What is Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Having a Coke with You,” trying to teach about objects, things, and thingness? In this essay, David J. Alworth uses thing theory as a hermeneutic method to ask not what the critic can do to the text but what the text can do to the critic: O’Hara’s poem, approached this way, is already a thing—or rather, an object whose thingness manifests in and as an outcome of interaction between text and critic, poem and reader, art object and perceiving subject.