The title of this chapter is a form of collage, an appropriation and an assimilation, intended to reflect both ‘the stolen hearts and emotional misdemeanours’,2 and the heisting of cultural and contextual materials, which permeate O’Hara’s compositional process. O’Hara steals what he loves, and loves what he steals, and the result is usually a remarkable collage of ideas, moments, quotations, emotions, thoughts, and situations, both his own and those originating in other people, enacting Gregory Ulmer’s notion of collage as ‘a kind of theft which violates “property” in every sense’.3 This chapter’s title is itself, of course, the latest in a genealogy of violated property: for the most part it is borrowed from Bob Dylan’s 2001 album, Love and Theft, the title of which was in turn taken from Eric Lott’s 1993 publication, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, which was itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, published in 1960. The quotation – ‘thus the poet is truly the thief of fire’ – comes from a letter written by Arthur Rimbaud to George Izambard in 1871, which is often used as a preface to Illuminations. The letter, with its evocatively primal image of the poet as a thief of fire – as a kind of Prometheus figure – resounds with the passion and unpredictability of O’Hara’s poetry, with its lived qualities, with the sense that in his writing he was stealing something back from the literary gods, and also with the impression that his writing is unequivocally enmeshed with the authority of witness.
Collage, as I have noted, has been described as both ‘an intuitive self-definition of the artist among objects’4 and as ‘the growth of the surface towards us in real space’.5 In the light of both statements, this chapter will account for the effects of collage on O’Hara’s work, and use the practice as a lens through which it can be appreciated. I will explore the role collage played in the dialogue between materiality and self-definition enacted in O’Hara’s poetry, and consider the ways in which his early Surrealistic experiments in collage were crucial to the definition of his poetic. I will also examine his use of the collage practice in relation to his interactions with the European avant-garde, with his readers, with his coterie, with painters, with other poets, and with New York City, positing the argument that collage, for O’Hara, was ultimately both a state of mind and a means of enabling readers to experience rather than merely to interpret his work.
Collage was a crucial part of O’Hara’s exploration into the nature of his self-definition as a poet in his increasingly materialistic environment. In addition to the escalating commodity culture of the 1940s and 1950s (which O’Hara embraced aesthetically and made use of), he also found himself inevitably immersed in what fellow poet James Schuyler called ‘the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble’.6 The prevailing (and, to O’Hara, most appealing) mode of creativity at the time he began to write seriously, was in physical materials – paint – rather than in words. New York, the newly-crowned capital of the art world, was a realm of paint and materiality in which, as Saul Bellow’s protagonist notes in Seize the Day, ‘there were fifty thousand people … with paints and brushes, each practically a law unto himself. It was the Tower of Babel in paint’.7 Writers in New York City soon realised that this world of art and painting could exist quite successfully outside the domain of language and literature. John Ashbery spoke of the coveted freedom of creativity enjoyed by the Abstract Expressionist painters, for instance, which remained, initially, off limits for the poets:
Artists like de Kooning, Franz Kline, Motherwell, Pollock – were free to be free in their painting in a way that most people felt was impossible for poetry. So I think we learned a lot from them at that time, and also from composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman, but the lessons were merely an abstract truth – something like Be yourself – rather than a practical one – in other words, nobody ever thought of scattering words over a page the way Pollock scattered his drips.8
During the early 1950s – the period in which O’Hara produced long, fraught, collage-heavy poems such as ‘Second Avenue’ (1953), ‘Easter’ (1952), and ‘Hatred’ (1952), as he was making the transition from Harvard to New York – he had not yet come to terms with the notion of artistic freedom discussed by Ashbery above. Writing at a junction in literary history when tradition and literary orthodoxy loomed particularly oppressively over creativity, he seems also, judging by such poems, to have been experiencing a more personal kind of writerly crisis of influence and a struggle to find his own poetic voice. His decisive use of collage during this period represents a form of ‘askesis’, or purgation, to borrow from Harold Bloom’s set of terms deployed to define the anxiety of influence. The poems manifest an iconoclastic, self-purgative instinct. They appear to be deliberately artistic acts of aggression against the poetic tradition, as O’Hara struggles to be what Bloom calls ‘the truly strong poet’ who is ‘both Prometheus and Narcissus … making his culture and raptly contemplating his own central place in it’.9 The freedom of experimentation enjoyed by the artists, and their attendant success in the wider circles of culture, represented an ideal for O’Hara: artists like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, in particular, succeeded at arresting the gaze of the cultural world whilst simultaneously remaining true to themselves and to their ideals. They also seemed to be having more fun than their literary counterparts; as Ashbery noted, ‘no one with a sense of adventure was going to be drawn to the academic poetry that flourished at the time’. It therefore seemed both rational and exciting to O’Hara to use art in order to try to liberate himself from the restrictive bonds of literary influence and the tedious ‘politics of getting into never-to-be-heard-of anthologies’.10
The influence of art on O’Hara is evident in poems from across the spectrum of his work, from titles that sound like paintings (‘Study For Women On A Beach’, ‘Image of the Buddha Preaching’), to poems dedicated to painters (‘For Bob Rauschenberg’, ‘For Grace, After A Party’, ‘Ode to Willem de Kooning’, ‘Hieronymus Bosch’), to poems that deliberately employ the stylistic techniques of collage, Surrealism or Abstract Expressionism. ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, as Anthony Libby has suggested, is reminiscent of a Pollock drip-painting, such as Summertime 9A, in its looping ubiquity, its underpinning by an even but dynamic tension, and its absence of linear stimulus.11 ‘To The Film Industry In Crisis’ is a classic example of self-reflexive verbal montage which cleverly mimics cinematic narrative techniques: it is, to borrow from Andrew Clearfield, ‘marked by a succession of visually disconnected images which, cut together … tell a coherent story or furnish some sort of ironic commentary upon that story’.12 ‘Chez Jane’ is punctuated by visually juxtaposed objects – ‘the white chocolate jar’, ‘petals’, ‘the terrible puss’ (CP, 102) – which, in themselves, connote little beyond the simple fact of their representation of themselves, but as a collective serve as a constituents of a vivid, Surrealist still life, brimming with pleasurable contradictions. ‘Easter’ recalls the improvisatory, disorienting elements of Dadaist collage, whilst ‘Biotherm’ is an orchestral collage sequence featuring divergent yet interrelated ‘puns, in-jokes, phonetic games, allusions, cataloguing, journalistic parodies, and irrelevant anecdotes’,13 in an accomplished mélange of the fantastic and the real. Collage in O’Hara’s work is difficult to define precisely because it operates conceptually – it is rarely possible to say that this or that fragment of text has actually been cut and pasted in from elsewhere. It is important to bear in mind, then, the opening arguments of this book, in which I established that ‘the process of pasting is only the beginning of collage’,14 and that its long-term impact was as much as a conceptual phenomenon or attitude of mind as it was a physical practice.
Collage, as the European avant-garde had shown (and as Ashbery would also find, particularly when writing The Tennis Court Oath [1962], which I will discuss in my conclusion), was the ideal method with which to indulge the creative impulse to take the world apart in the name of aesthetic liberty, originality, and self-excavation. Although he was growing increasingly involved with Abstract Expressionism, in the early 1950s O’Hara remained somewhat mired in Surrealism: his poems from this time are often violent and extreme, abstract and self-annihilating, an aggressive torrent of collage frequently inundating the reader with wilfully disjunctive imagery. There is also, however, a distinctly un-Surrealistic emotional quality to the poems, which bubbles through and threatens to disrupt his otherwise deliberately flat poetic surfaces, indicative of his later, more profound and long-lasting involvement with the non-figurative emotional intensity of Abstract Expressionism.
In particular, O’Hara’s experimental employment of collage in three poems from the early 1950s – ‘Second Avenue’, ‘Easter’, and ‘Hatred’ – paves the way for his better-known poetry, which, made up as it is of simple, everyday fragments collaged together, is related to the collages of Picasso in the period 1912–1914. We see in the later poems the same benign ‘element of provocation’ that Peter Bürger, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, saw in Cubist collage: ‘the reality fragments remain largely subordinate to the aesthetic composition … although there is a destruction of the organic work that portrays reality, art itself is not being called into question’.15 O’Hara’s later poetry, particularly the ‘I do this, I do that’ poems, are weighted far more in a material, fragmented reality out of which the poetic psyche may be mined. Although the solipsistic antagonism has dissipated, the roots of this poetic stance are nevertheless particularly visible in ‘Second Avenue’, a poem O’Hara described as itself being the subject, rather than being about a subject (‘Notes on “Second Avenue”’, CP, 497). In order to understand the route by which O’Hara travelled from ‘Second Avenue’, ‘Easter’, and ‘Hatred’ to the ‘I do this, I do that’ poems and beyond, this chapter will conduct a broadly chronological assessment, first exploring his earlier writing before moving on to discuss his later poetry in the second half of the chapter.
Ideas and instances of love and theft in O’Hara’s work operate most significantly in relation to the role he carves for himself both as the kind of flâneur for whom the joys of the city lie in fragmentary surface images which can be looked at and heard without necessarily requiring interpretation; and as a poetic bricoleur, of the kind discussed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind:
The ‘bricoleur’ … derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he ‘speaks’ not only with things … but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes … The ‘bricoleur’ may not ever complete his purpose but he always puts something of himself into it.16
We see this in much of O’Hara’s poetry, from his early attempts, in poems such as ‘Second Avenue’ and ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ (1956), to try on the Surrealist voice, to his ‘I do this, I do that’ poems, in which the buildings and people of New York are interlinked to give an account of his personality and life. Furthermore, because O’Hara worked so fast, because he didn’t ‘believe in reworking – much’ (SS, 21), and because he died unexpectedly at a relatively young age, he did not, in a sense, ever complete his purpose. And yet, he himself was so much a part of his poems that his body of work flourished following his death, as his devotees sought to use it to reconstruct him, both in terms of keeping his work current, and attempting, with varying degrees of success, to adopt his poetic style and techniques. Emerson wrote that ‘every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he wrought in’.17 O’Hara built his poetry out of the things he loved, the things he hated, and the experiences he had in New York City, depicting them within his work in such a way that they operate as far as possible as found objects, or as pasted-in fragments, in spite of the fact that the work, of course, is made of words (O’Hara accepted that as a poet he could not, ultimately, move outside of language, an acceptance which William Burroughs found far more difficult to reach). O’Hara’s satisfaction with collage relates partly to its potential for expressing ‘the relationship between the surface and the meaning’ (CP, 497), a particular facet of his early poetry which he felt was important, writing in his ‘Notes on “Second Avenue”’ that ‘the one is the other (you have to use words) and I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it’ (CP, 497). O’Hara’s use of collage delineates the intersections between words and images and ideas, compelling the reader to take note of the referential quality of transposed fragments of experience, however large or small, abstract or specific they may be, before considering them in the role they have assumed, situated within the context of the poem. The speaker in the seventh section of ‘Second Avenue’, for example, declares ‘I want listeners to be distracted’ (CP, 145). Picasso, similarly, talking about his own pioneering use of collage, asserted that
It was never used literally but always as an element displaced from its habitual meaning into another meaning to produce a shock between the usual definition at the point of departure and its new definition at the point of arrival … This displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness.18
It is this jolting sense of departure and arrival that O’Hara puts to work across the surfaces of poems such as ‘Second Avenue’. Tom Conley, discussing ‘the literatures of collage’ explores a similar idea, proposing that the ‘reader’s memory of the source and citation provides an imaginary break of continuity and a glimpse of the work of writing’.19 This fits with the deliberate obscurity cultivated by O’Hara in many of his poems, as well as with his statement that his ‘Notes on “Second Avenue”’ ‘were explanatory of what I now feel my attitude was toward the material, not explanatory of the meaning which I don’t think can be paraphrased (or at least I hope it can’t)’ (CP, 495). The poem resists meaning, its ‘diced excesses’ (CP, 139) moving too fast to sustain much reflection on the part of the reader. What it explores instead is the key notion of ‘enlacement’ or ‘contamination’ (CP, 141), whereby words or images are replaced or cross-pollinated with others, creating within the text false memories for the reader, who is then accused of ‘the deviousness of following’ (CP, 143). In the line ‘cerise cumulus cries’ (CP, 145), for instance, readers often hear ‘skies’; in ‘alternate sexual systems’ (CP, 140), readers will half-hear ‘solar’, and so on. This is a form of audio collage, which complements O’Hara’s free-spirited compositional self-contradiction, which he describes in the ‘Notes’. He initially recalls the lines ‘and your wife, Trina, how like a yellow pillow on a sill / in the many-windowed dusk where the air is compartmented!’ as being about ‘a de Kooning WOMAN which I’d seen recently at his studio’. He then reconsiders, however, writing ‘actually, I am rather inaccurate about the above, since it is a woman I saw leaning out of a window on Second Avenue with her arms on a pillow, but the way it’s done is influenced by de K’s woman’ (CP, 497). In collaging the two separate memories, splicing them together and proceeding to move back and forth between them in order to create the instance depicted in the poem, O’Hara makes clear that in addition to the heaped and strange disjunctive imagery which marks the surface of his work, biographical fissures run deep beneath it.
Brockelman, in The Frame and the Mirror, describes collage as being representative of ‘the intersection of multiple discourses’.20 O’Hara himself was the embodiment of the idea of an intersection of multiple discourses. At the time of his death, he was the centre of an eclectic, even collaged, social circle: as an art critic, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, talented pianist, poet, and playwright, he moved with ease between disciplines, taking people on their individual merit rather than choosing sides between the numerous different groups or schools of artists or writers with whom he came into contact. His views on the inspiration he drew from art had become confidently equivocal, and he asserted: ‘I don’t find that one year I’m excited by Abstract Expressionism, the next year by Pop Art, the next year by Op Art, and this coming year by spatial sculpture or something. It is all in the same environment which I live in’ (SS, 6). Regarding the world of poetry, Anne Waldman (paraphrasing Edwin Denby) recalled that ‘it was through Frank O’Hara that the uptown poets and the downtown poets got together and eventually the West Coast too, plus the painters and Frank was at the centre and joined them all together. After his death there was no centre for that group’.21 In his writing, his aesthetic appropriation and interweaving of a vast range of material, makes clear, as Ginsberg observed of him, that O’Hara ‘felt that any gesture he made was poetry, and poetry in that sense was totally democratic. So that there were no kings and queens of poetry’.22
His lifelong receptivity to other art forms, and his sustained use of collage concepts, came partly, as fellow New York poet Barbara Guest explains, from growing up ‘under the shadow of Surrealism’:
In that creative atmosphere of magical rites there was no recognized separation between the arts … all the arts evolved around one another, a central plaza with roads which led from palette to quill to clef. One could never again look at poetry as a locked kingdom. Poetry extended vertically, as well as horizontally. Never was it motionless within a linear structure.23
Much of O’Hara’s earlier poetry is Surrealist in tone and diction, and it differs significantly from the city poems which he wrote later, for the most part because the later proliferation of contextual information is either jumbled or absent altogether. The Surrealist stimulus is more immediately apparent in certain shorter early poems, which are more obviously related to the plastic rather than the poetic arts. ‘Homage to Rrose Sélavy’, written in 1949, for instance, refers directly to Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego, and recalls his two most famous works. In the lines ‘When I see you in a drugstore or bar I / gape as if you were a champagne fountain’ (CP, 10), we are reminded of Duchamp’s most famous readymade, the porcelain urinal entitled Fountain (1917). Later in the poem the lines ‘clattering down a flight of stairs like a / ferris wheel jingling your earrings and feathers’ simultaneously evoke the artist’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), his readymade Bicycle Wheel (1913), and the photographs, taken by Man Ray, of Duchamp dressed in drag as the eponymous Rrose. It is interesting to compare this poem with the later love poem, ‘Having a Coke With You’ (1960), in which O’Hara blithely relegates the Nude Descending a Staircase to the position of just another piece of art he ‘never think[s] of’, grouping Duchamp together with several other celebrated artists, including Da Vinci and Michelangelo, who ‘used to wow me’, but whom he now deems to have been ‘cheated of some marvellous experience’ (CP, 360). There is a marked distinction between the tone of almost slavish adulation in ‘Homage to Rrose Sélavy’ and his casual dismissiveness of art in general in favour of the experience of being with, and simultaneously writing a poem for a loved one in ‘Having a Coke With You’.
