Frank O'Hara
Quick answer: Frank O'Hara craft guide: lunch-hour immediacy, proper nouns and intimate address. Learn the New York School technique of writing life as it happens.
Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) wrote poems on his lunch breaks, sometimes typing them in the demonstration booth of a typewriter shop, then stuffed them in drawers and forgot them. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art and the social centre of the New York School of poets and painters, he treated poetry as one more thing a lively person does in a full day. He died at forty, struck by a beach buggy on Fire Island, and friends assembling his Collected Poems found over five hundred pieces, many unpublished.
His mock-manifesto Personism (1959) claims a poem should simply be squeezed in between two persons instead of two pages, like a phone call. The joke contains his whole method, and it is a method you can learn.
The signature moves
Move one: the I do this I do that poem. Pieces like The Day Lady Died narrate an ordinary errand run, buying cigarettes, a magazine, presents for a weekend visit, in relentless present tense, until news of Billie Holiday's death arrives and the accumulated ordinariness turns to grief in a single remembered image. The shopping list was the elegy's fuse all along.
Move two: proper nouns as texture. O'Hara names friends, streets, brands, films and painters without explanation, trusting that specificity itself, not our recognition, creates intimacy. Move three: address to a you that makes the reader an eavesdropper on affection; Having a Coke with You runs on this charm. Move four: speed. The syntax rushes, digresses and doubles back like talk, with line breaks catching the skid, so the poem feels made now, in front of you.
What you can learn
Write a lunch poem this week. Narrate one real errand in present tense, logging times, shops and purchases without interpretation, then let a single piece of news, memory or overheard line enter late and recolour everything before it. The structure teaches how tone can pivot without a single explanatory sentence.
Use your own proper nouns. Your bus route, your corner shop, your friends' first names carry more charge than generic imagery; O'Hara proves readers lean in when the poem clearly belongs to a life. Keep the speed honest too, drafting quickly and preserving the detours. Writory's judges see thousands of solemn poems each month; one that sounds like a living person talking is memorable before it is even finished.
Where to start reading
Lunch Poems (1964), the pocket-sized City Lights collection, is the classic entry, containing The Day Lady Died and A Step Away from Them. Meditations in an Emergency (1957) shows the earlier wit. Having a Coke with You and Why I Am Not a Painter are the beloved anthology pieces, and the Personism essay is five minutes of craft reading no poet should skip.
What poets can take from this
- Write one poem on a break this week, inside thirty minutes, and keep it.
- Log exact times, prices and shop names; precision is the charm.
- Let important news arrive late in the poem, not in line one.
- Address a real person by name and keep the tone of talk.
- Resist explaining your references; intimacy comes from not pausing.
Try it yourself
Narrate your next trip to buy something small, in present tense with real names and times, and somewhere in the final third let a memory of someone absent interrupt one ordinary object, then end within three lines.
Questions
What is Frank O'Hara's Personism?
A half-joking manifesto he wrote in 1959 claiming poems should have the immediacy of a phone call between two people. It rejects grand theory in favour of intimacy, speed and address, which is a fair description of how his own poems work.
What are I do this I do that poems?
The nickname, taken from his own phrasing, for O'Hara's poems that narrate ordinary activities in present tense, like The Day Lady Died and A Step Away from Them. Their casual surfaces set up sudden emotional turns.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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