♪♪ -I can remember when I bought Frank O'Hara at a bookstore called Colosseum up by Columbus Circle in like 1975.

-This is the copy that I got when I was 16 years old in Ottumwa, Iowa, from the Hungry Mind Bookstore in 1978.

-My very first book, there's a poem called "Morning Poem," and, like, I go to the café with my Frank O'Hara book.

-When I got my first Kindle, the first thing I did was load "The Complete Works of Frank O'Hara" 'cause I have to have those around.

-Frank O'Hara emphasizes poetry as fun.

I believe, he says, "It has to be at least as interesting as the movies."

He is eager to break down a kind of classroom solemnity.

-I am going now to offer you a kind of division of the stanzas into the old three-fold sort of Platonic classification.

Being non-literary, they had no academic standards.

So that you could say, "I don't like Yeats."

And they would say, "I know just how you feel.

I hate Picasso, too."

That's a much pleasanter atmosphere than the literary community was providing at the time.

♪♪ -To read O'Hara's poetry, I gathered a group of artists -- four poets, a performing duo who specialize in the music of O'Hara's mid-century moment, and a celebrated choreographer.

Together, we'd read one of O'Hara's most exuberant Lunch Poems -- "Steps."

♪♪ [ Whistle blows ] -How funny you are today, New York, like Ginger Rogers in "Swing Time" and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left.

♪♪ -Here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days -- I got tired of D-days -- and blue you there still accepts me foolish and free -All I want is a room up there and you in it and even the traffic halt so thick is a way for people to rub up against each other.

And when their surgical appliances lock, they stay together for the rest of the day.

What a day.

-I go by to check a slide and I say, that painting's not so blue.

Where's Lana Turner?

She's out eating, and Garbo's backstage at the Met.

-Everyone's taking their coat off so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers, and the park's full of dancers with their tights and shoes in little bags... -...who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y.

Why not?

-The Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won and in a sense, we're all winning.

We're alive.

♪♪ -The apartment was vacated by a gay couple who moved to the country for fun.

They moved a day too soon.

Even the stabbings are helping the population explosion, though in the wrong country.

-And all those liars have left the U.N.

The Seagram Building's no longer rivaled in interest not that we need liquor, we just like it.

-And the little box is out on the sidewalk next to the delicatessen so the old man could sit on it and drink beer and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day while the sun is still shining.

-Oh, God, it's wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much.

-How are you?

-Frank O'Hara wrote an essay called "Personism," and one of the lines in there he talks about is like saying that, you know, "I could just as easily pick up the phone as write a poem."

-This is a very peculiar situation because while I am talking to you, I am typing and also being filmed for educational TV.

Can you imagine that?

-It seems spontaneous.

It seems casual.

It seems like speaking, except it's way more interesting and way more beautiful.

♪♪ -How funny you are today, New York, like Ginger Rogers in "Swing Time."

-Ginger Rogers, for people of my generation, she's the great partner of Fred Astaire in all those movies.

But even if you don't know that, the pleasure that O'Hara wants you to take is it feels right.

-So how is New York funny the way Ginger Rogers is in "Swing Time"?

-In "Swing Time," Ginger Rogers who's, like, a very serious artist... -1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3... -...takes her dance very seriously.

♪♪ -She's tough and funny.

You can't fool her.

-You probably think I'm silly.

-Yes, I'm afraid I do.

[ Whistle blows ] -New York is always sort of funny because you never know when you walk out in the street what you're going to be confronted with.

-The humor in it abounds.

You can constantly look around and laugh about maybe the absurdity.

♪♪ -"Funny" sets us on a path in this poem.

-It's very personal, and it's very un-- it's vague in its way.

It's delightfully vague.

♪♪ "How funny you are today, New York, like Ginger Rogers in 'Swing Time' and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left."

-The only thing I looked up from this poem was St. Bridget's church.

I found a period picture when it had steeples.

The steeples are gone because they were too dangerous.

-I think we've all had the experience of being in the city where it feels like it's a little bit off-kilter.

-So the leaning steeple is like this crazy, messed-up city.

It's like, you know, everything's crooked.

-But the thing, I think, it's very dancerly.

-Exactly.

-It's a very embodied way of looking at a steeple.

