O'Hara Audio and Video

Because recordings of Frank O'Hara are fairly scarce, I'm consolidating links to a number of different recordings under this one thread.

First, there's Frank O'Hara.org's Audio Page, where you can listen to the poet read a number of his poems, along with other readers' interpretations, and a few discussions of his life and work.

UbuWeb's Frank O'Hara Page showcases a handful of recordings taken from various albums that were all part of Giorno Poetry Systems Dial-a-Poem series (a dozen records released between the early 70s and mid 80s which served as mixtapes, of sorts, for America's poetic avant-garde).

Here's a rare video of O'Hara reading "Having a Coke with You," from the WNET program USA: Poetry. The footage was shot in March 1966, and aired in September of the same year, a few months after O'Hara's tragic death.



You can see two more videos from the program on the Frank O'Hara.org Video Page.

Finally, the AMC series Mad Men gave O'Hara's popularity a little boost recently, when they featured the poet, and his collection, Meditations in an Emergency in an episode. Here's a YouTube fan video featuring a reading of the poem "Mayakovsky" taken from the show, and below, the doctored version of the book's cover the show's set design department came up with (right) along with the original version (left):





Before the week's out, I'll try to track down and post recordings of O'Hara's early 60's reading at SUNY Buffalo, which, to my knowledge, is the only full reading on tape.