The coolly sinister ‘Female Torso’, written in 1952, relates in its imagery and motifs to the subversive doll photography of the German Surrealist Hans Bellmer, who had also been included in the 1948 Collage exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Bellmer’s work features life-sized female mannequins, often lacking heads and arms, and, in an image that particularly chimes with O’Hara’s poem, photographed in a woodland setting. The correlation is clear:
Each night plows instead of no head
nowhere. The gully sounds out
the moonlight, a fresh stream
licks away blood ties they’d touched
my trail by. Clouds pour over engines
and the children log down this chute
who is the vernal rattletrap. See,
much am I missed among the ancients.
Here jerk the cord around my neck
to heel. I’m the path so cut and red.
She shall have her arms again. (CP, 78)
Longer poems such as ‘Oranges: 12 Pastorals’ (1949), ‘Second Avenue’, ‘Memorial Day 1950’, ‘Hatred’, and ‘Easter’ reveal O’Hara’s Surrealist influences by encompassing collage, obscene juxtapositions, hallucinatory transformations, distraction techniques, and irrational, varied syntax. James Breslin suggests that these early poems are often ‘more contrived than revelatory, as if bombastic French language games were a sufficient substitute for the current “academic parlor game”’.24 To a degree he is correct: too often these poems do fall foul of O’Hara’s self-confessed ‘passion for poetry and his own ideas … [which] tend to run away with the poem … until the poet feels that his emotions are more important than any poem, that indeed they, not words, are the poem’ (SS, 35). This failing notwithstanding, O’Hara nevertheless succeeds in using the language and collage constructs of Surrealism to great effect in order to render intricate emotional dynamics out of the detritus of his linguistic and spiritual world; or, to borrow from Herbert Leibowitz (who identified O’Hara as ‘a distant cousin of the Dadaists’), ‘the brittle, decorated surfaces of his poems, the droll humour, cloak a Pierrot who is easily wounded’.25
‘Memorial Day 1950’ (CP, 17), for example, is part memoir, part manifesto, part memorial to the artists, particularly the European ones, who inspired O’Hara as a young man. The poem is one of O’Hara’s first to use collage as a means to attempt to appropriate the techniques of film: less those of classic narrative cinema (which splices together sequential shots which are demonstrably related to one another), than those of Sergei Eisenstein, who used the principle of collision to evoke emotion in his audiences, and the avant-garde films of Dalí and Buňuel, or Francis Picabia and René Clair. O’Hara dissolves and cuts away throughout stanzas that accumulate almost as separate entities, held together by abstract, even polarized, emblems which logically are not connected, but which operate on emotional links instead, such as ‘surgery’, the ‘guitar’, ‘fathers’, and the colour blue, which run through the poem. In contrast to Joseph Cornell, O’Hara uses collage to downplay the role of symbolism in the poem, to emphasise the physicality of the objects he refers to, and to ensure that the fragments of autobiography he chooses to reveal neither drift meaninglessly apart nor subsume the abstract and experiential details of the rest of the poem. The result is a shifting, nonorganic canvas in which meaning is derived from old contexts and new arrangements. It is Surrealistic and self-reflexive in its open referencing of Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Apollinaire, Max Ernst, collage, and the ‘Fathers of Dada!’ It also establishes a precedent for O’Hara’s later poetry, in which the varied styles of William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, and Ezra Pound complement the synaesthesia characteristic of Dada, and in which the ‘wasted child’ who ‘tried / to play with collages’ at the start of the poem is, by the closing stanza, a poet in his own right, ‘dress[ed] in oil cloth and read[ing] music / by Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra’. Phrases such as ‘all of us began to think / with our bare hands’ and ‘we never smeared anything except to find out how it lived’, also indicate the beginning of O’Hara’s move away from the political, psychically-driven cynicism of Surrealism and toward the warmer, more positivistic physical processes and ideas of Action Painting.
This poem is typical of the ways in which O’Hara, particularly at this relatively early stage in his career, often seemed to be viewing American culture through the lens of French art and poetry, turning his gaze toward Europe in much the same way as Joseph Cornell. Rod Mengham notes the striking frequency, throughout the Collected Poems, with which O’Hara manifests this tendency: ‘New York references are supplanted by French references, … the space that these poems explore seems to be simultaneously French and American, … meditations on New York end up being displaced by reveries about Paris’.26 In ‘Oranges: 12 Pastorals’, for instance, the speaker cries revealingly: ‘I hear you! You speak French!’ (CP, 5). In ‘Naphtha’ (1959), O’Hara explores and expresses his anxiety at what he perceives to be his creative inertia, questioning the validity of the place he occupies within his context – physically, creatively, and temporally. He achieves this through his subtle depiction of the corresponding skylines of Paris and New York, as the poem veers sharply from an image of the French artist Jean Dubuffet ‘doing his military service in the Eiffel Tower / as a meteorologist’ to an image of ‘the gaited Iroquois on the girders’, building the skyscrapers of an ever upwardly-expanding New York, before returning to Paris, to ‘the haunting Métro / and the one who didn’t show up there / while we were waiting to become part of our century’ (CP, 337). In the final stanza O’Hara pastes in a statement by Dubuffet, taken from the 1947 invitation to his Portraits exhibition: ‘“with a likeness burst in the memory”’.27 O’Hara uses quotation marks to clearly demarcate the fragment from the rest of the poem, drawing attention to its alienness in order to highlight what he perceives to be the cultural divide between his world and Dubuffet’s. It is clear too, however, that he selected this quotation for its proximity to his own mind-set regarding his relationship with European culture, and his own creative ideology, in that he almost perceives his European influences as memory, as something which is a part of his own history, and which he can therefore recall and legitimately draw upon. This act of trans-Atlantic collage, and O’Hara’s linking of the Dubuffet exhibition with the occasion of his poem, further enforces the doubling of Paris and New York, France, and the US, emphasising the complex anxieties and responsibilities felt by many New York artists about living and working in the new capital of the art world, while the former capital deteriorated within the wider context of a politically and culturally weakened Europe.
O’Hara explored this anxiety more explicitly in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue which accompanied Robert Motherwell’s 1965 show at the Museum of Modern Art. O’Hara discusses the ‘intense Francophilism among all liberal intellectuals’ caused by the fall of France during the Second World War, and describes the European émigré artists and writers as
emblems of art and also as emblems of experience – an experience which no American artist save Gertrude Stein suffered as the French themselves did. Their insouciant survival in the face of disaster, partly through character, partly through belief in art, is one of the great legends … In the artistic imagination these refugees represented everything valuable in modern civilisation that was being threatened by physical extermination.28
O’Hara’s stance toward France was by no means one of untempered adulation, however, although it is interesting to note how little acknowledgment he gives to the imperialism and patriarchy of France, particularly under the rather chauvinistic Charles de Gaulle. Mengham draws attention to a recollection by Barbara Guest, when, during a trip to Paris, O’Hara allegedly commented somewhat trenchantly: ‘their history … doesn’t interest me. What does interest me is ours, and we’re making it now’.29 This highlights the fact that O’Hara was actively trying to be a poet of America, even if he sometimes had to remind himself of it. Notwithstanding his admiration for the French, he was keenly aware of and attuned to the rising star of his Americanness, and he maintained his commitment to resisting the notion ‘that avant-garde was not only a French word but an École de Paris monopoly’.30 Whilst his admiration for French poets such as Apollinaire, Rimbaud, and Reverdy was profound (and not, of course, terribly unusual), he was very much at a remove from the strand of Anglo-American modernism which disparaged the creative legacy of Walt Whitman, or the currency of developments in poetry from other cultures, and for whom literature was almost exclusively equated with the European past (T.S. Eliot, in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, for instance, views ‘tradition’ as equating exclusively to ‘the whole of the literature of Europe’,31 seemingly disregarding the traditions in literature of the rest of the world). O’Hara displayed a Franco-American esteem for the brazen romanticism of Whitman’s poetry, and, to quote David Antin, for ‘the anti-literary impulses embodied in the great catalogues and the home-made tradition of free verse’.32 Ultimately, of course, as he declared in his riotous mock-manifesto, ‘Personism’ (1959), ‘only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies’ (CP, 498).
Poetic bricolage, anti-literary impulses, the aesthetic intersections between surface and meaning, and the relation of America to the rest of the world are all in evidence in the cathartic verse expanses of ‘Second Avenue’, ‘Hatred’, and ‘Easter’. In their speed, imagination, and brazen aggression, these collage poems of the early 1950s provide a distorted impression of a multitude of voices and attitudes, techniques and imagery, and events both real and psychological. They are underpinned by a use of collage which is at once despotic and totally democratic, in which the reader is seemingly invited to engage and to explore, but is then surreptitiously unmanned by the extreme levelling of the poems’ misleading component parts. Written in March and April of 1953, ‘Second Avenue’ is O’Hara’s best-known poem from this period. It consists of eleven unequal, unrhymed sections that trace, upon close inspection, O’Hara’s concerns, aesthetic concepts, and preoccupations at the time of writing, including, as Lytle Shaw notes, ‘not merely the familiar existential struggles, but also the “inadmissible” contexts of American cars, Hollywood violence, and Cold War ideology’.33 The reader must navigate the poet’s verbal junkyard, encountering some concepts naturally associated with O’Hara, in lines such as ‘it’s very exciting to be an old friend / of Verlaine’ (CP, 145), or ‘At / lunch in the park the pigeons are like tulips on the trees’ (CP, 147), but having to reconcile them with stranger ones, some of which seem incongruous or unlikely, but not impossible – ‘Bill was married secretly by a Negro justice / over the Savoy on Massachusetts Avenue’ (CP, 148) – and others manifestly acts of old-fashioned cut-and-paste collage:
And then staggering forward into the astounding capaciousness
of his own rumor he became violent as an auction,
rubbed the hairs on his chest with bottles of snarling
and deared the frying pan that curtained the windows
with his tears. (CP, 144)
O’Hara uses collage in this way to evade and subvert the views of readers and critics, continually redeploying himself in varying guises throughout the text. In the third section alone he himself appears to manifest as ‘the animal’, ‘the paralytic’, ‘the dancer’, ‘the condemned man’, and ‘the judge’ (CP, 142). This is deliberate misdirection on the part of the poet, and the reader, in coming to critical terms with the poem, as Andrea Brady argues, ‘is expected to have already failed’.34 O’Hara’s attitude toward the figure of the critic is distinct from his attitude toward the reader, but this is something which we learn in hindsight, not just from reading O’Hara’s notes on the poem, but from studying his body of work as a whole. Take this anachronistic understanding away, and the poet’s attitude toward his readers seems petulant and schizophrenic; in terms of tone, the dryness, irony, and, at times, concerted disregard for his readership, is undermined by a distinct but subtly revealed vulnerability on O’Hara’s part. The text veers between quasi-confessional outpourings such as admitting to ‘the longing to be modern and sheltered and different / and insane and decorative as a Mayan idol too well understood / to be beautiful’ (CP, 141), and accusations that the analytical (and perhaps inadvertently New Critical) reader is a ‘grinning Simian fart, poseur among idiots / and dilettantes and pederasts’ (CP, 148). O’Hara brazenly pulls the reader’s attention swiftly to and fro across the text, attempting to prevent them from delving beneath the surface, or from embarking on any processes of psychoanalysis or interpretation; instead, with a defiant insolence, he poses the question to the reader: ‘Is your throat dry with the deviousness of following?’ (CP, 142) This question is also, of course, directed at himself, problematizing his own role as a reader of other people’s poetry and his struggle, as a young poet, with the anxieties of influence.
The longer view of ‘Second Avenue’ reveals a poem that, like ‘Oranges’ (as I will discuss), is attempting to be painterly, and is thwarted in its attempts on account of the length of time it takes for a reader simply to read it, let alone come to an understanding of it. Unlike a painting, which the gaze can take in in a matter of seconds, a poem – particularly one of this length – takes much longer. Alan Ansen wrote of William Burroughs’s Interzone that ‘to sketch a progression is pointless, since the work is conceived as a total presence’.35 This caveat applies equally to ‘Second Avenue’, suggesting that painterliness is what unites all literary collage (Burroughs and O’Hara tend toward visual stasis in their work, whilst Cornell began in visual stasis but tended always toward narrative). In many ways the poem feels like a unique amalgamation of Surrealist technique and Abstract Expressionist intent, in that its sly and oblique rendering undercuts its grand, non-figurative, emotional qualities, in a manner which signposts the presence of the poet’s unconscious self. A strong impression throughout, and one that impacts greatly on the reading experience, is that the poem is, as its speaker himself suggests, ‘a performance / like a plate of ham and eggs eaten with a fur collar on’ (CP, 143). ‘Second Avenue’ embodies O’Hara’s general poetic stance, whereby he treats his subject matter as the material substance of his work: he wanted the poem to be the subject, not just about a subject. The reader may be at a loss as to how to approach it: as Brady suggests, O’Hara’s ‘anxiety to avoid interpretation and to create an anti-absorptive poem makes it very difficult to read “Second Avenue” without becoming distracted by its distractions’.36 But these distractions are partially the point: the speaker in the poem wants his ‘listeners to be distracted’ (CP, 145). The speed of movement throughout the poem, the heaping up of unrelated images, the shifting personae, the hybridism, and the revealing concentration of words such as ‘diced’, ‘disorder’, ‘splintering’, ‘enlacement’, ‘spiritual contamination’, ‘deviousness’, and ‘remake’, result in ‘Second Avenue’ resembling an avant-garde cinematic montage, in which the reality with which we are presented is, by necessity, fragmented, but in which the cumulative effect is lost if the reader or viewer takes too much time to deliberate on each image or concept individually.
It is in this respect that ‘Second Avenue’ is most provocative to the institutions and traditions of poetry at the time in which O’Hara was writing. In ‘Second Avenue’ he defies the New Criticism’s injunction to leave himself, the poet, out of his own poetry. He demonstrates that the fragments of the poem are subordinate to the whole – they are opaque and almost meaningless in their own right. This is his attack on the institution of poetry, facilitated by the use of collage and montage. ‘Second Avenue’ is made up of fragments which cannot be broken down and closely analysed on their own, because the more the reader tries to do so, the less sense the poem makes. To a certain extent, O’Hara takes this technique to extreme lengths in ‘Second Avenue’, alienating the reader, and undermining or even overwhelming his own purpose, as Burroughs would later do with the cut-ups. On account of his insistence on the flatness and one-dimensionality of his poem, as Brady suggests, ‘the reader is restrained by the tyranny of superficiality into respecting the poet’s autonomy, without enjoying any of her own’.37 The reader is almost entirely at O’Hara’s mercy. The danger with ‘Second Avenue’ is that it can seem inaccessible, and that the sum of its component parts is ultimately available only to its author. However, as with much of O’Hara’s work, the reader is required to be quick, and if one can be quick enough, and intuitive enough about the poem’s collage processes, its elusive or seemingly inaccessible qualities will prove rewarding rather than merely frustrating.
