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A Poem That’s Like a Perfect First Date

By A.O. Scott

This is a love poem.

The text of Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke With You,” which reads:

It captures the thrill of romantic infatuation, the feeling of being so smitten with someone that spending time in their company is better than anything else you can imagine.

The text of “Having a Coke With You.”

Travel, work, painting, even poetry itself — none of that can hold a candle to the everyday pleasure invoked in the title.

“Having a Coke With You” is breezy and forthright, and also intriguing and elusive.

Reading it is like going on a perfect first date: It makes a beguiling impression, and right away you want to get to know it better.

Frank O’Hara, a fixture of the New York School of poets in the 1950s and early ’60s, wrote poems about — and in the midst of — a busy social and professional life.

A photograph of Frank O’Hara exiting the Museum of Modern Art. He wears a dark overcoat and tie.

His writing is crowded with friends, lovers, cab rides, parties and gossip.

A photograph of a crowded party, people standing in their coats, holding drinks and cigarettes. Frank O’Hara is in the center of the frame.

This busy, unassuming everydayness — “I do this I do that” poems, O’Hara called them — has led some critics to dismiss his poetry as trivial, or to celebrate its ephemeral, spontaneous qualities at the expense of its formal accomplishment.

A photograph of Frank O’Hara, sitting in a butterfly chair, with legs crossed. He smiles at someone off-camera.

But as with most good poetry, the effects — in this case, of informality, of casualness, of companionable ease — are the products of precise and careful craft.

The text of “Having a Coke With You.”

“Having a Coke With You” unfolds as one breathless ungrammatical utterance: a 325-word run-on that starts with the title …

… and ends without a period.

All those words are layered into counterpointed rhythmic passages and arranged in long-lined stanzas.

In the first stanza, a blizzard of exotic place-names (gleaned from O’Hara’s recent trip to Europe for the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked) …

… dissolves into a series of partial explanations for why O’Hara would rather be with you.

These lines are stitched together with visual and verbal echoes. The orange of the tulips and the orange shirt.

The Spanish city of San Sebastián and the martyr St. Sebastian, an emblem of male beauty in European painting since the Middle Ages, and a longstanding queer icon.

The “better happier St. Sebastian” O’Hara is talking to has the advantage of being a real person. A guy who likes yogurt. Is there any word, or any substance, less poetic than that (especially when you spell it with an “h”)? That’s part of the charm, of course.

The poem’s hinge comes in this crucial, two-word line.

Now we see that the joy of looking is what the poem is all about.

Looking at paintings.

Looking at flowers.

Above all, looking at “you,” kid.

“You,” like other pronouns, is what linguists call a “shifter,” a word without a fixed referent. Whoever is reading the poem is, literally and impossibly, the person O’Hara would like to have a Coke with.

Some of Shakespeare’s sonnets achieve this kind of immediacy.

The text of William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18.”

Shall he compare you to a summer’s day?

Many of Walt Whitman’s poems use the second person to draw the reader near.

The first section of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

The word “you” occurs more than 100 times in the 1892 version of Whitman’s long poem “Song of Myself” — twice in the first three lines.

And “you,” since it doesn’t specify gender …

The text of “Having a Coke With You.”

… can throw a cloak of discretion over same-sex attraction.

The identity of this particular “you” isn’t a secret at all.

“Having a Coke With You” was written for Vincent Warren, a dancer O’Hara met in the summer of 1959.

A full-length photograph of Vincent Warren, shown in a graceful, balletic pose. He is dressed in black, his body silhouetted against a stark white background.

Over the course of their nearly two-year love affair, Warren inspired almost 50 poems, which, according to O’Hara’s biographer, Brad Gooch, surprised even the poet “in their openness and clarity.”

A photograph of Vincent Warren and Frank O’Hara. Warren looks directly at the camera, while O’Hara is shown in profile.

O’Hara was more than a decade older than Warren, and the age gap may have something to do with the hint of didacticism that runs beneath the poem’s frisky surface.

The world of art is one that the poet might help his less worldly boyfriend discover, for example by accompanying him to the Frick for his first viewing of Rembrandt’s “The Polish Rider,” the only portrait that might compare to Warren’s beauty.

A photograph of Rembrandt’s “The Polish Rider” as it appeared in a gallery at the Frick. The painting is hung in an ornate gilt frame.

O’Hara was an art critic and a curator at MoMA as well as a poet. He counted among his friends some of the leading painters and sculptors of the day.

He was particularly close to second-generation abstractionists, including Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan, and to figurative painters like Larry Rivers, Wynn Chamberlain and Alex Katz, all of whom painted his portrait.

Art was his life, and the source of his livelihood.

Here, though, he pretends not to care about it.

Many love poems gaze upon the beloved as a work of art.

“Having a Coke With You” pushes that conceit even further:

This beloved is so perfect as to render most works of art irrelevant.

Why would the poet need Marcel Duchamp’s abstract study of a body in motion when he can look at Vincent Warren with no clothes on?

Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” an abstract painting depicting multiple iterations of the same figure in motion.

And who are all those people in Impressionist paintings?

Claude Monet’s “The Parc Monceau,” an Impressionist painting depicting a group of well-dressed figures walking and sitting in a sunlit park.

None of them is Vincent Warren, so why should O’Hara care?

The text of “Having a Coke With You.”

O’Hara’s love for him renders art redundant, annoying, beside the point.

Partly because (as O’Hara might say), one of the functions of art is to arrest the flux of experience, to freeze it, to stop time. But that’s not what this poem wants.

What it aspires to is captured in a surreal, synesthetic image of the two lovers dissolving into the air as afternoon turns to evening.

Could that be painted?

The image approximates, or maybe reverses, what O’Hara is doing in the poem. His voice evokes, expresses — exhales — what his eyes have seen.

But the emphasis is less on the things he sees than on the act of looking, less on the fixed meaning of words than on the act of speaking them.

In “Personism: A Manifesto,” a tongue-in-cheek broadside written in September 1959, several months before “Having a Coke With You,” O’Hara wrote about sitting down to write a love poem and realizing he “could use the telephone instead of writing the poem.”

Personism aspires to place the poem “between two persons instead of two pages.”

Instead of being about “some marvellous experience,” a poem is a marvelous experience, like “The Polish Rider” when you see it in the right company.

Can any art really achieve that? Not if art is understood in terms of “unpleasantly definitive” works endowed with cultural authority and inherited prestige — as “statuary” or as “literature.”

But what if art, on the contrary, has the ability to dissolve the boundaries of time and space, to give shape and expression to fleeting sensations as well as deep emotions?

That’s what poetry often aspires to do: to conjure a living presence through words.

The second section of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

Whitman does this in “Song of Myself,” when he grabs you by the arm and literally promises you the world.

Painters do it too.

Rembrandt, in the 1600s, captures the vitality of a young man you could swear you just saw on the subway four centuries later.

What O’Hara achieves here is even more startling.

The text of the poem “Having a Coke With You” by Frank O’Hara.

He makes you feel as if the poem exists only between you and him, a private confidence, a secret smile.

He was just 40 when he died, in July 1966, after being hit by a jeep on Fire Island.

You can’t really have a Coke with him. Except that, somehow, you can, which is why I’m telling you about it.

Produced by Erica Ackerberg, Lucky Benson, Greg Cowles, Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio and Gabriel Gianordoli.

Listen to A.O. Scott discuss this poem on “The Culture Desk.”

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