On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Frank O’Hara’s celebrated poem “Having a Coke with You,” Gillian Jakab takes a look at the “poet among painters” and the poem’s “You.” In April 1960, four days after returning from a trip to Spain, Frank O’Hara dashed off the poem “Having a Coke with You.” The open arms of the second person beckon anyone in; we are at home in the delights of Frank’s quotidian world. But eventually a clue emerges of the poem’s very real recipient, whose thrall over Frank outpaces some impressive competition: 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 A “poet among painters,” O’Hara could be found most nights in the late 1950s and ’60s at readings, exhibitions, studios, dinners, or the Cedar Tavern with the many contemporary painters he counted among his intimate friends and wider circle: Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, and Willem de Kooning, to name a few. 1 His weekdays he spent among paintings, first at the front desk, then as a curator, at The Museum of Modern Art. The poem’s precipitating visit to Spain was in fact a research trip for an exhibition he was organizing to open at MoMA that summer, New Spanish Painting and Sculpture. The museum’s dedication of a minigallery to O’Hara last fall attests to his role in celebrating Abstract Expressionism (he helped to curate MoMA’s influential Cold War-driven exhibition The New American Painting, of 1958, and wrote the first monograph on Jackson Pollock the following year) and in championing the movement’s second generation, his friends and contemporaries. The gallery assembles poems, ephemera, and paintings of and in the vicinity of O’Hara to describe how he shaped the history not only of the museum’s own collection but of modern art. So who could have moved so beautifully as to render Leonardo, Duchamp, and the entire movement of Futurism dispensable? In O’Hara’s eyes, that would have been the not-yet-twenty-one-year-old dancer Vincent Warren. And what to make of these rhetorical devices elevating his lover above greats of the Western canon? In “Having a Coke with You” as in much of his work, the poet admixes life and art. Here, life seems to come out on top: person over portrait (except maybe Rembrandt’s Polish Rider in the Frick). But we know that O’Hara didn’t sort the world into such stilted categories. As the writer Joe LeSueur, his roommate, and occasional bedfellow, through four apartments, put it, “He didn’t make distinctions, he mixed everything up: life and art, friends and lovers—what was the difference between them?”2 O’Hara aestheticized life and vivified art. And for either to be worthwhile for him, they had to be both immediate and action-filled. Warren, as both lover and dancer, embodied a quality that fed O’Hara’s appetite for a fresh union of life and art, a quality next to which the works of the great painters were found wanting. In O’Hara’s poem, Warren’s moving, breathing presence at home and on stage is a foil to what’s static and anchored: 114
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 O’Hara devalued both fixed definitions of the past and lofty theories of the future. Instead, he cast his gaze on the ever-shifting present before him and transcribed it in real time with his portable Royal typewriter.3 On the resulting quick, cascading poetry and its bursting imagery, the critic Marjorie Perloff comments that “photographs, monuments, static memories—‘all the things that don’t change’—these have no place in the poet’s world.”4 While O’Hara and the other New York School poets were closely and famously entwined with the Abstract Expressionists, it was the immediacy and dynamism of their work that drew him, not their focus on the inherent characteristics of the medium. Perloff writes, “We can now understand why O’Hara loved the motion picture, action painting, and all forms of dance—art forms that capture the present rather than the past, the present in all its chaotic splendor.”5 A trained pianist, O’Hara kept pace by “playing the typewriter,” in his phrase, anytime, anywhere. His apartment’s revolving door of friends, the city honking by, a typewriter shop at lunch, a trip to an art opening, a party—everything and everyone before him was fodder for his poetry. So naturally, from the summer of 1959, when O’Hara and Warren met, dance— among the most immediate and least mediated of
Previous spread: Vincent Warren in Catulli Carmina, c. 1969. Photo © Jack Mitchell, courtesy Vincent-Warren Dance Library This page: Vincent Warren and Frank O’Hara. Photo © George Montgomery, courtesy Vincent-Warren Dance Library Opposite: “Having a Coke with You” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen Granville-Smith and Donald Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
