Private Life: A New York Review Podcast
Jul 8, 2026 · 27 min · 12 segments
In this episode of Private Life, the poet and writer Eileen Myles reads Geoffrey O'Brien's essay on Frank O'Hara, ”…
Eileen MylesGuestJarrett EarnestHost
Side by side with an extract from leaves of grass, a line of Frank O'Hara's adorns the railing along the esplanade of New York's Battery Park City.
One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes.
I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.
The italics have been dropped and their suggestion of live speech caught in passing.
One wonders what Frank O'Hara would have made of this bit of graven immortality.
He would certainly have approved of being paired with Whitman, whom he invoked as my great predecessor.
And with his eye for city views, might well have savored the setting's incongruous juxtaposition of sea and crowds and corporate architecture, gawking tourists and rollerblading youth against a backdrop of hundred-foot yachts with names like This Is It and Pleasant Moments.
the old-fashioned red and white Colgate sign on the Jersey side of the water facing off the sleek postmodern kitsch of the palm court of the World Financial Center.
On the other hand, the contemporary panorama might have struck him as unexpectedly sterile and dispirited, a more cowed and anonymous spectacle than the New York of which his poems have become both emblem and repository.
The New York of Pollock and Balanchine and Billie Holiday, the Cedar Tavern and the Five Spot and the Roxy.
When artists were artists, parties were parties, and record stores tended to be more cozy and idiosyncratic than those in the shadow of the financial center.
There was no escaping the nostalgia that pervades any consideration of O'Hara's life and writing, a nostalgia he helped invent with his mythologizing of his social life.
In a letter to the poet James Schuyler, he wrote, I make real life into a fantasy which bears little resemblance to the actual and largely fortuitous events which inspired it in the first place.
Do we respond most in reading him to a generic sense of dailiness or to the evocation of a golden era imagined to have occurred roughly between 1951 and 1965? That era's liveliness was, of course, not all imagination.
Side by side with an extract from leaves of grass, a line of Frank O'Hara's adorns the railing along the esplanade of New York's Battery Park City.
One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes.
I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.
The italics have been dropped and their suggestion of live speech caught in passing.
One wonders what Frank O'Hara would have made of this bit of graven immortality.
He would certainly have approved of being paired with Whitman, whom he invoked as my great predecessor.
And with his eye for city views, might well have savored the setting's incongruous juxtaposition of sea and crowds and corporate architecture, gawking tourists and rollerblading youth against a backdrop of hundred-foot yachts with names like This Is It and Pleasant Moments.
the old-fashioned red and white Colgate sign on the Jersey side of the water facing off the sleek postmodern kitsch of the palm court of the World Financial Center.
On the other hand, the contemporary panorama might have struck him as unexpectedly sterile and dispirited, a more cowed and anonymous spectacle than the New York of which his poems have become both emblem and repository.
The New York of Pollock and Balanchine and Billie Holiday, the Cedar Tavern and the Five Spot and the Roxy.
When artists were artists, parties were parties, and record stores tended to be more cozy and idiosyncratic than those in the shadow of the financial center.
There was no escaping the nostalgia that pervades any consideration of O'Hara's life and writing, a nostalgia he helped invent with his mythologizing of his social life.
In a letter to the poet James Schuyler, he wrote, I make real life into a fantasy which bears little resemblance to the actual and largely fortuitous events which inspired it in the first place.
Do we respond most in reading him to a generic sense of dailiness or to the evocation of a golden era imagined to have occurred roughly between 1951 and 1965? That era's liveliness was, of course, not all imagination.
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3 of 4
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