And he's doing that with the whole city of New York, which is really amazing.

♪♪ -Even a title like "Steps" has these multiple resonances.

-The title "Steps" is basically a dance term.

-It's literally our little hoofs, our eyes moving down the page.

-The poem is not linear.

It's stacked.

There are instant observations that are happening, I think, pretty much simultaneously.

O'Hara's very, very musical.

-It really is like O'Hara's a dance partner that is taking you on this sort of journey around the dance hall.

-Yeah.

-And we're just, like, holding on for dear life and, like, "Are we done?

No!

[ Grunts ] We're going back again.

Yep."

♪♪ -In the university, students were learning to regard poems as rare objects, deliberately crafted, perfect in their form, and poets as bearers of sacred tradition.

♪♪ By contrast, O'Hara was composing poems on the fly, on his lunch hour, tapping them out in a typewriter showroom.

-His influences were his friends, action painters.

And like them, O'Hara let his poems brim over with feelings and moods.

♪♪ -Here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days -- I got tired of D-days.

-And blue you there still accepts me foolish and free.

-All I want is a room up there and you in it.

-And even the traffic halt so thick is a way for people to rub up against each other and when their surgical appliances lock, they stay together for the rest of the day -- what a day.

-"What a day!"

You know, it's like -- it's very jazzed.

-It seems to be this immense gratitude that we are having such a day.

-Here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days -- I got tired of D-days.

-V-Day is victory in Europe.

Everybody was on the streets, partying, kissing.

If he is feeling like it's V-Day, he's waking up ebullient.

And D-Day was a depressing day.

You are getting the body counts in the newspapers.

-He was in the military.

But it's also kind of knocking it off the table and saying, "It's not so important.

I can say this, or I can say that."

-Though his reference to D-days and V-days is breezy, O'Hara, in fact, served as a Navy sonarman on the U.S.S.

Nicholas.

Subject to air raids, the Nicholas guided minesweepers and picked up prisoners of war.

O'Hara's war experiences pierce other poems in brief flashes of recollection.

-You pull a pretty ring out of the pineapple and blow yourself up, contented to be a beautiful fan of blood above the earth's empathic earth.

♪♪ -If you just read him very casually, you won't ever notice that he is actually often talking about a kind of longing, blueness.

♪♪ There's always, like, this basement of darkness, contending with not getting too sunken down.

♪♪ "And blue you there still accepts me foolish and free."

♪♪ It is a balance of, like, trying to bring some levity to what is really gravity.

♪♪ He has a kind of tongue in cheek relationship to everything.

This seemingly superficial relationship to things is a kind of existential relationship to things, too.

-You have to find your happiness where you can find it, and it's a little bit of a struggle.

-All I want is a room up there, and you in it.

-That's from "My Fair Lady."

The lyric is "somewhere."

-♪ All I want is a room... ♪ Oh, "somewhere."

It probably is somewhere.

Yeah.

-Yeah.

But you know immediately that he's referencing it.

-No, no, totally, totally.

It's a happy song, but it's got this message of like, "That's the one thing I don't really have is a room up there."

That's the thing about New York.

It's like you don't need much space to become a New Yorker.

You just need one dingy room.

-Some days, though, O'Hara would wake up in his dingy room with Vincent Warren, a young dancer with whom he'd fallen in love.

-O'Hara was in love with dance.

And was definitely in love with the dancer.

-The accomplishment of the poem that I kind of admire and envy is how "you" is both some particular person and the city of New York.

-"It began with the you that I woke up with today," and because of that, New York is so beautiful and sends you off into the world in a particular way.

♪♪ -Down in the street, where the speaker's erotic afterglow collides with bumper to bumper traffic, "funny" can mutate into bawdy.

-And even the traffic halt so thick is a way for people to rub up against each other and when their surgical appliances lock, they stay together for the rest of the day.

What a day.

[ Whistle blows ] ♪♪ -You know, we are bunched up very close in this city, so you have to forgive a certain amount of contact, you know, in a way.

Accidental contact.

-"Surgical appliances" -- a riot.

That's like kissing another teenager with braces.

It's like, "Oh, have you been kissing?"

"Yes.

You know, can you pull us apart?"

-It's a way of talking about genitalia in a way that seems sort of funny.

