Frank O 'Hara's Having A Coke With You'

“Having a Coke with you” by Frank O’Hara is a poem that captures the rare moments that remind us how lucky we are to be on this earth. Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. Before the writing began, Francis Russell O'Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Russell J. and Katherine Broderick O'Hara but moved at an early age to Grafton, a suburb of Worcester, in central Massachusetts. While growing up, he was a serious music student and wished above all to be a concert pianist. He took courses at the New England Conservatory. O'Hara’s made a strong effort to incorporate music into his early life, "It was a very funny life. I lived in Grafton, took a ride on a bus into Worcester every day to high school,

Having a Coke with you was published in 1958. O'Hara is considered a member of the “Beat generation” and the “New York School”. Both were groups of writers and other artists who from the late 1930s through the 1960s that wanted to make art matter to the average person on the street. The art spoke about daily struggles in a way that was like having a conversation with an old friend. In this poem the speaker is directly and personally speaking to one person, his love, and celebrating the simple pleasure just of having them in his life. The flow and rhyme scheme of their speech was conversational. O’Hara uses multiple poetic devices, but what stood out the most was his use of meter and similes. He used the patterns of commas to heighten the language with lots of emotion and excitement, the literally device used here is the meter. In this 25-line poem he only used two commas, this is where the poet decides to pause throughout the whole poem: "partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt" (line 4, O’Hara) and "the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint" (line 11, O’Hara). Without any other commas, he runs different thoughts together into a big sentence. The overall tone is the kind of speed and energy someone has while giving an intense speech. Essentially, the poem “Having a