The day Jackson Pollock died I called a certain man I knew - a very great painter - and told him the news. After a long pause he said, in a voice so low it was barely a whisper, "That son of a bitch -he did it." I understood. With this supreme gesture Pollock had wrapped up an era and walked away with it.

It was big stakes we were after in those times. Through the years we have watched each others' deaths like the final stock quotations of the day. To die early - before one's time - was to make the biggest coup of all, for in such a case the work perpetuated not only itself, but also the pain of everyone's loss. In a certain sense the artist makes that pain immortal when he dies young. Even the widows of these men don't behave like other widows. There is a kind of exaltation, as though they know there can never be an end to the period of mourning.

Looking at Mondrian's total output, we see a man who has completed a consummate journey. What regrets can we have? But do we ever hear a melody of Schubert's without that sense of a life cut short, of genius cut short?

As a very young man, my brother once approached George Gershwin at Lewisohn Stadium, and asked for his autograph. He never could explain to me what it was that had made that brief contact so unforgettable. What he did communicate was his sense of extraordinary luck to have had that one moment of Gershwin's presence.

That's a little the way I think of Frank O'Hara. Not in terms of artistic insight or of personal reminiscence, but just in terms of that all-pervasive presence that seems to grow larger and larger as he moves away in time.

Trying to write about that is like trying to write about F.D.R. What memoir can have the impact of that room in Hyde Park where his cape is still hanging? What revelation can equal that hat, that photograph, that profile?

It is only now that one sees the truth about this intellectual's intellectual - this Noel Coward's Noel Coward - only now one realizes it was his capacity for work, his stamina, his passion for work, that was the energy going through his life.

As a literary artist he was a sort of latter-day Chekhov on the New York scene. When we read O'Hara we are going a long and everything seems very casual, but as we come to the end of the poem we hear the gun-shot of the Sea Gull. There is no time to analyse, to evaluate. We are faced with something as definite and real and finite as a sudden death.

Unlike greatness, talent is an elusive thing, hard to pin down. Can anyone question, for instance, that Stravinsky is great? He certainly fits the fantasy bill of culture, gives off all the "greatness" culture demands. Yet he relies on so much beside his actual gifts that one wonders whether he is really to the medium born. The fame of a Mondrian, on the other hand, had to be propagated by a sort of word-of-mouth from artist to artist. How can culture admit he is as great as Della Francesca, when he brought nothing to the work but his gifts?

Unlike Auden or Eliot, who never stopped writing for the undergraduate, Frank O'Hara dispenses with everything in his work but his feelings. This kind of modesty always disappoints culture, which time after time has mistaken coldness for Olympian objectivity.

Let us remember, however, that while culture has the initial say, it is the artist who has the last word. Somebody once said the unconscious was a "subtle fox". History, too, has an unconscious that plays its tricks on us. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century everyone was sure it was Picasso; we are only now beginning to see it was Mondrian. How could anyone have known or guessed? The work seemed so limited, so simplistic, so unambitious. And all the time, nobody was reading it, nobody was seeing the touch, nobody was looking at the handwriting on the wall.

Not that I am comparing Frank O'Hara with an austere artist like Mondrian. What I am saying is, it may be Frank O'Hara's poems that survive when all we now consider "epic" is shot full of holes, nothing remaining of it but its propaganda.

When you begin to work, until that unlucky day when you are no longer involved with just a handful of friends, admirers, complainers, there is no separation between what you do and who you are. I don't mean that what you are doing is necessarily real, or right. Rather, you work. In some cases the work leads to a concept of music or of art that draws attention, and you find yourself in the world. Maybe not for the right reasons, but you find yourself in the world.

Yet there was that other "world". Of conversation, of anonymity, of seeing paintings in the intimacy of a studio instead of a museum, of playing a new piece on the piano in your home mstead of a concert hall. Because of this it isn t easy for me to talk to young composers these days. I always feel what I am telling them is so incomplete. What I really want to do at times is stop talking about all ideas, and just tell them about Frank O'Hara"ll them what really matters is to have s"neone like Frank standing behind you. That's "hat keeps you going. Without that your life is not worth a damn.

In an extraordinary poem Frank O'Hara describes his love for the poet, Mayakovsky. After an outburst of feeling, he writes, "but I'm turning to my verses/and my heart is closing/like a fist." What he is telling us is something unbelievably painful. Secreted in O'Hara's thought is the possibility that we create only as dead men. Who but the dead know what it is to be alive? Death seems the only metaphor distant enough to truly measure our existence. Frank understood this. That is why these poems, so colloquial, so conversational, nevertheless seem to be reaching us from some other, infinitely distant place. Bad artists throughout liistory have always tried to make their art like life. Only the artist who is close to his own life gives us an art that is like death.

I remember so little out of all those endless conversations. Are his words going so slow or so fast over the eighteen years I cannot catch them? What did he leave us? A few poems, a few drinks, a few rooms around town, a few friends. He was our Stendhal. No one came anywhere near him.

"The thin tunes, holding lost times and future hopes in liaison", wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. Note how we say his full name. The same is true of Frank O'Hara. It is his full name that conveys the complete meaning of this poet. This could be the subject of a game. How easily the last name of Joyce or Valery falls on our lips. But we always say, "Gertrude Stein" - we always say, "E. M. Forster". We need that extra sweep to distinguish those who typified an era from those who thrust themselves above it.

I hope I will be lucky as Frank O'Hara, and be remembered by my full name. No last name for me, sitting shivve over history.