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LIFE Frank O'Hara, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine Broderick, was born in , Stephane Mallarmé , Boris Pasternak , and Vladimir Mayakovsky . While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and left Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English. He then attended graduate school at the University Of Michigan , Ann Arbor, and received his M.A. in 1951. That autumn O'Hara moved into an apartment in New York City . He was soon employed at the front desk of the Museum Of Modern Art and began to write seriously. O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for ''Art News'' and in 1960 was made Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum Of Modern Art . He was also friends with Artists like Willem De Kooning , Larry Rivers , and Bill Berkson . O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island in 1966. He was run over by a Dune Buggy while on the Beach late at Night with Friends . He is buried in Springs Cemetery on Long Island. WORK O'Hara's early work was considered both provocative and provoking. His work was immediate and was often quickly typed out, a point critics have consistently pointed out. One collection, ''Lunch Poems'' was so named because he typed them up on his lunch hour. Low and high cultural references mingle easily in his poems, with dreamlike lyricism. His most anthologized poems are "Why I Am Not a Painter" and "The Day Lady Died," about singer Billie Holiday . O'Hara was notoriously disorganized. A legend states that before publishing O'Hara's poems City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti had to fly from San Francisco to New York and search through all of O'Hara's coat pockets to find them. It is unknown how many poems may have been lost. In 1952 his first volume of Poetry , ''A City in Winter'', attracted favorable attention; his essays on painting and sculpture and his reviews for ArtNews were considered brilliant. O'Hara became one of the most distinguished members of the New York School of poets, which also included Ashbery, James Schuyler , and Kenneth Koch . O'Hara's association with the painters Jackson Pollock , and Jasper Johns , also leaders of the New York School, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry. He attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas. In certain instances, he collaborated with the painters to make "poem-paintings," paintings with word texts. O'Hara's most original volumes of verse, ''Meditations in an Emergency'' (1956) and ''Lunch Poems'' (1964), are Impromptu lyrics, a Jumble of witty talk, journalistic parodies, and Surrealist imagery. BIBLIOGRAPHY Books in Lifetime
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