Why Frank O'Hara Still Works on Tweens (And Why That Matters)

By Andy — 2026-10-14 — Literary News

I walked into a classroom with three things: pencils, paper, and a poem nobody had heard of.

That was the trick, more or less.

When Catherine Sawoski taught poetry to middle schoolers, she watched their faces do something most teachers never see: they relaxed. Frank O'Hara's short, gossipy declarations—all those excited exclamations about lunch hours and Lana Turner's fainting spell—felt nothing like the stuffy, careful composition kids had been force-fed before. No hidden language. No pretence. Here was a poet who sounded like he was telling you something over coffee rather than delivering prophecy from on high.

There's an immediacy to O'Hara that does something to you almost right away. You become co-conspirators with him.

"The Day Lady Died." "Ave Maria." "A Step Away From Them." These are casually composed and vivid and conversational, documenting his sensory love affair with New York City. They're also exactly what a twelve-year-old needs to hear.

Actually, that's not quite right. What a twelve-year-old needs is permission to notice things.

Sawoski had her seventh graders read O'Hara's work out loud in class. Then she took them outside for what she called a Poetry Walk. Just the ordinary hallway. Just the familiar parts of school they'd walked past for weeks without seeing. When they came back inside, they brought her details they'd never noticed before—a crack in the wall, a spiderweb by the front door. Eight years later, she still remembers those specific examples.

This is what O'Hara had first taught her: poetry isn't word choice and simile. It's a way of looking. It's noticing that construction workers have glistening torsos, not just sweaty skin. It's asking what those yellow hard hats are actually protecting you from.

O'Hara called his style "I do this, I do that." The name itself—Personism—came from a manifesto he wrote in a single hour while his friend Donald Allen was on his way to pick it up. In it, he wrote that you just go on your nerve, the way you'd run if someone chased you down the street with a knife. You don't turn around and shout credentials. You move because you have to, and the poem comes out the same way.

The thing about this approach is that it works.

Generations of poets after O'Hara learned from it. John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler—the New York School poets who came after him—each took something different and built their own work from it. Ron Padgett realised he could relax and say anything he wanted. Alice Notley worked out her forms in what she conceived to be O'Hara's shapes. They weren't copying; they were learning how to see. Bill Berkson wrote what he called a "cheap imitation" of O'Hara's way, noticing a church steeple on Ninth Street as bent and ridiculous rather than solemn.

Sixty years after O'Hara died—hit by a jeep on Fire Island at forty—you can still hear him everywhere. In the humor that peppers literary magazines. In the short, conversational colloquialisms that contemporary poets proved could be poetic. In the way writers notice the mundane as if it matters, which it does.

The simplicity of O'Hara's work means it's both exciting and accessible. That shouldn't be possible. Usually something is one or the other. But he managed to make noticing things feel like the most urgent act in the world, and he did it with such nerve that you believed him immediately.

That's why middle schoolers still giggle at his poems. Not because they find them funny, exactly. Because they find them true.

Source: "He was the glue that held together the New York School poetry scene, which included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler." — Academy of American Poets