Anna Jackson on Frank O’Hara and the New School

“Two aspirins a vitamin c tablet and some baking soda / should do the trick”, is American poet Frank O’Hara’s cure for a hangover. It is also one of several lines artist Kate Newby has borrowed through her career and used to title her works. In the third of our series of lunchtime talks, Anna Jackson discusses the work of O’Hara and his circle of New School poets. Jackson considers O’Hara’s work alongside that of the contemporaneous Abstract Expressionists, tracking the shift from the “imagist” influenced by modernism, to a “personist”, a term O’Hara coined to characterise his approach to the poetic subject.

Anna Jackson is an editor, poet and Associate Professor in the School of English, Film, Theatre, Media Studies and Art History at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she has also published several collections of poetry in which the subject of family and domestic life is explored. Her current research includes a study of how poetry resonates with readers: from the role simplicity can play to the pleasures of ornamentation, in poetry from Robert Frost to Jericho Brown, John Keats to essa may ranapiri.

Kate Newby, Two aspirins a vitamin c tablet and some baking soda, 2015, detail of How funny you are today, New York,
2010–21, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, photo by Ted Whitaker