Brady suggests that there is ‘a tension in the poem between a deliberately fashioned structure and an associative drive which must work fast to avoid being set in the concrete of analysis’.38 However, the structure of the poem is not, in fact, as strong or as linear as Brady indicates, or, indeed, as perhaps it would have been had O’Hara not been so strongly influenced by the combined forces of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism at the time of writing. On account of his use of collage, the reader’s own associative drive is able to play a greater role in reaching an understanding of the poem. ‘Second Avenue’, as a whole, operates on an underlying principle of fluid dynamism and free association, and, therefore, provides the reader with more opportunities to make associations of their own than if the structure had been more concrete and more directed, as in, for example, a collage poem such as Eliot’s The Waste Land. O’Hara’s reader is able to move swiftly over the surface of ‘Second Avenue’, without being hindered or impeded particularly by its overall structure, which feels somewhat arbitrary, a token gesture to the more rigid aesthetics of an earlier generation of poets. Reading ‘Second Avenue’, in spite of the time it takes to do so, is an experience more akin to looking at a great Action Painting or an arresting Surrealist collage than reading a long, intricately-crafted, Modernist poem. The ‘associative drive’, which is the poem’s key operational principle, is, by its very nature, quick and shallow, impossible to outpace or outwit – it is not an investigative or exegetical impulse, but rather one which triggers multiple associations which then enable the reader to rove mercurially over the surface of the text. The problem with ‘Second Avenue’, however, is that O’Hara requires too much from his readers: the demand to be quick is often too great. O’Hara soon realised this, and slowed down the internal dynamics of his later work, modifying his technique so that the collaged quotidian fragments which make up his poems continue to carry weight in their own right, but also allow the poems to be more mobile, more plastic, more malleable, more three-dimensional, and less egotistical, with the reader permitted to have a significantly greater input into their own reading experience.
‘Hatred’ (CP, 117), composed on a long roll of paper39 in the summer of 1952, is a violent, disjunctive, unruly act of verbal negotiation, in which the murkiness of a barely focused hatred is addressed via notably Surrealist imagery and a deeply fragmented syntax. It reads almost as an anti-collage – a tearing apart which is simultaneously a pasting together. The poem resounds with separations, seams, rendings, and motifs of theft, stitched together to form a devastating tapestry. ‘I part / my name at the seams of the beast / in a country of robbers’, the speaker announces, before, significantly, making reference to the cuckoo, a bird notorious for stealing the nests of other birds in which to hide its eggs – an odd, profound kind of theft. Strange images combine to suggest a simultaneous fracturing and dissipation, both violent and intimate in its nature. ‘The sea’s split resistance’, for instance, is a dexterous aquatic metaphor that neatly sets up the speaker’s ensuing declaration: ‘I’d retch up all men’. The speaker goes on to elucidate an apparent division within himself: ‘I have hounded myself out of the coral mountains … I have hounded and hounded into being born my own death … clutching my wounds …’. America, in the poem, is ripped ‘sideways into pieces and shreds of blood’. Images such as the ‘cleft palate’ and ‘my brittle bones’ reinforce the sense of skeletal fragility and deformity, which underpins the poem as a whole. (Notably, the one aspect of the poem that appears fixed and incontrovertible is the speaker’s conviction about slavery: the reader is reminded, in bitter, ironic terms, that ‘slavery will not just burst like a volcano’.) Such large-scale fracture has the effect, as Richard Deming suggests, of illustrating ‘that hatred is not a solitary condition, though it is an alienating one’.40 It is arguable too that it is a negotiable one, albeit, in this poem at least, in an overwhelmingly negative bent. The closing line of the poem – ‘So easily conquered by the black torrent of this knife’ – invokes one of the key principles of collage, namely cutting. This opens up a whole new world of possibility in the form of redemption through art. The Surrealist mantra, Lautréamont’s nineteenth-century evocation of a ‘chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’,41 has cutting at its cornerstone, whilst the liberating and democratic, albeit inherently violent, nature of collage – cutting loose, cutting free, cutting up, cutting off, cutting out – is dependent upon the instrument which can perform the cuts; in other words, a knife. As I have already discussed in relation to the work of William Burroughs, a collage originates in a cut, in a process of dismemberment, arbitrary or otherwise. As O’Hara furiously cuts together a mass of textual abstractions, impossible images, and wild syntactical hybrids in this poem, a nebulous dialogue occurs as dislocated fragments begin to correspond with each other across the text. This is not to suggest that the poet retreats into the Symbolic mode, as well he might, for whilst the disjunctive components of the text may converse with one another, they do not necessarily unify, in part because in its shifts and ruptures the poem also encourages the reader to interact with the pieces, with the fallout, therefore, from the speaker’s hatred, playing their own role in constructing, deconstructing, and ultimately reconstructing the poem. In this sense, O’Hara engages in a process of dissection in ‘Hatred’, specifically enabled by his use of collage, in which his readers must participate. Furthermore, the poem fully embodies the duality of the act of dissection, as delineated by Jonathan Sawday, which is both a ‘methodical division … for the purposes of “critical examination”’ and a ‘violent “reduction” into parts: a brutal dismemberment of people, things, or ideas’. Of course, as Sawday continues (and as is in evidence in this poem), dissection is also ‘an act whereby something can be constructed … In lieu of a formerly complete “body”, a new “body” of knowledge and understanding can be created’.42
‘Hatred’ collages numerous constructs in a style that combines Dada and Surrealism – violent fantasies designed to reflect off each other, providing an ironically disharmonious synthesis. Whilst the poem as a whole operates as a form of polemic, it is possible, and indeed profitable, to cut it apart. It is, as Deming observes, a poem which encourages the reader ‘to begin to think about the broader chiastic relationship between language and one’s being in a world of possible worlds’.43 Lines such as ‘the morasses of ritual archers milking’, ‘a prison of bread and mortar’, ‘the savage foam of spears not polished to celebrate marriages’, ‘like a palace in a nightmare about anarchists’, ‘a cleft palate in a bus of silver’, and ‘the world’s years / of war turn like walls of bottles’ hint at the possibilities of other worlds, and are also typical of the absurd hallucinogenic torment of many of the collages of Max Ernst. The recurring bird imagery throughout the poem – ‘cuckoos, cormorants and cranes’, ‘my wings’, ‘prophetic ravens’, ‘herons and priests’, ‘pyramids and swallows’ – also relates to Max Ernst, for whom, as I noted in my discussion of Cornell, strange, winged creatures, including his sinister alter-ego the man-bird Loplop, came to play a central narrative role in his work and in his quest to avenge and destroy his memories of a tyrannical late-Victorian childhood. O’Hara responds to, and adapts, these types of images in pursuit of his own desire for self-purgation. His phrasing, in its strategic disorienting of familiar images, also embodies aspects of the subversive political photomontages of Dadaists Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and Aleksander Zhitomirsky, in which an emphasis on unexpected divergence from the banal enables the portrayal of inexpressible emotion. Further, O’Hara’s use of startling juxtapositions (archers milking, bread/mortar, foam/spears, etc.), and arresting imagery recalls Hans Arp’s image of ‘sofas made of bread’ in ‘The Domestic Stones’,44 or Breton’s images in ‘The Spectral Attitudes’, in which the speaker describes ‘branches of salt’, ‘a musician … caught up in the strings of his instrument’, and being ‘dragged along by an ice-pack with teeth of flame’.45
Surrealist collage is the ideal vehicle for O’Hara’s complicated rage and self-abnegation in ‘Hatred’. Fundamentally aggressive, Surrealism was a movement born out of darkness and violence, and many of its principal actors had themselves come to America under similar circumstances. Collage, too, as I have discussed, began in a time of political uncertainty and representational crisis. In ‘Hatred’, O’Hara explores his perception of the animosity and arrogance directed by America both at the wider world and at itself, a hatred not ultimately constricted by time or circumstance, and a hatred in which he, as an American, feels reluctantly complicit. The poem is both a warped portrait of the time and place in which he finds himself living – a kind of anti-propaganda – and an intuitive response to that situation. In its vitriol, the poem also seems, perversely, to be attempting to redress an imbalance of experience. In relation to O’Hara’s established but problematic veneration of the Europeans as emblems, and indeed survivors, of a lived experience which American artists could barely even imagine, this poem suggests that O’Hara felt a degree of irrational guilt and envy that he had not suffered, and therefore had not experienced as much as his European counterparts. The extent to which this sentiment can be extended to include other American artists and writers in O’Hara’s circle is not made explicit in the poem, but certainly the anxiety felt by many about being the new tenants of culture’s zenith has been well documented.
The opening line of the poem – ‘I have a terrible age’ – evokes O’Hara’s apprehensions, rooting the speaker’s hatred in the present and looking ahead to the misgivings of ‘Naphtha’, in which the speaker will ponder the shadow of Europe over America, and brood upon the uncertainties and complexities of ‘waiting to become part of our century’. In place of the voice of experience, which the speaker covets, he has instead a voice of hatred, a voice that is also, increasingly, one of self-hatred. As the poem progresses, the reviled self divides, and one part of the self addresses another, as the poem builds toward its sinister final stanza:
… I shall forget forever America,
which was like a memory of an island massacre
in the black robes of my youthful fear of shadows.
So easily conquered by the black torrent of this knife. (CP, 117)
This chilling ending, taken in the context of allusions in the poem to the Apache tribe, who suffered greatly at the hands of the US government, and to the observation that ‘slavery will not just burst like a volcano’, enunciates the speaker’s concern that perhaps the American experience is closer, after all, to that of the hated oppressors of the European refugees.
‘Easter’ (CP, 96), also written in the summer of 1952, is less vitriolic than ‘Hatred’, more abstract and open to the possibilities of irony. Dense and undisciplined, it is easy to see why Ashbery felt that such a style might need some sort of new vernacular to ‘ventilate’ it (CP, x). It gushes off the page, a carnivalesque torrent of camp (‘the razzle dazzle maggots’), Burroughsian brutality (‘all the powdered and pomaded balloon passengers / voluntarily burning their orifices to a cinder’), wit (‘a marvellous heart tiresomely got up in brisk bold stares’), and obscenity (‘when the world booms its seven cunts’). Overall, the poem emphasises physicality, both in its assault on the reader (reading it straight through will leave one gasping for breath), and in its accumulation of body parts, which anticipates O’Hara’s later idea that we are ‘mired’ in flesh (‘To the Movies’, [CP, 208]). Hazel Smith observes that as this is, ostensibly at least, a poem about Easter, this physical quality ‘suggests the resurrections of the spirit through the body’.46 Ultimately, however, the cumulative effect of the barrage of juxtapositions, repeatedly refocused imagery, and roguish experimentation with language, is rather that of a great, disembodied voice, through which the speaker may channel, to its outermost reaches, the possibilities offered by Surrealist collage. As with ‘Oranges’ and, to an extent, ‘Second Avenue’, O’Hara is attempting an immediacy of delivery which, given the poem’s length, is impossible to fully achieve. His later, more accessible poetic style, in evidence in immediately authentic poems such as ‘Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)’ and ‘Poem (Today the mail didn’t come)’, is arguably informed particularly by this prior experimentation, because in pushing the experiment so far, he is able, as Smith suggests, to ‘expose … its limits’ – although not quite in the way she means.
Smith continues: ‘despite the heterogeneity of the images they nearly all contain bodily parts or functions’.47 This, surely, is a choice that O’Hara made, and one that is key to understanding the poem in question, rather than being a natural limit of Surrealist collage. The limit that O’Hara exposes in his unregulated, Surrealist flow is that Surrealist collage cannot successfully represent the unconscious without a degree of discipline and internal logic. This is why, ultimately, O’Hara moved beyond it, taking from it only what he needed: he wanted his poetry to do more than just pretend to represent the unconscious mind. For him, the element of surgical precision needed to achieve the kind of dramatic combinations apparent in the work of Ernst, or Schwitters, or Breton, subordinated the equally vibrant yield of the conscious mind. After all, to quote Ashbery, ‘why should our unconscious thoughts be more meaningful than our conscious ones, since both are a part of poetry?’48 O’Hara’s overall poetic approach is less than surgical; instead of cutting into the world, he wished to present it as it is, as he experienced it, in a casually disjunctive outpouring of oblique, democratic chatter, which is where the differences between his work and Surrealism are thrown into relief.
Apollinaire, writing in 1913 when the practices of collage were relatively new, sought to legitimise the use of the random elements of everyday life in art and poetry, on the basis that although they are ‘new in art, they are already soaked in humanity’.49 This humanity is what is at risk, however, in poems such as ‘Second Avenue’, ‘Easter’, and ‘Hatred’, where too much is dependent upon chance, automatism, free association, and the unconscious. Certainly, some significant artworks are produced entirely by chance, but artists working in this mode are demonstrably not in a position to publish or exhibit every piece in the raw state in which it emerges. Even if the artist vetoes all elements of choice when creating the artworks themselves, they will be forced, ultimately, to choose between those that are good enough and those that are not; and if they cannot do so, their editors, publishers, or curators, will do so for them. Tristan Tzara, for instance, would not always be able to pull a poem out of his hat, and, as I have discussed with regard to Burroughs, the act of arranging texts in random order does not automatically equate to literary or artistic merit, however interesting the results may be. This is something which O’Hara seemed to learn, in that as his career developed, many of his poems became shorter and were executed with a lighter touch, rendering them less manic, less contrived and serious; ultimately he ‘grabs for the end product – the delight – and hands it over, raw and palpitating, to the reader, without excuses’,50 to borrow once again from Ashbery. Nevertheless, in many of his poems, O’Hara punctuates the flow of autobiographical and observational fragments with interjections whose role is to mediate between or evaluate them. He concludes the love poem ‘Having a Coke With You’, for instance, with the lines:
it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it. (CP, 360)
This determining evaluation not only justifies the beautiful detailing in the preceding list-like twenty-two lines of the places, experiences, and artworks which cannot compare to the simple event of having a Coke with Vincent Warren, O’Hara’s boyfriend and a dancer with the New York City Ballet, but it also validates and explains why O’Hara writes the kind of poetry he does – because the ‘marvellous experience’ of being alive and being in love is poetry. The final line of the poem ‘Early on Sunday’ has a similar effect, subtly altering the reader’s understanding of the poem they have just finished reading. The poem itself is a non-evaluative, autobiographical stream of thought, taking in the time of day (‘It’s eight in the morning’), O’Hara’s physical state (‘I feel pale’), the weather (‘it’s raining’), as well as some early-morning musings, both poetic and nonsensical, typical of O’Hara (‘with hot dogs peanuts and pigeons where’s the clavichord’ and ‘how sad the lower East side is on Sunday morning in May’). The closing lines, however, detail the return to the apartment of Joe LeSueur, who lived with O’Hara for many years:
Joe stumbles home
Pots and pans crash to the floor
Everyone’s happy again. (CP, 405)
The point of the poem, of the hesitancy in its short lines, of its uncertain flitting between thoughts, of the abstract sadness of the lower East side, suddenly becomes clear: Joe makes Frank happy, and as this is the motivation for writing down the poem, no further justification is required.
