Frank O’Hara and the Art of Skateboarding

Frank O’Hara’s influence continues to pop up in unexpected places, including in a new book called Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens by the essayist, poet, and playwright José Vadi, which is described by its publisher (Soft Skull) as “an intimate, genre-pushing meditation on skateboarding and the reasons we continue to get up after every fall life throws our way.”

As Emily St. Martin notes in her review of the book for Alta, “throughout Chipped, Vadi pays homage to the skaters, musicians, and poets who inspired his deep appreciation of the culture. ‘You can’t accurately talk about skateboarding,” he says, “without talking about music and art.”

“One such inspiration is Frank O’Hara, whose book Lunch Poems was written as he observed the midday bustle of midtown Manhattan. Much like a skateboarder, Vadi notes, O’Hara kept to a pedestrian’s perspective and a ground-level connection with space. When it came to his poems, he wasn’t precious, often shoving them, crumpled, into a pocket. ‘His carelessness for his own physical writing,’ Vadi writes, ‘reminds me of those obsessed, talented, but myopic pro skaters who didn’t care to redo a trick if it was filmed poorly or not filmed at all, the day’s vibes and the knowledge that they did it—and didn’t need to publish it—is such an unassuming braggadocio as to infuriate the hardest working skaters of the world.'”

I am not aware of any evidence that O’Hara ever tried skateboarding himself, but he did declare “my force is in mobility” and wrote lines like this: “A bus crashes into a milk truck / and the girl goes skating up the avenue / with streaming hair / roaring through fluttering newspapers … as the day zooms into space.” Even if that girl was probably zooming along the street on rollerskates, it’s not hard to imagine O’Hara being quite happy that his work inspired what St. Martin calls Vadi’s “extended mash note to the rich subculture of the board.”