12 Poems by Frank O’Hara

When Frank O’Hara died in 1966 at the age of forty, he left behind a vibrant community of writers in New York City—one he had already begun to shape and influence. Ted Berrigan memorialized O’Hara in The East Village Other (the obituary is included in full below), writing, “The loss of the poet can be compared only to the equally tragic early deaths of Guillaume Apollinaire and Vladimir Mayakovsky, the two poets in this century perhaps closest to Frank O’Hara in style, spirit, and stature.”