These simple acts of poetic mediation indicate a level of self-knowledge and assurance that has yet to develop in the long, densely-collaged poems discussed above, in which the poet’s motile and metamorphic self has more in common with Burroughs’s contemptuous self-portrayal than Cornell’s reverential self-archiving. O’Hara believed that identity was constantly shifting, but around the ideal of some kind of constant centre. The collage-poem ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, written in 1956, is O’Hara’s most fully-realised exploration of the self in the context of poetry and art. It represents his decisive leaving behind of Surrealist imitation, and the liberation of the independent self-hood from which his best poetry stems. In the poem, O’Hara explores the concept of a collaged ego, or the notion that a person has not just one face but many, ‘several likenesses’, representative of ‘a number of naked selves’ (CP, 252). This concept demands a new reckoning of poetry that goes beyond traditional criticism of the lyric. The poem articulates an almost palpable tension between control and chaos, depicting the self as walking a fine line between what Andrew Epstein calls ‘variousness and incoherence’; it is simultaneously bleak yet fertile, with each uneasily equivocal scenario suggesting ‘signs of a restless desire to move onward’.51 The ‘likenesses’ depicted are referred to only in similes: they are ‘like stars and years, like numerals … like vipers in a pail’. They resist unification or stasis, pulling apart from each other throughout the poem, subverting the conventions and expectations of memoir set up by the poem’s title. Grace Hartigan, to whom O’Hara dedicated the poem, explained that she felt that the poet was attempting to delineate ‘inner containment’, arguing that the strongly pragmatic approach to ideas of the self within the poem was aiming at a definition of ‘how not to panic’.52
O’Hara begins the poem contemplatively, in ‘quietness’, before releasing into the text ‘a number of naked selves’, which repeatedly metamorphose in order to recreate within the poem ‘the light mist in which a face appears’. Experiences and identities circle around each other, hallucinations are mingled with reality, and the indeterminacy of the poet’s ‘self’ suggest that not only is it in fragments but that it may actually be on the verge of total dissolution. The shifts in experience are unsynthesized, and cannot be reconciled with the excess of feeling which this generates – the only consolation that the speaker can find is the rhythmic equivalent to the relentless pacing of a caged animal. Enclosed within an endlessly shifting disposition which, nevertheless, struggles to move in any significant direction, O’Hara uses collage in order that the form of the poem fully embodies its sentiment; in other words, to quote Breslin, to try to ‘find any vantage point from which to construct a sequential narrative or stable identity out of his experience’.53
He realises that in order to be able to construct a stable identity out of the dislocated shards of experience, he must first deconstruct his existing identity, in the hope that fragmentation will lead, ultimately, to unification, and through this to illumination. Mutlu Konuk Blasing observes that, by the end of the poem, ‘it makes sense that O’Hara’s series of selves, ranging geographically from Africa to China, historically from Hittites to Indians, and psychologically from women to children, add up to an imperial self, consuming all and being consumed by all’.54 O’Hara recognises that he ‘singly must now kill’ the multitude of his selves – ‘the scene of my selves’ – which has whirled so violently and ecstatically through the poem, as part of the compositional process and in order to ‘save the serpent in their midst’, liberating a more unified version of himself as poet. His use of the word ‘must’ implies an unwillingness married with a determination that what he is doing is for his own greater good, a sentiment reinforced by the embodiment of self as serpent, with its connotations of slipperiness and evasiveness.
O’Hara’s body of work displays a sustained commitment to the possibility of change. Such metamorphosis is redeemable chiefly through the all-embracing principles of the collage practice, in which fragments can legitimately co-exist both autonomously and as part of a collective, mirroring the ideal role of the artist within society and within history. Collage also staves off the threat of creative stasis, enabling O’Hara to define himself in relation to his environment, and ‘to fashion comparisons, resemblances, rather than identities’,55 the collation of which produces a real yet endlessly protean identity, wherein lies artistic freedom. Blasing’s observation that ‘the “several likenesses” of [O’Hara’s] transparent self are presumably designed to protect it from the fixity of a singular identity’,56 operates anagrammatically, in that the fixity of a singular identity is equally designed to protect the self from fragmentation beyond function, which is the evident problem with poems like ‘Second Avenue’, ‘Easter’, and ‘Hatred’. In this way, the self can remain free, but rooted nonetheless, choosing where and when to manifest itself, invisible but present, the elusive but endlessly enticing centre of O’Hara’s entire poetic.
Emerson wrote that ‘power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state’.57 O’Hara, having used the space of his long, heavily collaged, early poems in which to explore and work out his relation to his poetic predecessors and contemporaries, to the European avant-garde and home-grown American artists by whom he was increasingly surrounded, to the growing commodity culture of 1950s New York, and to the uneasy postwar politics of his country as a whole, was able to move successfully from the limitations of the past to a powerful new present, reaching a new and intuitive definition of himself as a poet. Ashbery, although he refutes the unified existence of a New York School of Poetry, concedes that if as a group of poets they could be said to have any kind of ‘program’, it was that their poetry was ‘descended from Surrealism in the sense that it is open’, and ‘that it amounts to not planning the poem in advance but letting it take its own way; of living in a state of alertness and being ready to change your mind if the occasion seems to require it’.58 These are the principles with which O’Hara’s collage experimentation enabled him to come to terms, and to embrace. His appropriation of the techniques of collage, and the principles behind the use in art of found objects, enabled his poetics to progress beyond the mere imitation of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist art, which was always doomed to fail, whilst retaining those qualities that had proved transferable from plastic art to poetry. In this sense, at the level of composition and craftsmanship, Rimbaud’s evocation of the poet as Prometheus figure, as ‘thief of fire’, resounds particularly with O’Hara’s poetics, at whose fiery heart lies the guiding principle of creative appropriation from sources as varied as Surrealist techniques, cinematic methods, musical practices, the everyday words and phrases of friends and contemporaries, and the daily experiences of life in New York.
The essential poetic aim, according to O’Hara, as he explained in an interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, was ‘to establish one’s own measure and breath in poetry … rather than fitting your ideas into an established order’ (SS, 17). Establishing his own unique ‘measure and breath’ required some poetic trial and error on O’Hara’s part, however, and this is what he seems to have been doing in his long poems of the early 1950s: experimenting with the collage practice and trying on the Surrealist voice. In this sense, he was confronting his relationship to the literary establishment, and problematizing his own position in relation to poetic tradition. The end results undoubtedly bear what Russell Ferguson calls ‘the traces of a somewhat overheated and ill-digested Surrealism’,59 but, as with Burroughs’s rather uneven cut-ups, the insight they provide into the creative process is fascinating. ‘Oranges: 12 Pastorals’, for example, is indelibly marked by painterly influences that translate into words unevenly at best. Although O’Hara himself could not paint or sculpt,60 from a young age he understood that the processes involved in doing so were deeply relevant to the type of poetry he was trying to write. Whilst he had few doubts about his ability as a poet, his writing often shows that he viewed his artist friends as somehow superior to him. In a short poem addressed to the painter Larry Rivers, for instance, he reassures the artist: ‘You’re worried that you don’t write? … You do what I can only name’ (CP, 128). Ironically, it was his status as a non-painter and his attendant feelings of inadequacy, as well as his incisiveness as an art critic, which made the processes of plastic art so invaluable to the way he put his poems together. Five years after writing ‘Oranges: 12 Pastorals’, O’Hara wrote ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ (1956), in which he looks back on the process of writing ‘Oranges’, and examines the parallel unfolding of this difficult and irregular twelve-poem sequence with the artist Mike Goldberg’s painting Sardines:
One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by … (CP, 261)
Deliberately eschewing imagery in favour of a heavy, looping repetition – ‘I drop in … I drop in again … I drop in’ – O’Hara uses the space of ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ to evaluate the creative impasse he came up against during the drawn-out process of writing ‘Oranges’, in a manner related to Jackson Pollock’s use of the space of his horizontal canvasses when he first began his experiments in drip painting. Both O’Hara and Pollock use the page or canvas as ‘an arena in which to act’.61 O’Hara merges the poetic process and the poetic product. The poem simultaneously is the subject and is about the subject – in other words, to return to John Ashbery, the poem becomes ‘the chronicle of the creative act that produces it’ (CP, viii–ix). When a viewer encounters a drip painting by Pollock on a gallery wall (aside from the fact that it will usually be hung vertically, rather than laid horizontally, as it would have been when the artist painted it), the painting almost succeeds in taking the viewer back into the studio with the artist, to watch the work unfold as it is being painted. This effect, and O’Hara’s initial inability to achieve something comparable in his poetics, is what the difficulties encountered when writing ‘Oranges’, and other poems of the same period, seem to have revealed to him. In many of his subsequent ‘I do this, I do that’ poems, the reader, rather than being cajoled into thinking that the poem they are reading is really a painting, is instead encouraged to feel that they are present during the moments of composition, witnessing both the chronicle of the composition and the composition itself, simultaneously. This is where the collage technique proved invaluable for O’Hara: his readers cannot literally see every detail of the street or the bar or the party being portrayed in the poem in question, and yet by carefully selecting representative fragments of his reality and collaging them together in such a way that the reader will notice only what he deems important, O’Hara invites the reader to share his world of flânerie, to see the surfaces as he sees them, and to hear the same city sounds. Collage enabled him to recreate on the page a vivid impression of New York as he experienced it on a day-to-day basis.
O’Hara’s poetic technique proceeds not – as in some of the more serious, academic poetry of the time – by elimination, but by inclusion; as one detail greets the next, the reader is confronted by a language with its own laws of movement and flow, a language which moves mercurially and in multiple directions. ‘What is happening to me’, O’Hara wrote in his ‘Statement for the New American Poetry’, ‘allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else; they are just there in whatever form I can find them’ (SS, 112).
The title of O’Hara’s third collection of poems, Meditations in an Emergency, is relevant to much of his work, because, as fellow New York poet and close friend, Kenneth Koch, remarked, with O’Hara everything was ‘an emergency because one’s life had to be experienced and reflected on at the same time’.62 His enduring subjects were himself, his friends, and his New York City, and his notably unprogrammatic poetry is a succession of related but disjunctive images, which often do not mean anything beyond themselves and instead serve the purpose of grounding a mood within the poem or anchoring a particular moment, which frequently occurs in the final lines of the poem. Consider these end lines, taken from four separate poems:
‘my heart is in my pocket / it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy’ (‘A Step Away From Them’ [CP, 257])
‘I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is / thinking of me as I shake hands with Leroi / and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go / back to work happy at the thought possibly so’ (‘Personal Poem’ [CP, 335])
‘and everyone and I stopped breathing’ (‘The Day Lady Died’ [CP, 325])
‘happiness / the least and best of human attainments’ (‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s’ [CP, 265])
Each – so tender, so moving and serious – follows an immersion in casual, urban experience: ‘I walk around at lunchtime’ (CP, 335); ‘I go get a shoeshine’ (CP, 325); ‘The sun is hot, but the / cabs stir up the air. I look / at bargains in wristwatches. There / are cats playing in sawdust’ (CP, 257); ‘Tonight you probably walked over here from Bethune Street / down Greenwich Avenue with its sneaky little bars’ (CP, 265); ‘Neon in daylight is a / great pleasure’ (CP, 257); ‘I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun’ (CP, 325). The ‘I do this, I do that’ style of composition populates his poems with a catalogue of ‘happenings’, in which nothing fixed is allowed to build, until the moment of climax, which consequently resonates with the reader long after the poem has ended. O’Hara lifts these scraps of experience and unconnected images directly from his everyday life, cutting them together in a form of vibrant, fluctuating, temporal collage. Discordant elements are linked imaginatively, as in a train of thought, and grow vivid as their functional but initially hidden relationships emerge.
O’Hara spent fifteen years living in New York, and the city permeates his work, moving through his poems, balancing them, providing texture and tone, as he actively negotiates the variousness of the city. The patterns and sounds of many of his poems originate in the New York skyline, as well as in the city’s harbour and streets, bars and cafes, traffic and train-lines: Ashbery called this O’Hara’s ‘urban world of fantasy where the poems came from’ (CP, vii). In poems such as ‘A Step Away from Them’ (1956) and ‘The Day Lady Died’ (1959), New York plays the supporting role, with descriptions and collaged vignettes of the city making up the majority of the lines, driving movement and meaning through the poem in meandering, suspenseful digressions before the final emotive climax. New York in other poems is a personality – a leading lady – in a manner resonating with the closing phrases of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, a work of some significance to O’Hara:
Moscow below them and reaching into the distance – Moscow, the author’s native town and the half of all that had befallen him – now appeared to them, not as the place where all these things had happened, but as the heroine of a long tale ….63
In the poem ‘Steps’ (1960), O’Hara addresses the city affectionately in the second person: ‘how funny you are tonight New York’ (CP, 370) he declares, likening the city to ‘Ginger Rogers in Swingtime’ and in so doing evoking both the physicality and vivacity of the twentieth-century’s ‘second metropolis’,64 as well as highlighting, to quote Jed Perl, ‘how hopelessly mixed up nature and culture had become’.65 In other poems the city takes on a different character – sinister, more powerful, more intense; the poems are akin in the deadpan irrationality of their diction and imaginative texture to the seamless Surrealist collages of Max Ernst discussed in my chapter on Cornell. In the poem ‘To the Mountains in New York’ (1954), for instance, the city is
Hairy … wrinkled like a detective story
and noisy and getting fat and smudged
lids hood the sharp hard black eyes …
[its] alleys
open and fall around me like footsteps
of a newly shod horse treading the
marble staircases of the palace (CP, 198)
In other poems O’Hara uses the city as a vessel through which to filter his feelings, memories and fits of disquiet: everything he ‘felt happening (saw, imagined)’ (CP, 497). In ‘Berdie’ (1958), for example, which was part of a collaboration of lithographs with the artist Larry Rivers, the angle of the poem shifts from the sudden rain on Second Avenue, a key location within O’Hara’s oeuvre, to the absent ‘Berdie’, Rivers’ mother, who had died the previous year:
It has suddenly rained
on Second Avenue and
we are thinking of you
as the small thoughts of
the rain drum on tin
and soot runs down the
windows we always do
in the rain it’s no more
different than the rain
you went there honorably as
stone becomes sand and
the sad shore falls
into the unwilling sea (CP, 312)
The movement of the rain traces a line through the poem, from the concrete physicality of the city (‘drum on tin’, ‘soot runs down the windows’) to the elusive abstraction of ‘there’, mirroring in its passage the mutual sorrow of O’Hara and Rivers.
‘Naphtha’ (1959–1960) illustrates O’Hara’s subtle use of the city to explore his anxiety and unease with relation to his time, his legacy, and his creative pressures and precedents. It recalls Ginsberg’s ‘A Supermarket in California’ (1955), in which the poet, in his ‘hungry fatigue and shopping for images’, roams a ‘neon, fruit supermarket’ in whose aisles Walt Whitman and Garcia Lorca are lurking.66 ‘Naphtha’ is a precariously balanced poem – there is a tension running through it, holding it in place, like a steel girder in a skyscraper. It reads like a balancing act; footage of Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974 chimes with the poem, in the sense that both are acts of extreme beauty, daring, and nostalgia, fitting tributes to the buildings which will resonate both into the past and into the future. ‘Naphtha’ is a poem about construction – about the architecture not just of a city, but of its culture. It is also a meditation on a poet’s creative anxiety about his role within this city and this culture. The poem moves in and out of buildings, and up and down them, the bipolarity of the skyscrapers implying the vicissitudes of O’Hara’s frame of mind. References in the first stanza to the artist Jean Dubuffet up in the Eiffel Tower, and to the Iroquois Indians (who helped to build many of New York’s most famous landmarks) up on the girders building the tallest skyscrapers in the world, lead into a contrast in the second stanza with the poet (or poets), who is revealed to be down on the ground, or even under it, in the Paris Métro, not ‘do[ing] much but fuck[ing] and think[ing]’ and waiting for someone who ultimately doesn’t even ‘show up’ (CP, 337). The speaker clearly wants to become ‘part of [his] century’, a word which appears on four occasions in a poem fixated by the movement of time. Much of the poem’s diction consists of temporal words: ‘when’, ‘1922’, ‘the 20th century’, ‘while we were waiting’, ‘ancient September’, ‘burst in the memory’, ‘my century’. O’Hara seems to want to be a Dubuffet, an Ellington, or a builder of a wonderful city (we have seen the steel hats of the construction workers before, in ‘Personal Poem’ (1959), which was written shortly before ‘Naphtha’, in which O’Hara campily says: ‘If I ever get to be a construction worker / I’d like to have a silver hat please’, and, later on, ‘we just want to be rich / and walk on girders in our silver hats’ [CP, 335–6]). Instead he appears to view himself as being limited to the position of merely being entertained by his century, or, at best, chronicling it. The line ‘just as you can’t make a hat out of steel and still wear it’ illustrates his understanding of the futility of pretending to be something you’re not, whilst not denying the fun in it, a sentiment which is echoed, once again, in the final line of the poem: ‘but I have to smile’. O’Hara compares himself to Ellington, and to the Iroquois, but whilst they are ‘made in the image of god’ he is ‘made in the image of a sissy truck driver’. Does he feel he could do more, perhaps by heeding the ‘parable of speed’ of the Indian tribe, rather than, in the custom of his own ‘tribe’, simply ‘beguil[ing]’ his audience? Whilst he seems to be uneasy about his own creative value, it is also possible that he sees himself as just another figure in the haphazard collage of a modern city – the Iroquois build, Dubuffet paints his cows, Ellington plays his music, and O’Hara writes his poems. ‘Naphtha’ is written (and O’Hara performed it) with enough buoyancy and pace and humour to mute any sense of stoicism or tendency toward the confessional; and yet there is an immediacy and a rawness apparent in the poem, manifested particularly in the syntactic confusion that runs throughout the poem. Whose are the ‘fragile backs? Were ‘you’ also ‘made in the image of … Jean Dubuffet’? To whom does the ‘likeness’ refer? and so on. This belies the blithe up-beat tone and reveals a characteristically muted but very genuine anxiety about the poet’s place in his city.
