Poems Retrieved

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) was an American poet, curator, and critic whose exuberant, chatty, anti-monumental verse helped define the New York School of poetry in the 1950s and 60s. Working as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara produced poems that read like urgent dispatches from the street — full of friends' names, lunch plans, art gossip, and sudden lyric epiphany. His collection Lunch Poems (City Lights, 1964) remains one of the most beloved American poetry books of its era. He died in a beach accident on Fire Island at age 40, leaving a body of work that has grown only more influential with time.