-Because that's the vulgar O'Hara.

It's sort of like to be a little off and then keep going.

♪♪ I go to check a slide and I say that painting is not so blue.

-O'Hara earned his bread working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

-What's interesting is that it's one of the few poems where we get to see him working, you know?

So he's like, "I go by back to check a slide, and I say that painting's not so blue."

-He's looking at slides of paintings to comment on a show or a curator or whatever.

He was working all the time.

He wasn't -- he wasn't a poet.

♪♪ -But he uses the word "blue" in a way that confuses us.

-"That painting's not so blue."

That's the second use of blue in the poem.

-Yeah, I think that something's happening there.

"And blue you there still accepts me foolish and free."

-I think of a lover's blue eyes.

I think of blues as in jazz and blues.

-Is he talking about being sad?

About the sky?

-Like the blueness of the day, the openness of the day, the thing I'm jumping into.

♪♪ -Casual, not overly impressed with fine art, O'Hara equalizes everything.

Culture is whatever is worth paying attention to, including what's everywhere.

Like the tabloid coverage through 1958 of Lana Turner's travails.

-Where's Lana Turner?

She's out eating, and Garbo's backstage at the Met.

-O'Hara can put Lana Turner in a poem and preserve her as relevant as, like, the Wife of Bath.

-Just as relevant were the exciting surprise appearances of retired and reclusive movie star Greta Garbo.

-"Garbo's backstage at the Met" -- seems an unusual place for Garbo to be, because she's always hiding.

-Right.

-And saying, "I want to be alone."

-"Garbo's backstage at the Met."

Does that mean that he looked at the Arts and Leisure page of The Times, and it said, "Unbelievably, Garbo, who never goes out, was backstage..." Or somebody called him and said, "You'll never believe who was backstage at the Met."

There's just an excitement here that is unchecked.

-And suddenly I see a headline "Lana Turner has collapsed!"

-When I first heard recordings of him, I was like, a man who speaks fast, a man who is excited.

And that struck me as like, "Oh, my God, he's gay."

-Oh, Lana Turner, we love you.

Get up.

[ Laughter ] -That culture of campiness that was part of that particular period was somewhat personal and insular in some ways.

-"Garbo's backstage at the Met" Garbo, famously bisexual.

-This is at a point when being gay was, you know, punishable for 20 years in prison for hooking up with someone.

-When queerness is against the law, you have to figure out a way to communicate.

That's true of many, many subcultures.

♪♪ -Poetry had rarely been the place to log celebrity sightings or the personal details of one's day-to-day life, of work deadlines and lunch dates.

O'Hara called poems full of such minutiae "I do this, I do that" poems.

-This is part of a book called "Lunch Poems," which gives the lunch hour more bulk in the day.

-It just becomes magical in his hands, the phenomena of lunch as something worth recording, as opposed to a thing that's a break between work.

-He's on his own time.

He has immense freedom.

-He's saying that this is sort of, like, always happening.

"What a day" -- These days are always existing.

It's lovely.

I mean, it's just, uh...

It's like utopia.

♪♪ -Everyone's taking their coat off so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers and the park's full of dancers with their tights and shoes in little bags who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y.

Why not?

♪♪ -Outdoors in the sunshine and in love with a dancer, the poet is attuned to the whole choreography of the city, the grace and joy of human bodies in motion.

-There's this idea of passionately and seriously pursuing whatever you're pursuing in New York as an artist.

And then, also, there's all this preening vanity.

-The dancers with their tights and shoes in little bags.

It's performative.

-Right.

Right.

Well, it's like they're on their way to a performance.

Meanwhile, they're in one.

-The dancers being mistaken for the West Side Y and why not -- it goes from sort of a high balletic, people that are really into their art form, into just, "Oh, my God, they -- they confused me with somebody working out at the Y?

You know, I'm a ballet dancer."

-He was not separating this idea of high and low culture.

[ Cheering ] -The Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won, and in a sense, we're all winning -- we're alive."

I don't know nothing from sports, but I figure, you know, the Pittsburgh Pirates, I don't know if he cared a bit.

-Things resonate in different ways for people.

When he says the Pirates are winning, I think about Roberto Clemente.

