Born on March 27, 1926, Frank O’Hara helped make the ordinary movement of a day feel worthy of poetry. A lunch break, a telephone call, a movie star glimpsed in a headline, a taxi rushing through Manhattan, a friend encountered unexpectedly, a glass of juice, a painting, a love affair, or a walk through Midtown could all become material. Instead of removing poetry from daily life and placing it somewhere solemn and distant, O’Hara allowed the city to rush directly onto the page.
That spontaneity could make his poems seem casual, but casualness was part of the art. Beneath the conversations, jokes, names of friends, restaurants, movies, painters, and streets was a poet with deep knowledge of music, modernist literature, visual art, and European avant-garde traditions. O’Hara became one of the central figures of the New York School of poets while simultaneously building a distinguished career at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked closely with some of the defining artists of postwar America. At the time of his sudden death at forty, he was arguably better known in the art world than in the literary establishment; afterward, his reputation as a poet grew enormously.
🎹 Music Before Poetry
Francis Russell O’Hara was born in Maryland and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. Music entered his life early, and for years it appeared that the piano rather than poetry might become his central artistic discipline. From 1941 through 1944 he studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston, developing an understanding of rhythm, composition, and modern music that would remain important even after he abandoned the possibility of becoming a professional musician.
Music never really disappeared from O’Hara’s poetry. His lines can accelerate, interrupt themselves, change direction suddenly, and move between apparently unrelated ideas with the energy of improvisation. He did not depend upon conventional meter to create rhythm because everyday speech already contained rhythms of its own. Conversations, advertisements, traffic, telephone calls, gossip, movie dialogue, names, and sudden emotional shifts could all enter the composition.
That musical background also helps explain why O’Hara was attracted to artists who believed a work could register the energy of its creation. He wanted poetry to feel as though something were happening rather than as though the poet had carefully embalmed an experience after it was over. The poem might be revised, constructed, and formally intelligent, but it should still contain the electricity of the moment that produced it.
⚓ World War II and the Pacific
O’Hara’s musical studies were interrupted by World War II. He served in the United States Navy as a sonarman aboard the destroyer USS Nicholas, with service taking him through the South Pacific and Japan. Like many young Americans of his generation, he entered adulthood against the enormous disruption of global war rather than through a smooth progression from school into civilian life.
O’Hara did not become primarily known as a war poet, yet the experience placed him inside a generation for whom death, military service, mass destruction, and geopolitical upheaval were immediate facts. His later poetry frequently preferred restaurants, friendships, movies, paintings, desire, and city streets, but this attention to ordinary pleasure can feel more significant when understood against the historical world from which he emerged.
O’Hara’s poems often behave as though the present moment matters because it can disappear so quickly. Someone is alive now. A friend is standing nearby now. The afternoon light is changing now. There may be no grand philosophical system capable of preserving the experience afterward, so the poem catches what it can while everyone is still moving.
🎓 Harvard, John Ashbery and a New Direction
After the war, O’Hara attended Harvard College through the GI Bill. He initially concentrated on music and composition but eventually changed his major to English, graduating in 1950. During these years he read widely in modern poetry, encountering writers including Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose experiments with voice, image, and modern urban experience offered alternatives to more conventional American verse.
At Harvard, O’Hara also met John Ashbery, beginning one of the friendships that would become central to the emerging New York School. Both young writers were interested in contemporary art, European modernism, movies, music, humor, and literary experimentation, but their poetic voices developed very differently. Ashbery often moved toward dreamlike shifts of consciousness and deliberately uncertain meaning, while O’Hara increasingly created poems that felt like conversations already underway.
O’Hara published work in the Harvard Advocate and became part of a literary community that encouraged experimentation rather than insisting that poetry conform to established academic expectations. He continued graduate study at the University of Michigan, receiving a master’s degree in 1951, and then made the move that would define the remainder of his life.
He went to New York.
🗽 New York Becomes the Poem
For many writers, a city provides a setting. For O’Hara, New York became closer to a collaborator. Manhattan supplied movement, interruptions, names, accidents, weather, advertising, friendships, art exhibitions, cinema marquees, construction sites, restaurants, record shops, taxis, sidewalks, and the countless tiny encounters that make urban life feel simultaneously anonymous and intimate.
