Frank O'Hara: A Story in Names

This paper is an analysis of two poems by the American New York School poet Frank O’Hara. The two poems analysed here are “The Day Lady Died” and “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul.” Both poems have O’Hara’s distinctive ‘I do this, I do that’ style which is characterised by a conversational tone and a narrative of everyday events in New York City. O’Hara’s poetry has long been criticized by the literary community for being targeted to a coterie circle, specifically to his friends and artists in the New York School in the 1950s and early 1960s. Because these criticisms partly derive from the considerable amount of proper names O’Hara includes in many of his poems, the following analysis will be based on the proper names included in the poems. By using two different theories/typologies to analyse the poems, this paper finds the proper name to be a core part of the narrative of the poems and an important source of information for the context in which the poems were written