a polymath. My lingering image is of he and Charles Olson walking the bleak streets of Buffalo after a reading.

3.2 stars rounded up

[Frederick Gault · Rating 4 out of 5]

The extraordinary life of Frank O'Hara is covered exhaustively in this work. What was remarkable about this man's life was that he was at the center of the arts in New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was a major poet, instrumental at making American modern art as popular in Europe as American Jazz, a critic, a playwright, a lover of Opera, Ballet, Jazz and the master of revels at Bohemian hot spots. To read this is to be immersed in the turbulent center of the Abstract Expressionism art universe, and the birth of Pop Art, in the mid 20th Century. This book is not just about the man, but all the household names that swirled around him; Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Allan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Robert Motherwell, Norman Mailer, Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, Claes Oldenburg, Willem de Kooning and many more.

[Dona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Received this book from friend Phyllis years ago and never read it until this month. Gooch's biography of poet and Musuem of Modern Art curator Frank O'Hara is informative and well-researched and documented. Gooch also incorporates many excerpts from O'Hara's poetry to show how the poet's experiences were inspiring his art. Although O'Hara is considered part of the New York School of poets and artists (including painter Jackson Pollock and poet Kenneth Koch), he collaborated and brushed hands with artists from the Beats and Black Mountain School, just to name a few. I had no idea how many notable artists, painters, filmmakers, sculptors, musicians and writers were revolving around each other during O'Hara's time: from Ginsberg to Warhol to Anita Pallenberg to John Ashberry to Franz Kline. I found myself googling names every few pages or so to find out more about individuals of whom I have only cursory knowledge.

The writers' style was just right for my taste--conversational enough to keep things interesting and matter of fact enough to describe the over-the-top lives and activities of 1950's and '60's artists in a non-dramatic, sometimes humorous way. Here's one description of a Warhol/O'Hara encounter: "Jim Brody, a poet from O'Hara's New School class, recalls a cocktail party at O'Hara's at which Warhol gave O'Hara an imaginary drawing of the poet's penis, which he crumpled up and threw away in annoyance."

Whether you like his poetry or not, O'Hara was a fascinating, acerbic, charismatic and ultimately tragically alcoholic figure who left an indelible impression on everyone he met.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frank O'Hara was an almost savant-level talent: a whipsmart, intense, deeply flawed, fascinating bon vivant–and a real piece of work, as it turns out. This exhaustively detailed biography is elegantly, skillfully written–always interesting and evocative. The circle of legendary friends O'Hara surrounded himself with (William DeKooning! Diane DiPrima! Alan Ginsberg!) is remarkable in itself, yet O'Hara is one of those individuals who contained multitudes, a subject deserving of a biography if ever there was one. And those poems he wrote! There's a lot of them to be found in here, but not my favorite, a 1950 work called "Animals." I'll post it right here and now, it's so great:

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


Anyway, if you like Frank O'Hara & want to know more about him, this is a fine book, indeed.

[sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

what an amazing life

[E. V. Gross · Rating 4 out of 5]

What. A. Fucking. Life.

Is it possible to grieve someone you never knew? 😭

[Mauberley]

'I do this I do that'. Like its subject, the book is gossipy and insightful. While I can't yet say how much reading this biography has increased or lessened my admiration for O'Hara, I certainly feel as if I know him better. O'Hara's mileu is well drawn - post-war New York, second generation Ab Ex and the Pop rebellion that ultimately overthrew it are captured in portraits that deftly render the vitality of its participants. It is a world with an insatiable appetite for all forms of art and O'Hara throws himself headfirst into it. (I wonder how seriously he is taken today as an art critic.) His love affairs are portrayed in all of their passionate confusion - 'eroticization of the oppressor'. Gooch is better in locating the sources of many instances in O'Hara's poetry than in interpreting it, however, I now understand that the poetry that I like best is the work that commences with 'To James Dean'. As a measure of shifting social attitudes, it is amazing to hear participants interviewed in the late 80's/ early 90's discussing with candour and openness that for which they would have been arrested less than 40 years earlier.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with any biography, there is a struggle between exhaustive details and some sort of narrative drive. This book has a few chapters where it seems to be endless lists of who Frank knew, who he slept with, and who invited him for a weekend in the Hamptons, but it also has really great chapters looking at how the person he was sleeping with inspired him to write this amazing series of poems or that one seminal gorgeous piece. Gooch clearly seems to have spoken with every single person who ever knew Frank and who is still alive, and to have gone through any writing he could find by or about him. The fact that he's able to distill all of this research into such a readable book is amazing. And the poetry shines through. There are ample examples from longer poems and many of the shorter poems are presented in their entirety.