I think about the history of Pittsburgh and the Pirates, and so just a moment like that is gonna resonate.

-Yes and no.

I think O'Hara doesn't care who won.

It's kind of undermining that guy thing.

Like, who cares if the Pirates or the Yankees won?

We're all winning.

-"In a sense, we're all winning" -- That's sort of tongue in cheek.

And then he's like, "We're alive."

One line, two words -- "We're alive."

And to me, that goes back to the real heaviness that's always in the work.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The apartment was vacated by a gay couple who moved to the country for fun.

They moved a day too soon.

-It happens they did it a day too soon as part of his celebration of this particular day.

-"The gay couple moving to the country for fun too soon" really reminded me of the way that people talk about New York, like, "Oh, they left right before it got good."

-"You should have seen New York then."

That's what everybody always says.

-"They can't hack it, but they don't know."

-That's an attitude you have to have 'cause it's a tough city.

♪♪ -Even the stabbings are helping the population explosion, though in the wrong country.

And all those liars have left the U.N.

The Seagram Building's no longer rivaled in interest, not that we need liquor, we just like it.

-This gets weirder and funnier as it goes along.

-It's like talking to somebody at a party, and they were like, "What did they mean by that?"

But they just keep being so interesting and charming, you think, "Well, that felt a little weird, but..." -You know, when you're telling a joke that we think, "Oh, God, why did I say that?"

-Yes.

Yes, "Stop me, somebody, please."

♪♪ -If you're Frank O'Hara, you can have humor and satire and parody and sarcasm and dangerous comedy.

-What is it?

"Even the stabbings are helping the population explosion, though in the wrong country."

-This is the thing that my students would ask me about if I showed them this poem.

Like, "Really?

Is he advocating for violence?"

-That's -- he successfully scandalizes me.

-And again, "Not that we need liquor, we just like it."

My students would be like, "Is that okay?

Is that morally correct to be suggesting that people drink?"

And I'd be like, "Well, it's true."

You know?

It's true.

Right?"

-So while showing me a good time in this poem, he's thumbing his nose at me and my values.

It makes me take him maybe a little bit less as a social and moral guide and think of him as a little greater as an artist.

-And then there's certain things that I don't necessarily need to know the answer to.

-There's some secret language in there, but you don't need to know it.

♪♪ -And all those liars have left the U.N.

The Seagram Building's no longer rivaled in interest.

-When he says, "All those liars have left the U.N.," he doesn't have to go into it or talk about why.

He's thinking about the speed of conversation.

-There's all these flotsam and jetsam between the beginning and the end.

-The list goes on, and it's -- you're not sure if it's part of the line before or leading to the next line or it's just, "And another thing, and this, too."

-It really would be different if this was, quote, "written."

But this is said.

-Flash and bulb.

What does that mean?

-The poem is an imitation of the phone.

-It feels like the way that we all really talk with one another in some ways or the way that we really do think if we don't clean it up in a way that would make more continuous sort of, quote-unquote, "sense."

♪♪ -And the little box is out on the sidewalk next to the delicatessen so the old man can sit on it and drink beer and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day while the sun is still shining.

-The old guy on the box outside the delicatessen -- she doesn't just ask him to leave, she knocks him off it!

♪♪ -It's slapsticky.

-It's a joke, but it's not easy.

I'm not saying to be in this moment in New York and to love it is without its complexities.

-It's not like a love song to New -- like everything is a tribute of how fabulous New York is.

It's also how frustrating and irritating and complicated it is.

♪♪ -Oh, God, it's wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much.

♪♪ -The poem comes from a moment when it was all working.

Do you know what I mean?

That there's a moment when it's great that you drank too many drinks and smoked too many cigarettes, but you're so kind of vital and strong that it's like, "Yay!"

-It feels to me like the final chorus, where you're like, "Alright!

And everybody sing that together."

Like, you're like, "Great," you know.

♪ Love you so much ♪ You know, you just -- you can't -- You can't help but want to just read it again.

♪♪ -"Oh, God, it's wonderful, and I love you so much."

We will say, "That's too easy.

That can't work."

But it always works in O'Hara, and this is the magic of him.

-It's a very pure emotion of being, you know, just extremely -- -Alive.

-Alive.

♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ]