Jul 14, 2026 · 6 min · 4 segments
On March 23, 1960, the poet Frank O'Hara kissed his boyfriend beneath the Calder mobile hanging in the international terminal of what is now JFK. "That's what it always needed," he wrote on the plane…
O'Hara was on his way to Spain, where he was doing legwork to put together an exhibition of modern Spanish painters for the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator in the international program.
But the trip he was taking is important to me for poetic rather than curatorial reasons.
The itinerary he would follow through San Sebastian, Irun, Ondai, Biarritz, and Bayonne would become the inspiration for a poem O'Hara would write a few days after he came back.
That poem was Having a Coke with You, which has come to be O'Hara's most famous poem.
If you don't know it, you should stop listening to me and go read it, or you can watch O'Hara read it on YouTube.
It's a swoon-worthy love poem, one of the great love poems of the 20th century, really one of the best love poems since Shakespeare's sonnets.
It's also crucially a truly spectacular queer poem, maybe one of the best queer poems since Shakespeare's sonnets.
I'm mentioning all this because the title of this podcast comes from the end of that poem, where O'Hara expresses a kind of pity for all of the great artists of history, whose work might be classed as the best that we have thought and done, but nevertheless they never had the opportunity to watch Vincent Warren walk across the room, let alone to kiss him beneath a calder.
O'Hara was on his way to Spain, where he was doing legwork to put together an exhibition of modern Spanish painters for the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator in the international program.
But the trip he was taking is important to me for poetic rather than curatorial reasons.
The itinerary he would follow through San Sebastian, Irun, Ondai, Biarritz, and Bayonne would become the inspiration for a poem O'Hara would write a few days after he came back.
That poem was Having a Coke with You, which has come to be O'Hara's most famous poem.
If you don't know it, you should stop listening to me and go read it, or you can watch O'Hara read it on YouTube.
It's a swoon-worthy love poem, one of the great love poems of the 20th century, really one of the best love poems since Shakespeare's sonnets.
It's also crucially a truly spectacular queer poem, maybe one of the best queer poems since Shakespeare's sonnets.
I'm mentioning all this because the title of this podcast comes from the end of that poem, where O'Hara expresses a kind of pity for all of the great artists of history, whose work might be classed as the best that we have thought and done, but nevertheless they never had the opportunity to watch Vincent Warren walk across the room, let alone to kiss him beneath a calder.
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3 of 3
Art Needs Shared History
Exploring why art needs our shared moments
Queer Poem Since Shakespeare
Comparing queer poetry from Shakespeare to today
Podcast Concept Revealed
What listeners can expect from upcoming episodes
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