[Salvatore · Rating 4 out of 5]

A biography that makes me want to return to all O'Hara's poems to see what I missed the first few times. A biography that makes this pilf prove there was a lot of baggage attached to him the poems do not suggest (Catholicism and self-image issues as causes). A biography that respects but does not canonize its subject, especially on the topic of his lovers and open gay love poetry, which according to this biographer is more incidental than purposeful or political or radical (maybe the best kind of reason?). A biography that name drops and makes O'Hara's end seem inevitable (ugh!) but does a fine job evoking an O'Hara world. I would have liked to have seen one of his curated MoMA exhibits.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Biographies being what they are its hard to avoid a certain dishy, gossipy tendency, and even more so when the subject is one of the world-champion gossips. That gossipy tone became more pronounced toward the end of the book, but the middle section is actually pretty detailed in terms of sourcing the poems and showing how O'Hara worked. Worth the time if you're a serious Frank freak.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's safe to say I'm on a major Frank O'Hara kick, and I preferred this to Joe LeSueur's memoir, although I don't think it beats Gooch's biography of Flannery O'Connor. Regardless, better understanding O'Hara's work in the context of his life should only make reading his poems that much more enjoyable.

[David Marans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I am unable to appreciate Abstract Surrrealism, including most of the poems (and artwork) featured in this biography, I thought the book was excellent. And I was delighted to finally "meet" the wonder that was Frank O'Hara. His ridiculously premature death was a tremendous loss, wish I could have seem this kinetic, way ahead of his time wonder.

[Ben Shear · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 stars for frank ohara 4 stars for brad gooch's bio of frank ohara. well worth the read. I hesitate to say unflinching bc there were parts where i flinched, but does paint a seemingly unbiased portrait of oharas life. and made me really wanna peek at nyc 50's art world for a week or so. don't know if i could handle much more. i would recommend to anybody who even kindve likes frank ohara

[Alejandro · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really readable and fascinating account of Frank O'Hara's life.

[Randy Wilson]

He didn't care about money, fame, what people thought of him or living in an orderly house. Frank O'Hara cared about art and life.  In that order.  This book is engaging and conveys the infectious energy and wicked humor of the man.  That is more Frank's doing than Brad Gooch's the author.  Brad only needs to get out of Frank's way for him to burst forth into lyrical delight.

In Frank's poetry and in his work, art was the live-wire of his spiritual essence.  His life was big and full of art and importantly at art's service.  Warhol is a great touchstone in this regard.  Frank at first saw Andy as a shallow talent all show and no depth.  Warhol and the Pop Art movement he represented was pushing Abstract Expressionism, the art of Frank's close and dear friends into history.  Frank fought back at first but then surrendered to the fact that art moves on and can't be captured in amber.

Frank O'Hara's life was both extremely romantic and not the slightest bit romantic.  The romance came in his deep connection with artists and poets, the sense that he mattered so much to them.  That he was always the life of the party, gathering people around himself, unafraid of life and death.  His poetic obsession with early death came true for him in his painful end by vehicular violence.  That is the romance.  But he wasn't a POET.  His poetry was important to him but not to make himself a POET.  He was reluctant to publish and had piles of unpublished works lying around untended to at his death.  He was an accidental curator at MOMA during the last gasps of Abstract Expressionism.  He never owned property or seemed to collect things.  His life was a subway ride not a marble bust in a public park.   Even his alcoholism was romantic and unromantic.  Alcoholic artists in the Dylan Thomas mode are the essence of the tortured, tragic artist too vulnerable to handle their unbearable honesty.  Frank was a great artist incapable of writing dishonestly.   So yes Frank O'Hara was an artistic alcoholic but he was a highly functional alcoholic, he wasn't tortured by his drinking and his life never veered off into skid row debauchery. Yawn.

Now to the heart of the matter for me.  Frank O'Hara was an out-homosexual long before Stonewall.  Was he also a proud homosexual?  There is no evidence about that one way or the other.  Did he worry about the damage he did to his career, standing in society, family?  Did he for a moment think about the closet as an option for himself?  What did he tell his family about his being homosexual?  I use homosexual because I don't think gay is a word of meaning for the pre-Stonewall era.  Is this opacity about being homosexual something that Frank himself perpetuated or is this the fault of the author?  I blame Brad Gooch because even if there was no public record of how Frank wrestled with the societal and cultural loathing of gay men, it was an issue in the 'times' of Frank O'Hara and I believe Brad Gooch should have done his best to help us understand how Frank could be so verbal and visible about loving and being sexual with men during this forbidding period for homosexuals.

Quibbles aside, I loved this book and I love Frank O'Hara.  He became a cult figure after his death inspiring young gay men to become poets and probably to come out and celebrate themselves as well.  Alcoholism and fearlessness aside, I see much in myself that makes Frank such an inspiration.  I too care little about things, career, celebrity, money and orderliness.  I see his engagement in life one I aspire to.