Nevertheless, poetry for O’Hara was about his participation in, and enthusiasm for, life in New York, in the twentieth century: as he wrote in his ‘Statement for the New American Poetry’, ‘I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times when I would rather be dead the thought that I could never write another poem has so far stopped me’ (SS, 112). Life, therefore, was equally about poetry. His poetic ambition was to encompass life in his poetry as it was happening, and his actions, as David Herd explains, were logically ‘a continuation of his aesthetic’, operating ‘as a formal principle in and for his writing’.67 One of the best examples of this is the poem ‘Sleeping on the Wing’ (CP, 235). Allegedly written as a result of a challenge by friends to produce a poem in a matter of minutes, the poem is an embodiment of the self’s intimate (to the point of claustrophobia) relationship with its own ‘aesthetic’. It explores the desire to escape, depicting a vast imagined patchwork of what the world looks like from a distanced yet still connected perspective. The poem reads rapidly, permeated with an impression of movement, of going, suggesting, as Breslin argues, ‘an uneasiness with reality’.68 The reader witnesses the poet’s self ascend, violently, ‘as a pigeon does when a car honks or a door slams’, to find itself ‘soaring above the shoreless city’. The word ‘shoreless’ implies an oppressive infinity, or inescapability, avoidable only by the imagined flight into the ‘impersonal vastness’ in which the poem so wistfully delights. As the poem exults in a newfound freedom, greater ideological concerns, such as slavery and the American Civil War, dissipate with the breeze, and the self can forget the burden of its ‘position in respect to human love’. The poet, ‘a sculptor dreaming of space and speed’ (note the Futurist, and, indeed, futuristic, connotations), is suddenly master of his own destiny, free from the constraints of friendship and love, from ‘the sad struggle of a face’. But as the poem draws to a close, the speaker begins to doubt his flight, questioning (as we imagine him falling, like Icarus): ‘is there speed enough?’ Even as the words are uttered, the reader, and the newly elated poetic self, knows that the answer is no, that the self ‘must awake’, and return to its earthly chains, to the bonds of O’Hara’s always intense relationships, in which, he feels, ‘space is disappearing and your singularity’. This is one of the clearest articulations O’Hara gives of his fear of the encroachment of his friends upon his individuality and artistic autonomy. The poem’s concluding lines feel weighted and solemn: jolted back to earth, the self finds itself apprehended once more within the boundless collage realm of human existence and the urban experience.
This lived, and living, collage of friends, associates, and places, however, was also, for all its problems, something O’Hara treasured, and from which he appropriated many of the words and phrases which make up his body of work, the ‘pale fire’ which poems like ‘Sleeping on the Wing’ enabled him to ‘snatch … from the sun’.69 He often appropriated them directly from the mouths of others, stealing out of love: as Merle Brown has written, ‘he valued certain persons more than most people think any person should be valued’.70 Kenneth Koch recalled, in an interview with Daniel Kane: ‘What a gift for the immediate! Frank could write fast – he could sit down in the middle of a party and write a poem, and if you went over and talked to him he’d put what you just said into the poem’.71 Joe LeSueur also recollects specific instances of this poetic technique in action, particularly with regard to several of his plays:
One Saturday afternoon … Bill Weaver and I were sitting around with Frank, who was busy at his typewriter and talking to us at the same time. Bill had brought Frank a half-pint of brandy; he asked me if I wanted some, and I said I’d rather have a cognac. ‘Didn’t you know cognac was brandy, queenie?’ Bill shot back. Frank laughed and promptly put what Bill had said into the play. A little later, he happened to remember a line from an anecdote Bill de Kooning had recently told him over drinks at the Cedar Bar. ‘It’s terrible under Kay Francis’s armpits’, de Kooning quoted Arshile Gorky as saying to him as they were leaving one of her movies. That, too, went into the play he would call Awake in Spain. (Gorky’s weird observation was a source of continued amusement to Frank; ten years later, the line popped up again in a poem called ‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday & About Arshile Gorky’.)72
A video recording of O’Hara with the filmmaker Alfred Leslie, made by Richard Moore as part of a series of interviews and readings for KQED-TV in 1966, perfectly encapsulates the seamlessness with which O’Hara’s daily life merges with his identity as a writer. The film shows O’Hara in compositional mode at his typewriter, while Leslie sits just off camera on the floor. They are collaborating on a film script, which O’Hara is exuberantly improvising and typing out: ‘She thinks she’s some sort of cornball Salome … I think she’d like to have my head’. The phone rings. O’Hara lifts the receiver with a fluidity that makes the telephone seem like an extension of his own arm, all the while continuing to type. ‘Jim’73 is on the other end. ‘’lo?’ O’Hara drawls pleasantly down the line, explaining: ‘This is a very peculiar situation because while I’m talking to you I am typing and also being filmed for educational TV – can you imagine that? Yeah! Alfred Leslie is holding my hand’. He listens, before continuing: ‘It’s known as performance. What? Yeah? Oh right, flash and bolt? What does that mean? Flashing bolt, you mean? Oh good … Flash-ing bolt (typing) … A flashing bolt – is that art, or what is it?’ He then types what has just been said into the film scripts, and tells him: ‘I’ve just laid it onto the paper’.74
It is instances such as these that clearly evoke Rimbaud’s image of a poet stealing fire from life. Figuratively, O’Hara cuts out and pastes into his writing words or phrases from his daily conversations, collaging them exactly as they occurred into whatever poem he happens to be working on at the time, and, in this way, keeping them alive on paper. In a manner that relates to his often overly sentimental feelings toward his friends, O’Hara’s attitude toward such moments, or fragments of conversation, or snatches of music heard on the radio, is one of instant nostalgia: no sooner is the moment upon him than he is devising a way to somehow keep it alive forever, much as Cornell would attempt to capture fleeting experiences within his collages and box constructions. Koch explains that ‘the speed and accidental aspect of his writing are not carelessness but are essential to what the poems are about: the will to catch what is there while it is really there and still taking place’.75 O’Hara’s work operates in a constant state of flux, often moving with a dreamlike absurdity in which an awareness of self amounts only to an acknowledgment and acceptance of its unremitting and disorderly metamorphosis. In a poem such as ‘To the Mountains in New York’, he embraces this abdication of authorial responsibility, announcing ‘Yes! yes! yes! I’ve decided, / I’m letting my flock run around’ (CP, 198). This style leaves his poetry deliberately open to the subjectivity of his readers, or, as he writes in ‘Poem (Instant coffee with slightly sour cream)’, ‘my life held precariously in the seeing / hands of others’ (CP, 245). In taking fragments of whatever it was that happened to be happening to him, and filtering them through his own imaginative interpretation of them, O’Hara constructed a fluctuating selfhood which remains fiery and alive today, dependent as much upon what readers bring to his poetry as on what he himself put in it. It is possible to view the Collected Poems as a vast improvisational collage: without doubt the O’Hara that we ‘know’ now is the O’Hara of his poems, rather than, say, the O’Hara of anecdote or biography (although he, of course, is famous too).
As a poet O’Hara worked as a receptive, improvisational, two-way canvas upon which he may draw, and, more significantly, upon which he encourages others to draw. As Charles Molesworth observes, ‘unlike Whitman, O’Hara never sings of himself; rather, his self is the instrument on which the poet sings’.76 Molesworth, remarking that O’Hara’s poetry ‘startles as does any utterance clearly self-begot’, likens his poetry to Saul Steinberg’s self-portraits, in which the hand holding the pen is simultaneously sketching both the artist’s line and a drawing of the artist himself. And indeed, in spite of his frequent collaging of appropriated material, O’Hara’s work is both self-begot and self-begetting: Elaine de Kooning’s 1962 portrait of O’Hara, in which the figure of the poet is faceless and yet is unmistakeably O’Hara, reveals this further. De Kooning recalled her decision to smudge out the face in the painting, saying that in doing so it was rendered far more like O’Hara than when the portrait contained his distinctive and carefully delineated facial features. A similar principle operates in O’Hara’s poetry – although it is full of the names of people and places we cannot possibly know, and of snippets of unmediated conversation we may not be able to understand, our lack of knowledge is irrelevant because he is not trying to draw a diagram. The purpose of his poetry is to evoke a mood or a feeling, which is as much dependent on the subjective response of the reader – the receiver of fire – as it is on O’Hara himself. As I established in my introduction, the collage aesthetic requires from the reader or viewer not necessarily the discovery of any particular message but the intuitive discernment of the emotional regulating system upon which the poem or artwork in question operates – a system which normally carries the ‘implications of a life beyond art’,77 without which the work in question could not exist. In O’Hara’s case this regulating system is of course that which Ashbery called his ‘culte du moi … the poems are all about him and the people and images who wheel through his consciousness, and they seek no further justification’.78
‘The Day Lady Died’ (1959), for instance, is an elegy to Billie Holiday and one of O’Hara’s most accomplished poems, in which an assortment of collaged details focuses our attention on the evocation of O’Hara’s mood upon learning of the singer’s death, rather than any specific visualisation of her. Charles Simic, writing about Joseph Cornell in Dime-Store Alchemy, imagined that ‘somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together they’ll make a work of art’.79 Brought together, five objects more or less make up the work of art that is ‘The Day Lady Died’: a hamburger, an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING, a little Verlaine, a bottle of Strega, and a carton of Gauloises. The poem uses a collage style to interweave and juxtapose the everyday objects, with which it is broadly composed, in order to formulate unexpected layers of meaning and a tone of intimacy that is autobiographical without being confessional.
O’Hara’s choice of title sets the reader up for a mournful homage which is never realised in the traditional sense. Instead of the standard direct address to or lament about the departed artist, O’Hara only mentions Holiday twice, and then not even by name. The meandering nature of the poem’s collated detail even implies that Holiday might not have been mentioned at all, had the wandering figure of the poet not happened to catch sight of the ‘NEW YORK POST with her face on it’ (CP, 325), a newspaper cutting which O’Hara almost literally pastes into the poem. The poem abounds in times, dates, and proper nouns, from which the reader is naturally but only gently alienated, the effect of which is to furnish the poem with a state of abstraction against which the subtle, breathless poignancy of the final stanza might be juxtaposed.
Abandoning elegiac emotion, O’Hara begins by inundating the reader with a detailed pageant of illustrative facts, all of which took place on ‘The Day Lady Died’. We learn that
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner (CP, 325)
This stanza sets the tone for the majority of the rest of the poem and establishes O’Hara’s intention to accumulate fragmentary, quotidian occurrences, and set them in apposition to each other for aesthetic effect. Marjorie Perloff argues that the fragments of detail accumulated in the poem, particularly the items he purchases, are deliberately selected in order to embody Billie Holiday as ‘both the foreign-exotic and the native American’.80 However this seems to rather miss the point of the poem, which is less about creating a portrait of Billie Holiday for readers to admire than it is about expressing how O’Hara felt on the day she died. The poem is a collage of fragments that relate to him, rather than to her, leaving behind an accurate impression of O’Hara of the kind that can be gleaned by sifting through the receipts and ticket stubs in a person’s wallet. We learn that he is a poet, that he has friends in the affluent Hamptons, that he is a perennially overdrawn neo-Bohemian who is financially secure ‘for once’, and that he has a taste for European cigarettes and foreign literature. In placing himself so unequivocally within the context of the poem, and representing himself as an active, middle-class, male poet buying gifts for his friends prior to a weekend in Easthampton, he provides a stunning juxtaposition with the understated image of the black, female, drug-addicted, dead singer, whose death, after all, is the occasion for the poem. Across the surface of the poem O’Hara combines the seamlessness of a Max Ernst collage and the heterogeneity of a collage by Picabia, to give Holiday a place in his poem, whilst simultaneously ensuring that she remains separate enough for the feelings provoked by her loss to be remarkable.
O’Hara’s exploitation of the natural fragmentation in the day’s experience is the key factor in the poem’s success. Anthony Libby notes that although ‘O’Hara’s lines are unusually rich in detail, he tends to force the details to replace rather than amplify each other’.81 In this way, although the reader is presented with a catalogue of ‘happenings’, nothing fixed is allowed to build, and the day continues through the poem as it would have done in real life, and indeed, if Holiday had not died. Bill Berkson elaborates on this distancing technique, explaining that ‘by the cancellation of one detail by another … the reader is confronted by a language with its own laws of continuity, not necessarily those to which he has been accustomed’.82 The result of this is that the mood of the poem is appropriately one of transience, volatility, and fleeting moments, aided by the impression we have of O’Hara walking around Manhattan gathering gifts with the intention of going elsewhere. In some ways, the poem is a motile collage – fragments are incorporated sequentially, and then moved swiftly on, as time passes and O’Hara continues on his journey. But the journey through the day, and through New York, is also a journey shared with the reader, toward, inevitably, the irrevocable ‘NEW YORK POST with her face on it’, and consequently the memory of Holiday’s secret performance at the 5 Spot.83 The journey contains also the strange moments of clarity associated with grief or shock, in which insignificant details take on greater poignancy or significance in hindsight. Furthermore, the process has repeatedly laid emphasis on disconnections and on anomalies: O’Hara does not know who will feed him, nor ‘what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days’; ‘for once in her life’ the cashier does not look up O’Hara’s balance, and, spoilt for choice, he almost, contradictorily, falls asleep. All this incongruity, when juxtaposed, finally, with the one moment of stasis and finality in the poem – O’Hara’s memory of Holiday singing at the 5 Spot – helps to stabilise the glaring sense of discontinuity provoked by her death.
