Frank O’Hara was born on March 27 1926. For much of his life, however, he celebrated his birthday on the wrong day. O’Hara was born into an emotionally complicated household in Massachusetts, to parents who were overwhelmed by Catholic guilt about sex before marriage and decided that a later date, June 27, would be for the best.
The mistake has a certain irony for a poet famous for his attentiveness to the marking of occasions both special and ordinary: birthdays, deaths, homecoming parties, farewell lunches, weddings, rendezvous kept and missed, a jazz concert at the Five Spot and a performance at the New York City Ballet. Even brunch (especially brunch). In one of his best-known “I do this, I do that” poems, “The Day Lady Died”, a shoeshine is pinned to an exact moment: “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday/three days after Bastille Day, yes/it is 1959”. The lines carry the echo of the French Revolution; as if private time were always brushing up against historical time, as if any day might contain the possibility of dramatic change or self-reinvention.
However we reckon the date of his birth, this year marks O’Hara’s centenary. His fixation on the present moment, “beautiful, and interesting, and modern”, was not merely temperamental.