FRANK O’HARA, poet, died on this date (b: 192); The poet, playwright, and art critic died just two days before his 40th birthday in a freak accident on New York’s Fire Island in which he was struck and seriously injured by a man speeding in a beach vehicle during the early morning hours. He died the next day of a ruptured liver at the age of 40 and was buried in the Green River Cemetery on Long Island.
His talents, diverse but minor, seem to recede with the passing years, just as much of the art that he championed when he was with the Museum of Modern Art seems like so much ancient history. Frank O’Hara’s poetry was published in a collected edition, posthumously in 1971. In recent years, the painter Larry Rivers, in discussing his own bisexuality, said that he was for a time, one of O’Hara’s lovers.