Having a Coke with You

Having a Coke with You

By Frank O’Hara

 

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne

or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona

partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still

as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it

in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth

between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

 

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

                                                                                                              I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or

at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully

as the horse

                               it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

About the Poem

 

First published in a small magazine Love, “Having a Coke with You” was also included in the 1965 book Lunch Poems, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. It is a typically spontaneous O'Hara work, unconventional and open-hearted, dashed off with enthusiasm.

 

Frank O'Hara was known as 'a poet among the painters' because of his association with a group of New York artists, the abstract expressionists, with whom he collaborated for a number of years. A livewire and party animal, he worked as an assistant curator at MoMA. Though not prolific, his carefree style, which he termed 'Personism', went against the grain of tradition. He hated literary pretension and wanted his poetry to reflect his dynamic interest in and involvement with cutting-edge cultural activity. Manhattan, his stomping ground, was certainly full of that.

 

"Having A Coke With You" was written when O'Hara returned from a trip to Spain in April 1960 and focused on the intimate relationship between two people enjoying a drink and alludes to art and religion. It's an unorthodox poem that contrasts a beautiful lover with fine art and saintliness. The poem celebrates the mundane and the present moment, contrasting it with the formalism of traditional art. It's conversational tone and colloquial language differ from O'Hara's previous poems, which were often more experimental and abstract. Compared to his earlier works, this poem showcases a shift towards simplicity and accessibility. O'Hara emphasizes the immediate and personal experience, rejecting the grand narratives and artistic conventions of the past. The poem also reflects the cultural shift of the post-war era, where artists sought to break away from traditional forms and engage with everyday life.

 

By praising the beauty and authenticity of everyday moments, "Having a Coke with You" challenges the notion that art must be monumental or grand to be meaningful. Instead, it asserts the value of the ordinary and the subjective experience.

 

 

About the Poet

 

On March 27, 1926, Frank (Francis Russell) O’Hara was born in Maryland. He grew up in Massachusetts, and later studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. O’Hara then served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.

 

Following the war, O’Hara studied at Harvard College, where he majored in music and worked on compositions and was deeply influenced by contemporary music, his first love, as well as visual art. He also wrote poetry at that time and read the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

 

While at Harvard, O’Hara met John Ashbery and soon 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 MA in 1951. That autumn, O’Hara moved into an apartment in New York. He was soon employed at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and continued to write seriously.

 

O’Hara’s early work was considered both provocative and provoking. In 1952, his first volume of poetry, A City Winter, and Other Poems, 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 painters Larry Rivers, 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.

 

O’Hara continued working at the Museum of Modern Art throughout his life, curating exhibitions and writing introductions and catalogs for exhibits and tours. On July 25, 1966, while vacationing on Fire Island, Frank O’Hara was killed in a sand buggy accident. He was forty years old.

 

 

*About the New York School of Poetry

 

The New York School of poetry began around 1960 in New York City and included poets such as John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. Heavily influenced by Surrealism and Modernism, the poetry of the New York School was serious but also ironic and incorporated an urban sensibility into much of the work. An excerpt from Ashbery’s poem “My Philosophy of Life” demonstrates this attitude:

Just when I thought there wasn’t room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea—
call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?

Abstract Expressionist art was also a major influence, and the New York School poets had strong artistic and personal relationships with artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning. Both O’Hara and James Schuyler worked at the Museum of Modern Art, and Guest, Ashbery, and Schuyler were critics for Art News. O’Hara also took inspiration from artists, entitling two poems “Joseph Cornell” and “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art.” O’Hara’s poem “Why I am Not a Painter” includes the lines “I am not a painter, I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.”

 

A second generation of New York School poets arose during the 1960s and included Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Joe Brainard. These poets were also influenced by art, and their work contained much of the same humor and collaborative spirit. Their scene grew up around downtown New York and was associated with the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, a poetry organization that started in the mid-1960s.

The New York School continues to influence poets writing today. Recently published books such as Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s and David Lehman’s The Last-Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets are important histories of this poetic movement that still captures readers today.