O’Hara moves the action of the poem into the past tense in the final stanza to heighten its quelling effect. Until the penultimate line, the poem is almost entirely in the present tense, occasionally dipping into the future, in a manner typical of O’Hara’s ‘I do this, I do that’ style. If the poem’s title were different, one might believe that he actually is doing all that he says he is – getting his shoeshine, going to the bank, eating a hamburger. However because the title informs us that we are in fact hearing about a memory, we are disoriented as the poem progresses in its terribly chipper, forward-looking mood, being drawn nonetheless into the poet’s present time. Paul Carroll’s remark that O’Hara represents ‘the poet as mirror … He reflects the surface of what that particular July afternoon in 1959 looked like to him’,84 echoes the disjunctive temporality of the poem, implying that O’Hara is a mirror capable of reflecting the past. The poem is just long enough to allow the significance of the title to fade, and then to recur to the reader, who will suddenly recall it as they reach the closing lines. It is then that O’Hara switches achingly to the past tense, to the memory of a memory which brutally juxtaposes death with life, and which almost succeeds in causing time to stand still:
… she whispered a song along the keyboard
To Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing (CP, 325)
This powerful use of language to represent a shifting of time illustrates how far O’Hara has come since abandoning his efforts to replicate painting in poetry: this is a technique which an ordinary painting, with its inability to manipulate verb tenses, cannot achieve. A collage, however, occupies a unique place, part way between painting and text, and, as Andrew Clearfield observes, a collage may incorporate within its structure ‘the temporality that has generally been an essential aspect of literature. It will, however, always obscure, and frequently deny, chronology’.85 We can see, then, in ‘The Day Lady Died’, that the power of the final two lines is very much dependent upon the progression of the preceding twenty-seven lines, just as in a collage the overall effect is dependent upon the accumulative process, upon juxtapositioning and sequentiality, and upon the artist’s ability to show that mood and meaning reside in the bonds of experience rather than, necessarily, experience itself. Furthermore, without the collaged surface of this poem – the tapestry of mundane memories, deliberately placed in apposition to the extraordinary one at the end – O’Hara’s recollection of the night at the 5 Spot would be rendered far less significant. As it is, the memory is startling and memorable, and in its evocation of tragedy succeeds in transcending time for the reader, just as it did for him. Clark Coolidge encapsulated this achievement in his own drifting, syntactically confused tribute to O’Hara:
The way things go by within his lines, to the side and away, just catching the edges … The small things tangential and instantly deflected in the going forward but not before they register. The mind is moving, passing, and (even absently) collecting the while. However minute, the bright included. A master of peripheral vision.86
The living quality of O’Hara’s poetry is sustained by his efforts not to recreate or re-imagine ‘in tranquillity’87 events such as this one, but, instead, to attempt to reconfigure the act of writing itself so that it might encompass life, or seem to, as it was happening; in other words, so that he might write his poems at parties, or on ferry journeys, or on display typewriters in the Olivetti showroom during his lunch hour, or, if he could not, to at least give the impression to his readers that he had done so, keeping the surface of his work alive. Joe LeSueur recalled:
we lived … in a second-floor apartment so close to the street that it seemed an extension of it, a cacophonous symphony of ugly urban sounds played fortissimo outside our window, punctuated regularly by the sound of the Ninth Street crosstown bus making its stop next to the downstairs doorway – incredibly, these distractions not only failed to impede but seemed to spur the steady stream of words rushing from his teeming brain to his two nimble index fingers.88
The velocity of life in a chaotic urban environment inspired O’Hara to attempt to outpace thought in his writing, propelling him to carry out with such success the kind of ‘theft of fire’ to which Rimbaud refers in his letter. This urban drive was not, however, as Susan Rosenbaum suggests, O’Hara deriding ‘an older pastoral ideal, aligning it with nostalgia for a past-that-never-was, with the “naive” romantic values of innocence, sincerity, and depth’.89 O’Hara may mock the pastoral ideal, but it is inaccurate to suggest that his poems lack innocence, sincerity or depth, or, indeed, that these things cannot be found within an urban setting. O’Hara does not mock romantic values – he rather mocks the confinement of these ideals to a pastoral setting. He asserts in the prose poem ‘Meditations in an Emergency’:
I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes – I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. (CP, 197)
The problem with Rosenbaum’s argument is that whilst she is correct in her observation that O’Hara ‘celebrates a present of irony, surface, and the “least sincere”, rejecting the desire to define a space distinct from the landscape of consumption’, she misleadingly presents her interpretation as a dichotomy, implying that a poem is either all innocence and sincerity, or all irony and surface, which is to disregard the fact that O’Hara’s poetry is often both, and that beneath surface, inevitably, is depth.
It is of course true that O’Hara was never one to take an oppositional stance toward commodity culture. It was very much a part of his poetry, and also of his critical writing and role as curator, in which he had to promote art in such a way that it could withstand the complexities of commodification and politicization, enabling it to remain fresh and original, even revolutionary, whilst simultaneously adorning the walls of government buildings or being co-opted into representing US interests abroad. He achieved this by refusing to present avant-garde art as antagonistic or ‘oppositional’, to quote Blasing, instead writing about it in a manner that ‘locates [art’s] impulse to technical innovation within the cultural and economic mainstream’, and showing it as reacting creatively to ‘the stresses and strains of a specific historical moment’.90 O’Hara succeeded in avoiding what Ashbery would later denounce as ‘the loyalty-oath mentality … where Grove Press subway posters invite the lumpenproletariat to “join the Underground Generation”, as though this were as simple a matter as joining the Pepsi Generation, which it probably is’.91 O’Hara resisted this kind of attitude in his body of work in a manner similar to his practice of name-dropping within the context of his poems, namely by employing a levelling effect and insisting upon the total democracy of the appreciation of art. Just as ‘Janice’, ‘Bill’, and ‘Maxine’ could appear alongside Rimbaud and Prokofieff, and ‘the soot … of New York’ (CP, 361) alongside ‘the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona’ (CP, 360), so he insisted that a piece of art is what it is, regardless of where it ends up or who looks at it, drawing for this on the democratizing principles of collage.
The illusion of flatness or one-dimensionality in O’Hara’s poetry stems partly from the disproportionate critical attention paid to his shorter, more mercurial and immediately accessible poems – it is interesting to wonder whether, had he lived as long as, say, John Ashbery or Kenneth Koch, he would have been known instead for poems more in the vein of the forceful and lengthy ‘Biotherm’, to which he seemed to be moving at the time of his death. It also lies, however, in O’Hara’s view that writing poetry and living life must go hand in hand, unimpeded by overly rigorous academicism, and that, as Rimbaud asserted, the poet
must see to it that his inventions can be smelled, felt, heard … summing up everything, perfumes, sounds, colours, thought grappling thought, and pulling … This future, as you will see, will be materialistic … Poetry will no longer accompany action, but will lead it.92
O’Hara manifests this notion in many of his poems, which are anti-elitist in the sense of being, as Ashbery notes, ‘part of a modern tradition which is anti-literary and anti-artistic’ (CP, vii). It is evident in poems such as ‘Having a Coke With You’ (1960), in which, in a poetic tradition dating back to Petrarch, the works of Michelangelo, Duchamp, da Vinci, and Marino Marini are weighed up next to the attributes of O’Hara’s lover, Vincent Warren, and found wanting (‘I look / at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world’, ‘the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism’, etc.). The featherweight, breathless ‘Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)’ was dashed off on the Staten Island ferry, in 1962, on the way to a public reading. The poem has the effect of making the reader or listener feel outpaced, much as a newcomer to a big city may feel. This effect is even greater if the poem is read aloud, forcing the reader to experience its breathlessness physically.
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up (CP, 449)
In seventeen short lines, unpunctuated except for two exclamation marks, O’Hara once again manipulates tenses and constructs as sensually as possible the velocity, the turbulent rhythms, and the captivating absurdities of a modern city. Verbs are piled absurdly on top of one another as the speaker hurries across town, depicting ‘the moment-to-moment reality of the individual’,93 to quote Fred Moramarco. The incongruous, disorienting descriptions of the weather subtly link O’Hara’s frothy, filmic New World caricature with Surrealist Europe, whilst the speed of the transitions in the poem, which drag the reader into the meteorological vortex being described, carries distinct Futurist connotations, whirling like a collage by Carlo Carrà, as well as manifesting O’Hara’s interest in the nature of time by revealing the endless tiny, entropic changes that are, in the words of Geoff Ward, ‘the ways life makes itself felt’.94 Like many of O’Hara’s most famous poems, this is an occasional poem, and as such it exists completely in the moment of perception, its details and appropriations resisting interpretation, hierarchy, and longevity, so that instead of organising experience, the imagination simply records it, and in so doing shrugs off what Charles Altieri has called ‘its noble form-creating role’.95
‘Poem Read At Joan Mitchell’s’ (CP, 265), another occasional poem, further refutes Rosenbaum’s suggestion that O’Hara’s poetry is inherently unromantic and insincere. Although, as an epithalamion, its poetic surface suggests a celebration of the marriage of O’Hara’s friend Jane Freilicher to Joe Hazan, in the fissures between each collaged fragment O’Hara reveals an internal resistance to the notion of complete, permanent unity between two people. The poem is informed by collage principles and is inherently fragmented and deliberately stylistically uneven, ranging in style from campy, Mayakovsky-esque word-drunkenness (‘It’s so / original, hydrogenic, anthropomorphic, fiscal, post-anti-esthetic, / bland, unpicturesque and WilliamCarlosWilliamsian!) to poignant sentimentality (‘This poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long, long / for this life and these times’). Moments of sincerity concerning the couple’s relationship are also subtly ironic:
city noises are louder because you are together
being together you are louder than calling separately across a telephone one to the other
and there is no noise like the rare silence when you both sleep (CP, 265)
They are further destabilised by a sequence of double-edged, lightly mocking observations, which hint at the changes marriage brings: ‘it is most modern to affirm someone’, ‘no one will be bored tonight by me because you’re here’, ‘your peculiar desire to get married’, ‘did you spit on your index fingers and rub the CEDAR’S neon circle for luck?’ The poem’s progression indicates that this hesitancy regarding marriage stems from and is counterbalanced by O’Hara’s own fear of being alone. The poem grows increasingly nostalgic – the speaker hopes for ‘more drives to Bear Mountain … more evenings avoiding the latest Japanese movie … more sunburns and more half-mile swims’, implying, simply by mentioning them, his fears there will not be. O’Hara imbues the concluding lines of the poem with resignation – that the couple in question will probably be happy, and that he, the poet, probably will not – but, unable to concede this completely, the poem ends on a note that is uplifting in a rather knowing way: ‘something to cling to, happiness / the least and best of human attainments’. Despite being a poem about an engagement, read to a group of close friends, it remains fragmented, emphasising its fissures in its arbitrary incorporation of place names and memories, and its halting, inconsistent style and heavy enjambment. O’Hara dances around ‘the paradoxes of self and union inherent in marriage and friendship’96 without ever confronting them directly, choosing instead to duck through the ellipses permitted by his employment of collage, which enable him to enunciate his feelings, as in ‘The Day Lady Died’, without ever denoting them specifically; in other words, he indulges his desire to self-document without being directly confessional.
The heightened subjectivity of the collage practice and of modern art in general, and the increasing acknowledgment of the quotidian fragment as an important aesthetic constituent, enabled O’Hara to use in his poetry an expansive gallery of characters, both real and fictitious, around whom associations, recollections, ideas, or emotions may cluster. O’Hara was strongly influenced in this respect by the writer and activist Paul Goodman’s essay, published in the summer of 1951, entitled ‘Advance-Guard Writing, 1900–1950’.97 Goodman depicts society as being alienated ‘from its own creative development’, writing: ‘its persons are estranged from one another; but most of the members of society do not feel their estrangement; … the artists, however, feel it, regard themselves as estranged’. Specifically referring to the post-Second World War era, he writes that
the norms that a young person perforce introjected were now extraordinarily senseless and unnatural – a routine technology geared to war, a muffled and guilty science, a standard of living measured by commodities, a commercial art, a moral freedom without personal contact.
Under such circumstances, he argues, ‘we can expect little creativity, advance-guard or otherwise’. His proposed remedy to this alienation and ‘shell shock’, which is what O’Hara took to heart, was ‘the physical reestablishment of community’, whereby the avant-garde writer would ‘take the initiative precisely by putting his arms around [people] and drawing them together. In literary terms this means: to write for them about them personally’. Goodman continues:
But such personal writing about the audience itself can occur only in a small community of acquaintances, where everybody knows everybody and understands what is at stake; in our estranged society, it is objected, just such intimate community is lacking. Of course it is lacking! The point is that the advance-guard action helps create such community, starting with the artist’s primary friends. The community comes to exist by having its culture; the artist makes this culture.
These ideas come across very clearly in O’Hara’s intensely social poetry: he writes for and about not just his friends but also his idols and even people he disliked altogether, bearing out Goodman’s view that a writer’s ‘audience and his relation to his audience are his essential plastic medium’. O’Hara furthers this notion by allowing the processes of poetry to be reciprocal – he, as author, is just as much the plastic medium of his audience as they are his. Goodman’s essay was a ‘validation’98 of his developing poetic ideology. In an effusive letter to Jane Freilicher, O’Hara called Goodman’s manifesto ‘delicious’, writing that ‘it is really lucid about what’s bothering us’ and that ‘it is so heartening to know that someone understands these things’.99 Heartening indeed, for an increasingly collaboratively-minded poet whose aim was to remove the ‘versus’ in poetry, and to narrow the gap between art and community through the integration and subjectification of his work.
The collaged proliferation of proper nouns within many of O’Hara’s poems has the dual effect of simultaneously seducing and disorienting the reader by incorporating within their plane the ‘familiar bits of the world without regard for their iconic value’.100 The familiar tone with which O’Hara drops names onto the surfaces of his texts heightens the reader’s consciousness of their unfamiliarity with them. Because of this, many of O’Hara’s poems might be regarded as what Roland Barthes denotes as being ‘text[s] of bliss’, in the sense that the bewilderment they inspire ‘imposes a state of loss … that discomforts [and] unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, bring[ing] to a crisis his relation with language’.101 This is also, of course, part of the main purpose of collage; it is, as Max Ernst asserted, a conquest of the irrational through the coupling of two or more irreconcilable realities upon an unsuitable plane, thus pioneering a fresh approach to the work of art in question. One only remains mystified by O’Hara’s intimate web of interpersonal affiliations if one is intent when reading his poetry on pinning down exact meanings, analysing images, and dragging the riverbed of opacity for symbolic corpses. Proper nouns within O’Hara’s poetry, if treated instead as fragments of an extended collage, enable the reader to understand their function within the context of the poem in question, rather than as ‘real’ individuals from whom we are obstructed by our lack of knowledge of them. Charles Altieri highlights the importance of not worrying about who ‘Joe’ or ‘Jane’ might be, within the context of O’Hara’s poetry, by emphasising that such characters ‘continually insist that they are not representations of reality but the enactment by the artist of certain attitudes and choices within that reality’.102 What matters is how the poetry operates around such characters, and what poetic role they have to play in terms of informing the ‘attitudes and choices’ of the poet.
The collaged cast of characters appearing in O’Hara’s poetry often evokes, ironically, a sense of isolation, with the poem becoming, as Terence Diggory observes, ‘the space in which persons are mutually exposed in their separateness’.103 O’Hara’s poem ‘Joe’s Jacket’ (CP, 329), for instance, which Epstein describes as ‘an experience of disorienting emotional enjambment’,104 features an extended collage of names and individuals which ultimately conveys a sense of poignant hollowness. The poem centres around ‘an enormous party mesmerizing comers in the disgathering light’, at which the poet is one of many guests, of whom ‘Jap’, ‘Vincent’, and ‘Kenneth’ are named, whilst ‘Ashes’ and ‘Janice’ also feature as absent friends.105 ‘D.H. Lawrence’ is also mentioned by name. The poem begins with O’Hara, ‘Jap’, and ‘Vincent’ in the ‘parlor car’ of a train on the way to a party, with O’Hara musing on his notion of ‘life as a penetrable landscape lit from above’, an image whose painterly connotations are clear. The role of ‘Jap’ and ‘Vincent’ in the text is not dependent on the reader’s knowledge of who they are; their role is to root O’Hara in the present, protecting him from the menacing nostalgia of the subsequent lines:
… I
pretending to be adult felt the blue within me and light up there
no central figure me, I was some sort of cloud or a gust of wind (CP, 329)
As soon as the party to which the three travellers are ‘entraining’ begins, proper nouns vanish from the stanza. The word ‘disgathering’ carries the implication that despite the large numbers of people being drawn to the party, they are psychically at a remove from one another, and that rather than gathering together, they are actually drifting, or even being forced apart. O’Hara’s reactions to the large, faceless group – ‘boredom’, ‘mounting panic’, ‘anxiety and self-distrust’ – build into a terrible despair by the third stanza, ominously demarcated by ‘the D.H. Lawrence on the floor and … “The Ship of Death”’. Unusually for O’Hara, he also uses a metaphor for his depression here: ‘the beautiful desperation of a tree / fighting off strangulation’. This continues until, looking out of the window the following morning, he sees ‘Kenneth’ appear, whose evidently familiar face instantaneously transforms his mood, diverting his thoughts toward ‘beauty, art and progress’ until ‘musical and strange the sun comes out’.