His poetry rarely treats the city as something to be described from a scenic distance. O’Hara is usually inside it, walking. The poem moves because he moves. A street changes the subject. A passing thought collides with a person coming around the corner. Something seen in a shop window interrupts an emotion that had seemed important only seconds earlier.
This gives many O’Hara poems their peculiar sense of speed. They do not merely describe the modern city; they imitate the way consciousness behaves while moving through one. Attention jumps from traffic to friendship to art to food to desire, and the poem allows those changes to remain visible.
The city never waits for the poet to finish his thought.
O’Hara learned not to ask it to.
🖼️ The Museum of Modern Art
Shortly after arriving in New York in 1951, O’Hara began working at the Museum of Modern Art, initially in a relatively modest position selling postcards and working around the museum’s public spaces. The job gave him something he valued enormously: proximity to paintings. After leaving MoMA briefly to devote more time to writing, he returned in 1955 and gradually assumed increasingly substantial curatorial responsibilities. By 1960 he had become an assistant curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions.
O’Hara’s museum career was not a side job used merely to pay a poet’s rent. He became a serious curator, critic, exhibition organizer, and advocate for contemporary artists. He wrote catalog essays, organized exhibitions, contributed criticism to ARTnews, and helped explain developments in American painting to audiences at a moment when Abstract Expressionism was radically changing the international reputation of American art.
The overlap between art and poetry became one of the defining qualities of his career. O’Hara knew painters not as distant cultural celebrities but as friends, colleagues, collaborators, and people whose studios he visited. Poetry and painting were part of the same ongoing conversation.
His poems entered painters’ lives.
Painters entered his poems.
🎨 A Poet Among Painters
O’Hara formed close relationships with artists including Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and others associated with the intensely creative New York art world of the 1950s and 1960s. Some painted or drew his portrait, while others collaborated with him on projects in which words and images occupied the same physical work.
These friendships influenced the way O’Hara thought about poetry. Abstract Expressionism emphasized gesture, movement, process, scale, and the physical act of making a painting. O’Hara became interested in achieving something comparable with language—not by imitating a painting literally but by allowing a poem to record the force of its own unfolding.
This helps explain the velocity of his verse. The line can feel like a brushstroke made before hesitation slows it down. Yet the apparent spontaneity should not be mistaken for lack of craft. Like painters whose dramatic surfaces could conceal careful decisions about color, space, and composition, O’Hara could make deliberate poetic construction appear effortless.
He liked the appearance of speed.
He knew how much work could hide inside it.
📝 The New York School
O’Hara became closely associated with the group eventually known as the New York School of poets, whose central first-generation figures included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest. The name was never a strict manifesto or organized movement in the way some earlier artistic schools had been. These poets shared friendships, aesthetic interests, art-world connections, publications, readings, and a general openness toward experimentation without developing a single style that everyone followed.
What united them was partly an environment. New York’s painters, galleries, theaters, cinemas, cafés, museums, small magazines, apartments, and parties produced a culture in which disciplines continually overlapped. A poet could write art criticism. A painter could illustrate a poem. Writers could collaborate, dedicate poems to one another, borrow jokes, interrupt one another’s work, and turn daily social life into literary material.
O’Hara was particularly important because he seemed able to connect people. Friends later remembered the extraordinary range of his relationships across the arts. He could move from museums to poetry readings to studios to parties while maintaining an intense curiosity about what other people were making.
His poetry reflects that sociability.
Names are everywhere because people were everywhere.
📖 A City Winter and Early Poetry
O’Hara’s first book, A City Winter and Other Poems, appeared in 1952. The work introduced many qualities that would later become more fully developed: urban imagery, humor, surreal turns, shifts in tone, and a willingness to allow high culture and ordinary popular experience to occupy the same poem.
He did not believe poetry had to protect itself from movies, commercial culture, gossip, or contemporary names in order to remain serious. That attitude became increasingly important during a decade in which distinctions between elite and popular culture were being challenged across American painting, music, fiction, film, and poetry.
An O’Hara poem could refer to an avant-garde artist and a movie star without apologizing for either.
Both belonged to the poet’s actual mental world.
Why pretend otherwise?
