Frank O’Hara Never Read a Richie Hofmann Poem, by Richard Tony Thompson

Historic Plaque at 441 East 9th Street where Frank O'Hara lived unveiled by Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation on June 10, 2014.

Frank O’Hara Never Read a Richie Hofmann Poem

There is an oil on canvas painting of Frank O’Hara by the artist Larry Rivers from 1954 that
depicts the poet nude but wearing boots. It measures just over 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide, and it is called O’Hara Nude with Boots. His arms are raised above his head with his hands resting
together on the top of his head, the tuft of a widow’s peak visible above the calm expression that betrays the vulnerability of his nudity. One boot is planted securely on the floor while the other
boot is elevated, resting on a cinder block or stool that forces his left leg into a slightly obtuse
angle. The hair of his armpits is exposed to the viewer, his chest is splotched between the nipples with the painter’s delicate linework, an impression of the wispy fuzz that protects his body and
falls into a softness around his naval before gathering into a swirling darkness around his
protruding white cock. The room is muted and unknowable, but O’Hara’s eye is fixed intently on
the viewer. There is an emotional resonance to his stare that presumes mutual recognition. He
knows he is being seen. Perhaps somewhere out of frame, a pale brushstroke of the t-shirt that carries his smell. It is 70 years since that painting was done; another God and his muse in the
​canon of American literature. Eyeroll, and yet, the impulse to document the undocumented.

To sinfully lust for the under-anthologized, the never made public,
the un-objectified, and to yearn to be seen in the poetry of their privacy.

Richard Tony Thompson
​
This piece contemplates O’Hara Nude with Boots, by Larry Rivers (USA) 1954. You can view it here:
https://larryriversfoundation.org/seminal_works_frank.html

Richard Tony Thompson is a writer from the Chicago area completing a PhD in language and literature at Northern Illinois University. He works in real estate finance.