The poem continues to relate the poet’s borrowing of ‘Joe’s seersucker jacket’, a temporary act of larceny which prompts a fragmented blend of beautiful, protective memories of travelling in Europe and feelings of warm nostalgia: ‘it is all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here’. Once again, the reader does not require prior awareness of who ‘Joe’ is: what matters is O’Hara’s employment of him, in order to convey a mood. As his mood shifts, and proper nouns make their way back into the poem (‘Paris’, ‘Haussmann and the rue de Rivoli’, ‘my Spanish plaza’, ‘San Marco’s pigeons’, ‘the Kurfurstendamm’, ‘Ashes in an enormous leather chair in the Continental’), it becomes clear that they mark the seams of the collage. O’Hara collates emotions, and indicates their shifts by the entrance and exits of the names of friends, people, and places, as the poem progresses. Our attention is naturally drawn to the names through curiosity and because they stand out on the page. Proper nouns echo throughout O’Hara’s oeuvre, corresponding with each other like refrains across the surfaces of his texts, and embodying ‘the multiple facets of experience’.106 This is their role within O’Hara’s poetic – whatever he experiences, he usually experiences with, or because of them; and if he is alone, their absence is notable enough to bestow it with the weight of presence. In this way O’Hara’s characters operate as emotive signals, acting as both seams and fissures in the collage as he portrays the fluctuations of friendship and his relationship to place and space. Their most significant collective collage function, however, is as a simultaneous distraction from and indicator of the motivation behind O’Hara’s poetic; in other words, himself – ‘mobile, shifting, multiple … contradictory, elusive and incomplete’.107
John Ashbery noted that although O’Hara’s poetry is ‘almost exclusively autobiographical, there is little that is confessional about it – he does not linger over aspects of himself hoping that his self-absorption will make them seem exemplary’ (CP, x). Ashbery draws a line here between the autobiographical and the confessional modes, highlighting the subjective nature by which a poetic style may acquire a label. So whilst O’Hara’s poems are quite clearly confessional in the literal (and expansive) sense of the word, it is the connotations of the form which he, and critics of his work, take issue with. He possessed a particularly lingering distaste for the work of Robert Lowell, seen as the father of the confessional mode. In 1965, in an unusually acerbic outburst, he savaged one of Lowell’s most famous poems, ‘Skunk Hour’, saying:
I think Lowell has … a confessional manner which [lets him] get away with things that are really just plain bad but you’re supposed to be interested because he’s supposed to be so upset … And I don’t think that anyone has to get themselves to go and watch lovers in a parking lot necking in order to write a poem, and I don’t see why it’s admirable if they feel guilty about it. They should feel guilty. Why are they snooping? What’s so wonderful about a Peeping Tom? And then if you liken them to skunks putting their noses into garbage pails, you’ve just done something perfectly revolting. No matter what the metrics are. And the metrics aren’t all that unusual. Every other person in any university in the United States could put that thing into metrics. So I don’t really associate very much with it. (SS, 13)
Lowell’s confessionalism can certainly seem tactical and consciously introspective when compared with O’Hara’s infinitely more grubby, casual, and conversational aesthetic, which was engineered not around an audience of one, but between a shifting, undefined community of people. Lowell’s brand of confession comes as a result of a day of languishing in bed looking out at ‘the abstract imperial sky’ and lamenting: ‘Everyone’s tired of my turmoil’.108 O’Hara on the other hand writes a ‘Song’ in the back of a taxicab having just been diagnosed with a venereal infection: ‘how I hate disease, it’s like worrying / that comes true’ (CP, 361). Anne Hartman suggests that O’Hara’s objection to Lowell stems from the latter’s ‘spurious claims to sincerity and cathartic release from a guilt that is in fact its precondition’, arguing that Lowell’s poems are ‘characterized by controlled spontaneity or feigned carelessness … a self-conscious, composed style of self-narration we have come to expect from models of confession descending from Augustine and Rousseau’.109 But Lowell appears to have touched a raw nerve in O’Hara, whose atypical outburst seems to be about more than mere temperamental aversion, and perhaps, rather, exposes the similarities in their creative processes, uncovering in O’Hara the poetic devices he conceals not just from his audience, but also, as far as possible, from himself. Since the days of his early experimentation with collage in poems like ‘Second Avenue’, he had been practicing the art of concealing his poetic devices, so as to make his poetry seem as spontaneous and as improvisational as possible. Whilst Lowell articulates grandiose confessions with a poised theatricality (‘everyone’s tired of my turmoil’), O’Hara roves frenetically into and over the surfaces of his own psyche, tempering his strong performative tendencies with intimate ruses designed with the pleasure of an audience in mind: the lines ‘in a world where you are possible / my love / nothing can go wrong for us, tell me’ (CP, 361) sounds initially blithe and confident, but the final two words reveal the devastating uncertainty which is the motivation behind this short poem. It is interesting to situate Lowell’s genuine psychic anguish alongside O’Hara’s bitterness toward him: Lowell represents an immersion in a therapeutic culture which O’Hara, for all his own psychological troubles, seems to resist, dedicated as he is to pitting his anti-elitist impulses against Lowell’s self-conscious introspection. He is appalled by Lowell’s claim to exemplary status purely on account of his dissemination of his own psychological troubles. As an artist, O’Hara’s spontaneity and literary dirtiness are arguably just as much a subterfuge as Lowell’s decontaminated metrics. The stylistic purity of ‘Skunk Hour’ juxtaposed with its images of skunks and garbage pails forces O’Hara to confront his own artifice, unsettling the view he espouses in ‘Song (is it dirty)’, in which he justifies his lover’s bad character by comparing it with the dirty city air, which ‘you don’t refuse to breathe do you’ (CP, 327). The spontaneous impurity of O’Hara’s work is a natural impulse first, and a poetic tactic second, whereas in Lowell the reverse seems true, and recognition of this may have rather unnerved O’Hara.
Allen Ginsberg perhaps articulated these differences best when in an interview in 1966 he posed the question: ‘what happens if you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse? The problem is to break down that distinction: when you approach the Muse to talk as frankly as you would talk with yourself or with your friends’.110 Indeed, as Russell Ferguson notes, it was never O’Hara’s aim ‘to flaunt his erudition, but rather to submerge its deeper content in the embrace of the quotidian; to write always in the now of a particular time and place’.111 O’Hara was a judicious listener, and seems to have been able, critically and with remarkable self-confidence, to siphon off the more perceptive and charismatic elements from his inner verbal flow which he genuinely wanted, and, indeed, needed, to share with others: as he says in his 1961 poem ‘For the Chinese New Year & For Bill Berkson’, ‘what do you do with a kid / like me if you don’t eat me I’ll have to eat myself’ (CP, 389).
O’Hara was therefore troubled by, but largely ignored, the dry, self-conscious, poetic template drawn up by the New Criticism, particularly by academics such as W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, which seemed to go against everything he stood for, both as a poet and an art critic, as well as a reader of poetry. When asked by Edward Lucie-Smith to weigh in on the aesthetic debate over ‘the raw and the cooked’ in poetry, and to give an idea of where he stood in relation to the poets and the poetry involved (predominantly Lowell versus Ginsberg), his response was fairly equivocal: ‘Actually I don’t really see what my relation is to them one way or the other except that we all live at the same time’ (SS, 12–13). But the isolationist readings championed by the newly elevated advocates of the New Critical movement, whose enduring achievement was to professionalize criticism as a serious academic discipline, created a self-enclosed literary elite that seemed restrictive and authoritarian, particularly for a writer whose immediate audience was always his own, intimate community, or coterie, and much of whose poetry, particularly in the long-term, served to articulate the juncture between text and experience, something the New Critics largely rejected. Detractors of O’Hara’s writing could argue that it is just as self-enclosed as the elites he criticises, and in fact merely perpetuates a different kind of elite, punctuated as it is by the names of his friends and by lowbrow allusions to diners, bars, parties, streets and other city-places that the majority of readers would never even have heard of, let alone visited. He also makes frequent references to obscure or high cultural sources – Rachmaninoff, Macbeth, Fantômas, the Kikuyu, Saint Adalgisa’s day – ostensibly in the vein of the Modernist collage style of Eliot, Pound, or Lowell. And yet The Waste Land, the Pisan Cantos, and Lowell poems such as ‘Mr Edwards and the Spider’ and ‘Skunk Hour’ were being absorbed into the literary professoriate by the New Critics, whilst O’Hara’s work, in spite of its irony, complexity, and self-reference, all attributes championed by New Criticism, was not.
The difference between O’Hara’s poetic style, and Eliot’s, Lowell’s, or Pound’s, is that his often equally obscure references do not detract from the overall meaning of any given poem; they operate instead as something akin to the found object in art, and serve to add elements both living and universal to his poetic. O’Hara writes about the effect these unknown things have on him, about how they are relevant to his life, to the poem he is writing, and to the experience or idea he is trying to convey. He does not try to show how much he knows, or – except in the case of the movies – advocate anything. Meaning in O’Hara’s work lies in his own words and sentiments, as well as his implied delivery, because everything he writes seems to be, as Ashbery noted, ‘emerging out of his life’ (CP, x). To Wimsatt and Beardsley, who, in 1946, dismissed the intentions of the author as an ‘intentional fallacy’,112 this was anathema. O’Hara’s poetry does not depend on the reader knowing what Prokofieff sounds like, or what a de Kooning looks like, or what the Stagamore’s ‘terrific’ coffee (CP, 265) tastes like: what matters is what these things sound or look or taste like to O’Hara, who will delineate them, in his own unique way, for the reader. Equally, he will say what he needs the reader to hear about Janice or Kenneth or Allen, or Sergei O or Pasternak or Helmut Dantine – in this way, as I noted in my introduction, with regard to the creation of collage, choice is ‘the decisive creative act’.113 Not recognising a reference in O’Hara is not, therefore, an impediment to understanding his poetry. By contrast, New Critical readings of Eliot, for instance, rendered The Waste Land all but off limits to those with no knowledge of the journey to Emmaus, a multiplicity of languages ancient and modern, or who Tiresias might be. Likewise Lowell’s ‘Mr Edwards and the Spider’: without knowing anything about the eponymous Mr Edwards (an eighteenth-century New England theologian and one of the founders of what became Princeton University) the reader is kept at arm’s length from the poem itself.
This expectation of prior knowledge required by the New Critics was deeply alienating to O’Hara, the implication being that poetry was for some people and not for others. In promoting literature as a discipline akin to science or philosophy, New Critics such as I.A. Richards, William Empson, and John Crowe Ransom also promulgated an unavoidably elitist agenda of separation, which was not necessarily that of the poets to whom they subjected their specialized reading techniques. Eliot, for example, had his own reservations about ‘the respectable mob’114 who read his poetry, professing ‘that the poet naturally prefers to write for as large and miscellaneous an audience as possible, and that it is the half-educated and ill-educated, rather than the uneducated, who stand in his way’.115 The New Criticism was influenced by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938), a highly successful poetry textbook designed to help first-generation college students (many on the GI Bill) with literary studies. Although Brooks and Warren saw the New Criticism as helping to democratize the study of poetry, their view of the poem as an autonomous structure sustained the New Critical tendency to situate the text out of reach, forcing would-be readers to attempt a perilous ascent of the crags around their ivory tower, to claw their way from myth to ancient language to obscure spiritual reference until they had learned to appreciate all the technical inner workings and academic allusions of the poem in question. This is not necessarily a bad thing, or indeed the direction that Eliot or Pound envisaged their poetry taking, but it is what O’Hara objected to: such a process lacked joie de vivre, and, furthermore, underpinning it all was a stultifying autonomy which was incompatible with both his democracy of vision and his notion of his ‘life held precariously in the seeing / hands of others’ (CP, 245).