🚨 Meditations in an Emergency
Published in 1957, Meditations in an Emergency became one of O’Hara’s defining books. The title itself captures something essential about his sensibility: contemplation takes place amid crisis rather than outside it. There may be no peaceful retreat in which the poet finally achieves perfect clarity. One thinks while life continues happening.
The poems mix love, anxiety, humor, cultural references, urban experience, longing, and flashes of absurdity. O’Hara could move rapidly between emotional vulnerability and comic deflection, refusing the idea that serious feelings had to be expressed in solemn language.
This was especially important to his treatment of love. Desire in O’Hara is rarely sealed away from the rest of life. Someone can be heartbroken while still noticing the weather, a restaurant, a passing stranger, or an absurd social situation.
The world does not stop because the heart has broken.
O’Hara’s poems understand that almost cruelly well.
☎️ “Personism”
In 1959, O’Hara published “Personism: A Manifesto,” a playful essay that simultaneously mocked literary manifestos and offered an unusually useful explanation of his own poetic practice. He imagined the poem as something existing directly between people rather than as an impersonal object placed at a formal distance from both writer and reader. The essay grew from his joking realization that a love poem might function almost like a telephone call to the person for whom it was written.
The humor matters because O’Hara distrusted poetic self-importance. He could articulate sophisticated ideas about art while immediately puncturing the seriousness surrounding them. “Personism” therefore works partly as literary theory and partly as a joke about the urge to create literary theories in the first place.
Yet the central insight describes his poems extremely well. Many feel directed toward somebody specific. They contain private references, names, gossip, affection, impatience, invitations, and moments that sound as though the reader has accidentally entered an ongoing conversation.
Instead of making this intimacy exclusive, O’Hara somehow makes the stranger reading the poem feel included.
That is one of his most unusual gifts.
❤️ Love Without Disguise
O’Hara wrote openly from the experience of loving men at a time when homosexuality remained heavily stigmatized in American society. His poetry does not always explain or defend that fact. Men appear as lovers and objects of desire because they were part of his life, and the poems frequently allow queer affection to exist with an everyday naturalness that was unusual in mainstream mid-century American literature.
That quality helped make O’Hara particularly important to later generations of queer writers. His poems demonstrated that same-sex love did not have to appear only as tragedy, secrecy, confession, or argument. It could also appear as flirtation, excitement, jealousy, conversation, humor, lunch, art galleries, friendship, sex, and the ordinary pleasure of wanting to spend time with another person. Lunch Poems in particular later developed an enthusiastic readership within queer literary culture.
O’Hara certainly knew the pressures surrounding gay life in the 1950s and early 1960s. Yet his poetry frequently refuses to allow those pressures to control the entire emotional landscape.
Desire deserves more than fear.
It deserves pleasure too.
🥤 “Having a Coke with You”
One of O’Hara’s most beloved poems, “Having a Coke with You,” demonstrates how effortlessly he could combine intimacy, humor, art criticism, urban observation, and love.
The premise is wonderfully simple. The speaker would rather spend time with the person he loves than look at some of the most celebrated artworks in the world.
Yet the poem does not reject art. O’Hara loved painting far too deeply for that. The joke works because he knows exactly how important those works supposedly are and chooses the living person standing beside him anyway.
The beloved becomes more compelling than masterpieces because life has something even art cannot preserve completely: movement, reciprocity, unpredictability, and presence.
A portrait remains still.
The person you love turns toward you.
For O’Hara, that difference could contain an entire poetics.
🍽️ The Famous Lunch Breaks
O’Hara’s museum job provided the circumstances behind his most famous collection. During lunch hours, he often left MoMA and walked through Midtown, sometimes writing poems as he moved through the city or during breaks from work. MoMA’s own history remembers him as its “lunch-break poet,” while the Academy of American Poets notes that this habit contributed directly to the title of Lunch Poems.
The romantic version of the story imagines O’Hara effortlessly producing perfect poems between sandwiches. The reality was more complicated. The collection included poems written across a span of years, and assembling the manuscript took far longer than the spontaneous title suggests.
That gap between appearance and process is quintessential O’Hara.
The finished poem feels immediate.
The book took time.
Spontaneity itself had to be arranged.
🥪 Lunch Poems
City Lights published Lunch Poems in 1964 as part of its Pocket Poets series. The small volume placed O’Hara in a catalog already strongly associated with experimental American poetry, including work by Allen Ginsberg and other writers outside conventional academic traditions. The collection contained poems that would become some of O’Hara’s most widely read, including “The Day Lady Died,” “Ave Maria,” and “A Step Away from Them.”
