I remember where I was when I learned that Frank O’Hara was dead. I was sitting in the reading room of the library at the University of Iowa, in August 1966, my first semester of graduate school. The New York Times Book Review ran a memorial essay about the late poet, except that I didn’t know that he had been killed, run down by a Jeep on Fire Island on July 24. One of my favorite and essential poets had been dead for two months, and I hadn’t known. It felt as if I had lost two months from my life.

A massive “Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara” was published in 1971, followed by a “Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara,” derived from the first volume, in 1974. More of O’Hara’s work came to light, however, in the intervening years, and was published in various editions that editor Mark Ford drew upon for this handsome new “Selected Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf, $30) that expands, to some extent, our awareness of O’Hara’s achievement, especially in the early phases.

I read a story once that when the young Stephen Spender met T.S.Eliot in the mid or late 1920s — and Eliot was a renowned literary figure by that time — Eliot asked Spender what he intended to do with his life, and Spender replied, “I want to be a poet,” to which Eliot said, “I don’t know what you mean” or something like that. To Eliot, writing poems was something that someone did; as a vocation, it did not define you. To Spender, writing poetry meant being a poet; it was a state of existence and consciousness . Frank O’Hara, along with poets like Keats, Shelley and Hart Crane, embodied the idea of being a poet. Poems poured from O’Hara with the intoxicating scintillation of a martini from a silver shaker. He could scarcely stride along the sidewalks of his beloved Manhattan — he calls Whitman “my great predecessor” — without thinking of a poem, writing a poem in his head or rushing back to his office at the Museum of Modern Art after lunch to roll some paper into his typewriter and compose a poem. Significantly, his little book published in 1964 by City Lights was called “Lunch Poems.”

Many of O’Hara’s best poems have just that origin, in the “this-and-that” of urban life; in fact, he probably invented the “first-I-do-this, then-I-do-that” style of poem as he tended to call this manner that had such a powerful influence on the so-called New York School of poetry, though no one did it as well, with such bravado and insouciance, with such sweet, heartbreaking collisions of light and darkness as O’Hara did. Yet despite their being rooted in a particular time and place — cultural and intellectual Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s, the worlds particularly of modern art, dance, music, movies and poetry and of particular friends — such poems as “The Day Lady Died,” “Rhapsody” “Personal Poem” and several of the poems called “Poem” from 1959, for all their goofy charm and casual syntax, seem far more eloquent, humane and enduring than the gnarled, neurotic poems Robert Lowell was writing at the same time.

“You just go on your nerve,” O’Hara wrote in “Personism: A Manifesto,” and we imagine him out in the gorgeous, troubled world, skittery on cigarettes, Cokes and cocktails, attuned to the nuances of constantly impinging phenomena, a witty, vulnerable, self-deprecating and deceptively simple soul. As he says in one of his greatest poems, “Meditations in an Emergency”: “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.” At the heart of O’Hara’s work, though, is a sense of loss, not only of love and place but of the shadows, dreams and personae (like giant characters on the silver screen) that make us what we are. At the end of the long ode-like “In Memory of My Feelings,” another of his greatest poems, O’Hara writes:

….. I have lost what is always and everywhere

present, the scenes of my selves, the occasion of these ruses,

which I myself and singly must now kill

and save the serpent in their midst.

The wounds caused by the loss of innocence are no less painful because they are inevitable.