[Sam Rennick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had heard of Frank O'Hara before reading this biography, but I really knew nothing of the poet or his work. Having finished Brad Gooch's biography, I still am somewhat in the dark about the poetry, but I am very well acquainted with O'Hara himself. What comes across so powerfully is the crazy wild manic uncontrolled no-holds-barred life of this man. He never stopped, he never slowed down, he had the pedal to the metal every waking hour (and he didn't seem to need much sleep), he burnt the candle at both ends and in the middle. You have to catch your breath, and you wonder why he never had to pause and catch his. It's astonishing. Tragically, he went to one midnight beach party too many, and yet, when you reflect upon the man, it's hard to believe he could have kept going full-tilt this way. Old age wasn't in his stars. Gooch gives the reader a good idea of bohemian New York in the '50's and '60's. The booze flows copiously, and you're in somebody else's bed every night. This emphatically includes Frank O'Hara. His poetry isn't ignored, but it's piecemeal, which is the way his life was. If he had ever gotten the hell out of NY and settled himself down to a quiet life in some remote place out on the Great Plains, he might have produced a real body of work. But then he wouldn't have been Frank O'Hara. Gooch's biography includes a good collection of photographs, and it hardly needs saying the biographer treats his subject with compassion.

[Kidlitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

As close to walking in O'Hara's footsteps as we'll ever get the chance to do. Loaded with names, personalities, music, films, gathering spots and gossip, O'Hara's storied life, loves and career take the reader's ability to absorb a whole storied world of New York glamour, seediness and genius in the art, poetical and artistic worlds of the 50s and 60s. Oddly, the parts in provincial Grafton, MA resonate the most in the pinched, claustrophobic, Catholic world that shaped Frank and continued to haunt him in the figure of his alcoholic mother right to his tragic ending on a Fire Island beach. A crash course in mid-20th American century modern civ, Gooch keeps up with his exhausting subject with aplomb.

[maeve · Rating 4 out of 5]

in an ideal world i would have climbed into frank o’haras skull by now and known everything about him. this is not an ideal world, so this book has sufficed. i will say it focused a lot on the people surrounding him, but in a way that makes sense since he seemed to cherish the idea of being understood in the context of those he loved. and he did love. i love you frank o’hara in a very normal way i totally did not read ode to michael goldberg (‘s birth and other births) and sob ten minutes ago definitely not❤️

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent biography of a poet I’ve always liked that also serves as a lively cultural history of 1950s-60s New York. O’Hara was also a curator at MOMA and an art critic, and artists as well known as De Kooning and Larry Rivers were important figures in O’Hara’s life. O’Hara was also gay in pre-Stonewall America, and Gooch charts his emotional life with with both restraint and honesty.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe 5 stars is more to Frank O'Hara than to Brad Gooch. He wrote a very moving book though, and it read almost like a novel. Very enlightening, wistfulness-inducing, really a perfect biography (of O'Hara as well as of the New York art/poetry scene in 50s-60s).

[Ian Durant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating insight into the life, work, collaborations and early death of the ringmaster of The New York School of Poets.

[Adam Gossman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book

[Richard Stuecker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent biography

[Bradthad Codgeroger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't read this with my lunch/as I sat over Vichyssoise and a/sizzling stinger a la Balanchine.
But I did read it in front of/that tall drink of water Olyphant and a pair/of Little Debbies...

[A. H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of interesting material, but way too much this-then-this-then-this. Some of O'Hara's friends think Gooch's picture of the poet as worn out and down at the end of his life isn't valid.

[maria 🌥️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thats my (messy) best friend

[Hannah Piette · Rating 5 out of 5]

devastating but necessary for living

[Evan Marshall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely well researched, heavy going at times. But it does a good job of giving you a feel for what Frank O'Hara was like. In the end, a sad story. Recommend.

[David Rullo · Rating 3 out of 5]

An overview of O'Hara's life that pays respect to his poetry but never examines either with a critical eye. Much like O'Hara's "I do this, I do that" poetry, Gooch's biography is filled with a lot of what O'Hara did, with whom he lived, where he worked, etc. It never delves too deeply though into his relationships, never attempts to explain, conclude or surmise.

O'Hara's poetry is often referenced, rather, snatches of O'Hara's poetry is referenced. If you are new to the poet you get no sense for his rhythm or style. You derive no sense of the larger themes in any of his poems.

That said, the book does give a good summary of his love life, his work at MOMA, his friendships and his death. If nothing else the book can be recommended for the last chapter which focuses on O'Hara's death. Unfortunately though, that's where the book ends with nary a mention of his legacy or impact on the world of modern poetry.