The title captures O’Hara’s democratic sense of scale. A poem does not need an entire evening, a mountain retreat, or a grand historical subject. It can fit into lunch.
That smallness does not make the experience trivial. O’Hara’s poetry repeatedly suggests that ordinary moments become important because they are what a life is actually made of. The enormous majority of human existence occurs between traditionally “important” events.
Most days are lunch days.
O’Hara made them count.
🎷 “The Day Lady Died”
“The Day Lady Died” recounts an afternoon in New York when O’Hara gradually encounters the news of Billie Holiday’s death. The poem initially appears almost aggressively ordinary. The speaker runs errands, buys things, moves through the city, notices details, and continues with the business of the day.
Then memory enters.
The death of Holiday transforms everything that preceded it.
This structure gives the poem much of its emotional power. Grief does not arrive accompanied by formal ceremony. It interrupts shopping, conversation, traffic, lunch, and errands. A person can be moving through an ordinary afternoon while history changes quietly nearby.
O’Hara understood that people frequently remember major events through minor details.
Where were you?
What were you carrying?
What had you just bought?
Who were you supposed to meet?
The apparently trivial details become the architecture around loss.
🎬 Movies, Movie Stars and Popular Culture
O’Hara loved movies with an enthusiasm that appeared throughout his writing. Hollywood stars, film titles, theaters, and cinematic language could enter his poems as naturally as painters or classical composers.
This refusal to establish a rigid hierarchy between cultural forms placed him ahead of many literary critics of his period. A serious poet was supposedly expected to treat certain subjects with reverence while dismissing others as commercial entertainment. O’Hara saw no reason to impoverish his imagination that way.
Lana Turner could matter.
Opera could matter.
A Renaissance painting could matter.
A Hollywood melodrama could matter.
What mattered most was the intensity of the poet’s response.
O’Hara’s poetry often asks a refreshingly simple question of culture: does this make you feel more alive?
🏙️ The “I Do This, I Do That” Poem
Critics eventually used the phrase “I do this, I do that” to describe a recognizable mode in O’Hara’s poetry: poems structured around movement through daily experience. The speaker walks somewhere, meets someone, buys something, thinks about a friend, notices a building, remembers another person, changes direction, and reaches the end without having transformed the day into a conventional story.
The technique can look deceptively easy.
It is not.
Daily life contains far more details than any poem can hold, which means the poet is constantly choosing what matters. O’Hara’s great skill lay in making those choices feel accidental.
A name appears at precisely the right moment.
A joke interrupts before the emotion becomes sentimental.
A cultural reference changes the scale.
A tiny image suddenly makes the whole poem ache.
The art lies partly in hiding the art.
🖌️ Art Critic and Curator
O’Hara’s increasing prominence at MoMA reflected genuine expertise. He organized and contributed to exhibitions, wrote about painters, and became an important advocate for the American artists whose work was transforming postwar visual culture. His museum duties eventually included organizing circulating exhibitions and contributing to ambitious projects presenting contemporary American painting to audiences at home and abroad.
He was especially committed to artists whose work had not yet acquired the unquestioned status it would later enjoy. Supporting contemporary art meant accepting risk. A curator had to respond while reputations were still uncertain and arguments remained active.
That immediacy paralleled his poetry.
O’Hara preferred the living argument to the finished monument.
The painting being made now interested him.
The poem being written now interested him.
The friend walking into the room interested him most of all.
🤝 Collaboration as a Way of Life
O’Hara’s creative world depended heavily upon collaboration. He wrote poems with friends, worked with painters on combined text-and-image pieces, contributed to exhibitions, participated in readings, and treated artistic life as something intensely social.
This distinguishes him from the familiar image of the poet as a solitary figure withdrawing from the world in order to create. O’Hara certainly needed time to write, but he drew energy from proximity to other people.
Conversation generated poems.
Friendship generated poems.
Arguments generated poems.
Love affairs generated poems.
Looking at someone else’s painting could generate a poem.
Creativity did not have to be protected from social life.
For O’Hara, social life was one of its primary fuels.