O’Hara’s response to the New Criticism, however, as well as to the dominant parameters associated with contemporary poetics (allusiveness, ambiguity, symbolism), was not to deliberately set out to carve his own identity as particularly particular. It was, rather, as Lytle Shaw explains,
to destabilize and displace the markers of literary universality that would allow poetry to operate in an established, understood public sphere – a sphere characterized by norms of tone, canons of reference, and what O’Hara, referring specifically to the New Critics, calls “certain rather stupid ideas about … the comportment in diction that you adopt”.116
For O’Hara, poetry was about communication and conversation: it was not an academic delicacy designed to please the palate of an artificial public. The differences between his work and that of the more academic poets working (and having more success) at the time, were not so much a matter of mass culture versus high art (in these respects they actually share several characteristics), but the ways in which he intended it to be, and in which it was, received and discussed. O’Hara wrote that he wanted to ‘keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious’ (‘Notes on “Second Avenue”’, CP, 497), revealing that the technical intricacies of his poems must ultimately be subordinated to an overall evaluation of their effects, to the experience rather than the interpretation of them, and to prioritizing his creative processes over his finished creations. Jackson Pollock once remarked that appreciating his painting ought to be ‘like looking at a bed of flowers – you don’t tear your hair out over what it means’.117 This applies equally to O’Hara’s poems. Readers are not required to probe beneath their collaged but deliberately flat surfaces: just as Pollock wanted ‘to do away with [the image], to let the painting come through’,118 so O’Hara seems to be asking that the reader involve themselves in his work by trying to experience the fragments of his life which he is showing (rather than explaining) to them. Whilst O’Hara is not a confessional poet, his epithets – such as ‘Happiness / the least and best of human attainments’ (‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s’, CP, 265) or the wonderful ‘Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible’ (‘In Memory of My Feelings’, CP, 252) – have a certain Wildean universality in their marriage of highbrow social aestheticism and camp wit, forming an integral part of a narrative that is directly addressed to the reader, whoever he or she may be. His ‘I do this, I do that’ poems give the reader an almost documentary perspective on both his quotidian and poetic activities. The evenly presented pageant of images in O’Hara’s work permits the listener or reader the same liberty of contemplation that one has in an art gallery, with the result that we are able to fulfil the plea of another poet, Denise Levertov, who implores, simply: ‘O taste and see’.119
Part of the reason, then, for O’Hara’s strong associations with the Abstract painters in New York, and with artists in general, which he had cultivated since he began making weekend trips to the city whilst still a student at Harvard, was, as he discusses in another part of Richard Moore’s film, their disavowal of what he describes mockingly as the prevailing ‘partis pris about academic standards’. He explains:
John [Ashbery], and Kenneth, and I, and a number of other people, later found that the only people who were interested in our poetry were painters, or sculptors. You know, they were enthusiastic about the different ideas, and were more inquisitive … Being non-literary they had no partis pris about academic standards, attitudes and so on. So that you could say, ‘I don’t like Yeats’, and they would say ‘I know just how you feel, I hate Picasso too’. You know, that sort of thing, which was a much pleasanter atmosphere than the literary community was providing at the time.120
His relationship with the intellectual and philosophical hangover left in American poetry by the work of Eliot and Pound was more complicated. He found it overly grand, lacking in humour, and felt that it caused subsequent poets, such as Charles Olson (whom he nevertheless admired), to be too focussed on ‘saying the important utterance’, a trait which he described to Edward Lucie-Smith as being ‘not particularly desirable most of the time’ (SS, 13), rather than writing from the heart. This seems to be more directly related to the ways in which Eliot and Pound’s poetry was received in academic circles, than to their poetry itself – there are certainly connections to be made particularly between Eliot’s fusion of high modernism with his own lowbrow interests (melodrama, boxing, comic strips) and O’Hara’s own combinations of high art and popular culture. O’Hara and the other New York poets also acknowledged that the elder poets’ provocative uses of collage, juxtaposition, and layering effects inspired them, if only once they were detached from their more serious agenda. Talking about Pound’s poetic techniques, particularly his employment of collage, Koch speaks generously about his ‘quirky way of talking … a very flat, spoken style mixed in with unexpected quotes and other languages’, but goes on to clarify the extent of the influence this had on himself, John Ashbery, and O’Hara: ‘Pound did it to make some kind of point, whereas I think we did it because we just liked the splash of it, having everything in’.121 In this sense, the texture and variety of many of O’Hara’s poems illustrates an outward debt to Eliot and Pound, whilst remaining at a remove from the latter’s more Manichean bent and his lofty and expansive poetic philosophy. As Will Montgomery notes, O’Hara’s rejection of ‘an all-encompassing poetics’ is directly related to his ‘invocation of unpredictability [which] implies an openness to all the things that language can do while the poet isn’t looking … a liberty that realizes the limits of the self in directing language’.122
O’Hara rarely concerns himself with a quest for overarching meaning or poetic universality (or a universal poetics). His poetry uses the sounds and appearances of things to explore localised, individualised meanings, which, largely on account of their tone, are able to resonate widely nonetheless, in a manner similar to Joe Brainard’s unconventional memoir I Remember (1970), which despite being an uninterrupted verbal collage of highly personal recollections nonetheless reverberates remarkably with the reader. Collage for O’Hara, and this is particularly evident in his own collage collaborations with Brainard, represented an opportunity to question conventional norms of representation and poetic discourse. Nick Selby dexterously explores the ‘poetics of intimacy’ in the overlapping work of O’Hara, Brainard, and Jasper Johns, using the example of the 1964 Brainard and O’Hara collage collaboration I Grew this Mustache to illustrate how collage may be used to focus attention upon, in this instance, ‘the cultural frames through which maleness is both obscured and made apparent, and upon men’s masks and masques’.123 The collage is simultaneously explicated and complicated by O’Hara’s comic text, which reads: ‘I grew this mustache because my girl has one and I think mustaches are pretty sexy’. In addition, a semi-obscured Spanish text reads ‘Charro boricua’ (the Puerto Rican cowboy). The collage also contains a red-tinted picture of a man who looks like a movie star, wearing a suit and tie, a black and white shot of a naked or semi-naked fencer holding a foil, a Japanese style painting of a flower, and a border of Ghanaian stamps. Selby elegantly posits this as a roguish challenge to ‘the ways in which masculinity and the figure of the male body are placed at the heart of American ideology’.124 This playful aesthetic negotiation, facilitated throughout his body of work by the collage practice, allows O’Hara to engage provocatively and dynamically, without taking either himself or his art too seriously, with the issues which confronted him in everyday life, be they questions of sexual freedom within the context of the Cold War, Marino Marini’s failure ‘to pick the rider as carefully as the horse’ (CP, 360), or the simple pleasures of ‘neon in daylight’ (CP, 258). It also allowed him to exhibit – or, at least, to always seem to be exhibiting – the processes of his creativity.
His openness and receptivity to what he was thinking or seeing or experiencing – his ability, as it were, to listen to himself – enabled him to direct into his writing what Merle Brown qualifies as ‘those unforeseeable, unplanned, unintended forces of his inner and surrounding life as no deliberate, crafty, intentional writer could do’.125 But of course O’Hara was, in his own unique way, a ‘deliberate, crafty, intentional writer’, engaged in a lifelong endeavour to constantly renew the cherished subterfuge of spontaneity, immediacy, and improvisation within his work. It is possible to conclude from this innate, creative, self-reciprocity, that the spontaneity and impulsiveness of O’Hara’s work is both a poetic tactic and a natural impulse, on many occasions both manifested in and facilitated by his use of collage, which operates in his work as more than just a method or a technique: it is a state of mind, a mental modus operandi, which, to return to Lévi-Strauss, ‘lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought’.126
Fig. 3.1 Mario Schifano. Frank O’Hara, 1965. © DACS 2013.
1 ‘Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu. Il est chargé de l’humanité, des animaux même; il devra faire sentir, palper, écouter ses inventions; si ce qu’il rapporte de là-bas a forme, il donne forme; si c’est informe, il donne de l’informe. Trouver une langue … cette langue sera de l’âme pour l’âme, résumant tout, parfums, sons, couleurs, de la pensée accrochant la pensée et tirant … Cette avenir sera matérialiste, vous le voyez … La Poésie ne rhythmera plus l’action; elle sera en avant’.
‘Thus the poet is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he will have to have his inventions smelt, felt, and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form, he gives form; if it is formless, he gives formlessness. A language must be found … This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colours, thought holding onto thought and pulling. This future will be materialistic, as you see; … Poetry will not lend its rhythm to action, it will be in advance’. (Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, ed. Wallace Fowlie [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 (1966)], 376–9.)
2 Eric Lott, interview with David McNair and Jayson Whitehead, Gadfly Online (December 2001), http://www.gadflyonline.com/12-10-01/book-ericlott.html [Accessed 9 October 2010].
3 Ulmer, 391.
4 Carrà, quoted in Poggi, 185–6.
5 Malevich, ‘Spatial Cubism’, 60.
6 Schuyler, quoted in David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 2.
7 Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (London: Penguin, 2006 [1956]), 35.
8 Ashbery, ‘The New York School of Poets’ (1968), in Selected Prose (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), 115.
9 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 [2nd edn]), 119.
10 Ashbery, ‘Frank O’Hara, 1926–1966’ (1966), Selected Prose, 78–80.
11 Anthony Libby, ‘O’Hara On The Silver Range’, Contemporary Literature 17, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 249.
12 Clearfield, 9–10.
13 Perloff, Poet Among Painters, 174.
14 Perloff, ‘The Invention of Collage’, 6.
15 Bürger, 74.
16 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), 21.
17 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Shakespeare, or the Poet’, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson Vol IV: Representative Men: Seven Lectures, ed. Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 110.
18 Picasso, quoted in Gilot and Lake, 70.
19 Conley, 153.
20 Brockelman, 2.
21 Anne Waldman, ‘Paraphrase of Edwin Denby speaking on the New York School’, in Homage to Frank O’Hara, ed. Berkson and LeSueur (Bolinas: Big Sky, 1978), 32.
22 Ginsberg, ‘Early Poetic Community’ (discussion with Robert Duncan at Honors College, Kent State, 7 April 1971), in Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 149.
23 Barbara Guest, Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing (Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 2003), 51–2.
24 James Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry from 1945–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 242.
25 Herbert Leibowitz, ‘A Pan Piping on the City Streets’, review of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, New York Times Book Review, 28 November 1971 (reprinted in Elledge, Frank O’Hara: To Be True To A City [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990, 26]).
26 Rod Mengham, ‘French Frank’, in Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet, ed. Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 49.
27 According to Michel Ragon’s Dubuffet ([New York: Grove Press, 1959], 23), the quotation in line 38 of O’Hara’s poem is probably taken from a statement by Dubuffet in the catalogue for his 1959 show at the Museum of Modern Art – however this is likely to be a reprint of a 1947 invitation to an exhibition of Dubuffet’s Portraits, which read:
People are much better looking than they believe
Long live their true faces
At the Galerie Drouin
17, Place Vendôme
PORTRAITS
with a likeness extracted,
with a likeness cooked and preserved in the memory,
with a likeness burst in the memory of
MR JEAN DUBUFFET
Painter
28 O’Hara, introduction to Robert Motherwell (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965), 10.
29 Quoted in Mengham, ‘French Frank’, 50–51.
30 O’Hara, Robert Motherwell, 8.
31 Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood (London: Faber, 1997 [1920]), 41.
32 Antin, 127.
33 Shaw, ‘Gesture in 1960: Toward Literal Situations’, in Frank O’Hara Now, 37.
34 Brady, ‘Distraction and Absorption on Second Avenue’, in Frank O’Hara Now, 63.
35 Ansen, 22.
36 Brady, 59.
37 Brady, 69.
38 Brady, 64.
39 This artefact is privately owned and I have been unable to locate any images of it.
40 Richard Deming, ‘Naming the Seam: On Frank O’Hara’s “Hatred”’, in Frank O’Hara Now, 137.
41 Lautréamont, 217.
42 Sawday, 1–2.
43 Deming, 133.
44 Hans Arp, ‘The Domestic Stones’, in Collected Verse Translations of David Gascoyne, ed. Robin Skelton and Alan Clodd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1.
45 Breton, ‘The Spectral Attitudes’, in Collected Verse Translations of David Gascoyne, 2.
46 Smith, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: Difference/Homosexuality/Topography (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 98.
47 Smith, 97.
48 Ashbery, ‘Writers and Issues: Frank O’Hara’s Question’, in Selected Prose, 80–83. Originally published in Bookweek, 25 September 1966, 3.
49 Apollinaire, quoted in Rosand, 126.
50 Ashbery, ‘Writers and Issues: Frank O’Hara’s Question’, 80–83.
51 Epstein, Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 96 and 93.
52 Hartigan, quoted in Perloff, Poet Among Painters, 141.
53 Breslin, 248.
54 Multu Konuk Blasing, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 61.
55 Epstein, 96.
56 Blasing, 57.
57 Emerson, ‘Self Reliance’ (1841), in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 271.
58 Ashbery, ‘The New York School of Poets’ (1968), in Selected Prose, 113–16.
59 Ferguson, In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 46.
60 Significantly, O’Hara’s ‘solo art effort’, according to Joe LeSueur (Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara [New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2004], xix), was a collage, now lost, featuring a photograph of Arthur Rimbaud, which he gave to Edwin Denby.
61 Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 25.
62 Kenneth Koch, in Homage to Frank O‘Hara, 206–7.
63 Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Max Hayward and Manya Harari (London: HarperCollins, 1995 [1957]), 574.
64 John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (London: Penguin Classics, 2000 [1925]), 23.
65 ‘The idea that the slant of the light on a church steeple on a particular day might kick off thoughts of old Hollywood musicals told you how hopelessly mixed up nature and culture had become’. Perl, 282.
66 Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947–1997 (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 144.
67 David Herd, Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 149.
68 Breslin, 225.
69 Timon of Athens, IV.3.423.
70 Brown, ‘Poetic Listening’, New Literary History 10, no. 1 (1978): 135.
71 Koch, in Kane, What is Poetry, 99.
72 LeSueur, introduction to Amorous Nightmares of Delay: Selected Plays (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), xviii.
73 It is unclear which of O’Hara’s friends called Jim is calling.
74 USA Poetry: Frank O’Hara, dir. Richard O. Moore (WNET, 1966). Emphasis mine.
75 Kenneth Koch, ‘All the Imagination Can Hold’, The New Republic, 1 and 8 January 1972, 23–5.
76 Molesworth, ‘“The Clear Architecture of the Nerves”: The Poetry of Frank O’Hara’, Iowa Review 6 (Summer/Fall 1975): 62.
77 Rosand, 128.
78 Ashbery, ‘Writers and Issues: Frank O’Hara’s Question’, Selected Prose, 82.
79 Simic, 14.
80 Perloff, Poet Among Painters, 182.
81 Libby, 244.
82 Berkson, in Homage to Frank O’Hara, 164.
83 Holiday was temporarily banned from performing by the FBI, on account of her drug use. Although O’Hara is probably referring to the ravaged qualities of her voice in this poem, the notion that she ‘whispered’ because she was performing in secret is an appealing one.
84 Paul Carroll, The Poem In Its Skin (Chicago: Follet Publishing Co., 1968), 163.
85 Clearfield, 10.
86 Coolidge, in Homage to Frank O’Hara, 184.
87 William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (London: Longman, 1805), l.
88 LeSueur, 276.
89 Rosenbaum, Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture and the Crisis in Reading (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 60.
90 Blasing, 30.
91 Ashbery, ‘Writers and Issues: Frank O’Hara’s Question’, 81.
92 Rimbaud to George Izambard, 3 May 1871, in Complete Works, Selected Letters, 376–9.
93 Moramarco, ‘John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara: The Painterly Poets’, Journal of Modern Literature 5, no. 3 (September 1976): 444.
94 Geoff Ward, ‘“Housing the Deliberations”: New York, War, and Frank O’Hara’, in Frank O’Hara Now, 20.
95 Charles Altieri, Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During the Sixties (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979), 110–11.
96 Epstein, 109.
97 Goodman, ‘Advance-Guard Writing, 1900–1950’, Kenyon Review 8, no. 3 (Summer 1951): 359–80. Quotations from pages 361, 369–70, 375–6, and 178. Andrew Epstein has written more extensively on the influence of this essay on O’Hara’s entire body of work, in Beautiful Enemies, 29–32.
98 Epstein, 31.
99 O’Hara to Jane Freilicher, quoted in Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Knopf, 1993), 187.
100 Clearfield, 15.
101 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), 14.
102 Altieri, 119.
103 Diggory, ‘Community “Intimate” or “Inoperative”: New York School Poets and Politics from Paul Goodman to Jean-Luc Nancy’, introductory essay to The Scene of My Selves: New Work on the New York School Poets, ed. Diggory and Stephen Miller (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2001), 25.
104 Epstein, Beautiful Enemies, 118.
105 The poem refers to the artist Jasper Johns (‘Jap’), the dancer Vincent Warren, with whom O’Hara had fallen in love the summer the poem was written, O’Hara’s friends the poets Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery (‘Ashes’), and Koch’s wife, Janice. The eponymous ‘Joe’ is O’Hara’s close friend and flatmate Joe LeSueur. Their relationship had recently been complicated by the arrival into it of Vincent Warren.
106 Altieri, 119.
107 Breslin, 223.
108 Robert Lowell, ‘Eye and Tooth’, in For the Union Dead (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), 19.
109 Anne Hartman, ‘Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg’, Journal of Modern Literature 28, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 41.
110 Ginsberg, ‘The Art of Poetry No. 8’, Paris Review 37 (Spring 1966): 21.
111 Ferguson, 27–8.
112 Wimsatt/Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468–88.
113 Thomas, 81.
114 Eliot, ‘London Letter’, The Dial, May 1922, 510–13.
115 Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), 146.
116 Shaw, Frank O’Hara: the Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 5.
117 Quoted in Steven Naifeh and Gregory Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York: Clarkson N Potter, 1989), 592.
118 Naifeh and Smith, 591.
119 Levertov, O Taste and See (New York: New Directions Books, 1964), 53.
120 USA Poetry: Frank O’Hara, dir. Moore.
121 Koch, in Daniel Kane, What is Poetry, 96.
122 Will Montgomery, ‘“In Fatal Winds”: Frank O’Hara and Morton Feldman’, in Frank O’Hara Now, 201–2.
123 Nick Selby, ‘Memory Pieces: Collage, Memorial and the Poetics of Intimacy in Joe Brainard, Jasper Johns and Frank O’Hara’, in Frank O’Hara Now, 234.
124 Selby, 234.
125 Brown, ‘Poetic Listening’, 137.
126 Lévi-Strauss, 22.