🌆 High Culture and Everyday Life
One of O’Hara’s great stylistic freedoms came from refusing to keep cultural categories separate. Classical composers might appear near advertisements. European poets could coexist with movie stars. Abstract Expressionism might lead into a joke about lunch.
This approach did not mean everything was equally important in exactly the same way. O’Hara possessed strong judgments about art and could write serious criticism when he chose.
What he rejected was the idea that poetry became impure when contemporary everyday life entered it.
Poetry could contain whatever consciousness contained.
And consciousness was messy.
That mess became one of the most liberating aspects of his work.
🗣️ A Voice That Sounds Like Somebody Talking
O’Hara’s conversational tone is perhaps his most immediately recognizable quality. His poems can sound as though someone has called you, begun speaking before saying hello, and moved through three different subjects before you quite understand why.
The intimacy is carefully constructed. Direct address brings the reader close. Names make the world seem inhabited. Questions create the feeling that an answer might actually be possible. Parentheses reproduce side thoughts. Exclamations preserve excitement rather than smoothing it away.
Traditional poetic authority often depends upon distance.
O’Hara created authority through proximity.
He does not sound like someone speaking from a monument.
He sounds like someone calling from around the corner.
😄 Humor Without Losing Seriousness
O’Hara was extremely funny, and that humor is essential to understanding why his poetry feels so alive. He distrusted the assumption that literary seriousness required solemnity.
A joke could protect against sentimentality, but it could also make emotion sharper. The reader relaxes, laughs, and then encounters something painful before having time to prepare.
O’Hara used that rhythm repeatedly.
It resembles ordinary friendship. The people closest to us rarely speak in uninterrupted philosophical monologues. They joke, interrupt themselves, complain, flirt, exaggerate, and change the subject when something becomes uncomfortable.
Then, unexpectedly, they say the thing that matters.
O’Hara made poems behave like that.
💔 Friendship, Loss and Elegy
For all the speed and comedy of O’Hara’s poetry, loss runs through it. Friends die. Artists disappear. Relationships end. The city changes. Moments vanish almost immediately after occurring.
This gives his commitment to the present a deeper emotional foundation. O’Hara’s poems do not celebrate immediacy because the present is uncomplicated. They celebrate it because everything in the present is temporary.
His elegies frequently resist the grand formal language traditionally associated with mourning. Death arrives inside the ordinary world rather than replacing it.
Someone dies.
The traffic continues.
People eat lunch.
The museum opens.
The phone rings.
This coexistence of grief and ordinary activity may be one of the truest things O’Hara captured.
🏖️ Fire Island
In July 1966, O’Hara was staying on Fire Island, the barrier island off Long Island that had become an important summer destination for artists, writers, and gay New Yorkers. During the early hours of July 24, he was struck by a dune buggy on the beach and suffered catastrophic injuries.
He died the following day, July 25, 1966, at the age of forty.
The suddenness was particularly brutal for a poet whose work seemed built around the urgency of being alive right now. There was no long decline and no final period in which O’Hara shaped his reputation from old age.
The poems simply stopped.
Friends who had expected years more of lunches, phone calls, exhibitions, gossip, arguments, and new writing suddenly found themselves preserving what remained.
📰 “Museum Curator — Also a Poet”
At the time of his death, O’Hara’s standing was strangely divided. Within his circle he was deeply admired as a poet, and he had appeared in influential anthologies and published important books. Yet his museum career had given him a public professional identity that was in some ways more established.
The New York Times obituary emphasized his role as a museum curator before describing him as a poet. In retrospect, the ordering seems almost impossible because O’Hara has become such an important figure in postwar American literature. Yet it demonstrates how dramatically literary reputations can change after death.
The curator was visible.
The poet’s full influence was still coming.
📚 The Collected Poems
Several years after O’Hara’s death, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara brought together a much larger body of work than many readers had realized existed. The collection helped transform understanding of his achievement and won the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry.
The sheer volume mattered. During his lifetime, O’Hara could seem like a brilliantly spontaneous poet producing scattered occasional pieces around his museum career and social life. The collected work revealed something much more substantial.
The spontaneity had accumulated.
Lunches became a body of poetry.
Phone calls became a poetics.
Temporary moments became literary history.
🌈 A Queer Literary Legacy
O’Hara’s posthumous influence has been particularly important for queer writers. Later readers could recognize in his poetry a version of gay life not completely defined by shame, coded language, or tragedy.
That does not mean O’Hara lived in an accepting society. He did not. Mid-century America could be deeply hostile toward gay men through law, employment discrimination, policing, social stigma, and psychiatry.
Yet O’Hara’s poems often insist upon pleasure anyway.
Men fall in love.
Friends gather.
Bodies matter.
A person can be desired.
A lunch can become romantic.
This ordinary visibility was quietly radical.
O’Hara did not need every poem to announce a political position in order for the life inside the poem to challenge assumptions about whose intimacy belonged in literature.
✨ Influence on Later Poetry
O’Hara’s influence has expanded enormously since his death. Contemporary poets frequently draw upon techniques he helped popularize: direct address, casual diction, personal names, references to current culture, city walking, diaristic structure, humor, emotional immediacy, and rapid shifts between trivial and profound subjects.
Yet imitation can miss what made O’Hara difficult. Writing down everything that happened during lunch does not automatically produce an O’Hara poem.
The essential element is attention.
He knew which details created energy.
He knew when a name made the poem more intimate rather than merely obscure.
He knew when humor should interrupt feeling and when feeling should be allowed to break through.
The poems feel loose because the intelligence controlling them is exceptionally quick.
🥤 Why Lunch Poems Still Feels Contemporary
Lunch Poems remains striking because the cultural world it describes should, in theory, feel dated. Restaurants close. Movie stars fade. Stores disappear. Friends become unfamiliar historical names. Manhattan transforms.
Yet the poems continue to feel immediate.
Part of that freshness comes from their understanding of attention in modern life. People still move through cities while thinking about relationships, culture, food, messages, work, friends, headlines, and whatever else happens to pass in front of them.
The technology has changed.
The distracted mind has not.
If O’Hara were walking through Manhattan now, the telephone might be in his pocket instead of waiting at home, but the poem would still have too many things trying to enter it at once.
He would probably like that.
🌟 Remembering Frank O’Hara
Born on March 27, 1926, Frank O’Hara spent only forty years alive, yet he managed to become a sailor, musician, poet, critic, curator, collaborator, friend, lover, and one of the central personalities connecting New York’s literary and visual-art worlds during a period of extraordinary creativity.
His great achievement was making immediacy durable.
A lunch break should disappear.
A taxi ride should disappear.
A conversation should disappear.
An afternoon should disappear.
People themselves eventually disappear.
O’Hara knew this, and rather than attempting to defeat impermanence with monumental language, he wrote quickly enough to accompany it. His poems do not freeze life. They move alongside it for a few moments.
That may be why they still feel so fresh. Frank O’Hara never asked ordinary life to become grand before poetry could notice it. He trusted the city, the friend, the lover, the joke, the painting, the movie, the phone call, and the unexpected emotion that appears while walking somewhere else.
The poem could begin anywhere because life was already happening everywhere.
All O’Hara had to do was keep up.
“I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”
-Frank O’Hara
from “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”
The Sun woke me this morning loud
and clear, saying “Hey! I’ve been
trying to wake you up for fifteen
minutes. Don’t be so rude, you are
only the second poet I’ve ever chosen
to speak to personally
so why
aren’t you more attentive? If I could
burn you through the window I would
to wake you up. I can’t hang around
here all day.”
“Sorry, Sun, I stayed
up late last night talking to Hal.”
-Frank O’Hara
🔗 Related Articles
- William Carlos Williams: The Doctor-Poet Who Found Poetry in Everyday Life
- René Ricard: Poetry, Basquiat & the Art of Downtown New York
- Beyond the City Lights: Immersing Ourselves in the World of Lawrence Ferlinghetti
- Kenneth Rexroth: Poet, Translator & Reluctant “Father of the Beats”
📚 Sources & Further Reading
- Academy of American Poets — Frank O’Hara
- Academy of American Poets — Frank O’Hara: A Poet Among Painters
- Academy of American Poets — Lunch Poems
- Academy of American Poets — Frank O’Hara’s “Personism”
- Museum of Modern Art — Frank O’Hara: The Lunch-Break Poet
- Museum of Modern Art Archives — Frank O’Hara Papers
- Poetry Foundation — “Also a Poet”
- National Book Foundation — Frank O’Hara
