THE FINAL POEM OF THE COLLECTED POEMS OF FRANK O’HARA IS “LITTLE Elegy for Antonio Machado” (1966). It is slightly ironic that this should be one of O’Hara’s last poems (it was dated March 27, 1966—three months before O’Hara’s own death), given that Machado’s own last lines were found a few days after his death in 1939, scrawled on a piece of paper in his overcoat.1 Donald Allen notes that a shortened version of the poem first appeared in John Myers’s show, “Homage to Machado,” which Myers organized to benefit refugees from Spain (CP, 557). In the poem, O’Hara evaluates Machado’s significance and praises him in terms that can be applied to O’Hara’s own work.
The poem opens with the argument that while Machado himself is dead, he continues to be an active agent in the world though his poems:
Now your protesting demons summon themselves
with fire against the Castilian dark
and solitary light
your mother dead on the hearth
and your heart at rest on the border of constellary futures
no domesticated cemeteries can enshroud your flight
of linear solarities and quiescent tumbrils
vision of the carrion
past made glassy and golden
to reveal the dark, the dark in all its ancestral clarity
(CP, 491)
While the poet himself is silent, his poems continue to please our senses with flights “of linear solarities and quiescent tumbrils” and shape our view of the present world by summoning his “protesting demons” to show us that we live in darkness. Thus, the poet himself is neither fully present nor fully absent. He is “at rest,” but not in “domesticated cemeteries”; instead, he inhabits a point that seems to be outside of time, “on the border of constellary futures.”
Darkness, in Machado’s poems, is most often a symbol of death and destruction, and light, a symbol of new life. In Campos de Castilla (1907–17), to which O’Hara alludes in these lines, Machado contrasts images of ancient Castile with those of modern Spain to argue that the present is characterized by decay. This is what O’Hara seems to refer to when he writes that in Machado’s work the past is made “glassy and golden” to show the present to be “dark.” That this past is “carrion,” according to O’Hara—which is to say, dead and decomposing—underscores the fact that it is Machado’s work that makes it “glassy and golden.” O’Hara’s reference to Machado’s work as a form of fire is important in this respect. On the one hand, it is the hot hearth out of which molded artifacts—in this case, images of the past—emerge “glassy and golden.” On the other hand, it is a destructive force. It consumes the carcasses of the “carrion past” and molds them into something new. This consumption, furthermore, is not carried out with passionless disinterestedness. After all, according to O’Hara, Machado summons his “demons” in the same way as Satan passionately summons his army of demons in book 1 of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) against the darkness of hell, and who, in turn, respond with protests. Thus, O’Hara figures Machado’s act of creation as both an act of construction and destruction.
In addition to this, O’Hara alludes to Machado’s ambiguous use of the images of light and darkness in his poems. As Norma Louise Hutman notes, Machado believes in the cyclical nature of time and in the interconnectedness of all things, and in his poems images of light and darkness can come to symbolize the absent other. While darkness symbolizes death and destruction, it points to a future dawn; and while light symbolizes life, it points to an inevitable future darkness.2 O’Hara highlights this same interconnectedness in his use of the word “dark.” For example, while the phrase “dark in all its ancestral clarity” refers to Machado’s use of the “golden” past to show the present to be in darkness, O’Hara makes “clarity,” one of the common attributes of light, an attribute of darkness. This underscores the interconnected meaning of both terms.
In the third and fourth sections of the poem, O’Hara turns to another common image of Machado’s: water. O’Hara writes:
where our futures lie increasingly in fire
twisted ropes of sound encrusting our brains
your water air and earth
insist on our joining you
in recognition of colder prides and less negotiable ambitions
we shall continue to correct all classical revisions
of ourselves as trials of ceremonial worth
and purple excess
improving your soul’s expansion
in the night and developing our own in salt-like praise
(CP, 491)
The vaguely ominous “fire” of the third section, which is different from the fire in the first, is cooled, according to O’Hara, by Machado’s “water air and earth.” These images most often represent finite experience in Machado’s work. While it is unclear what these “colder prides and less negotiable ambitions” are that Machado’s “water air and earth” insist we recognize, O’Hara’s reference to “classical revisions / of ourselves” later in the same section as “trials of ceremonial worth” rather than as actual worth invites comparisons to the work of the French symbolist poet Jean Moréas, whom Machado met in Paris in 1899.3 As a symbolist poet, Moréas was, indeed, ambitious. As he stated in his symbolist manifesto in Le Figaro in 1886, “[S]ym-bolic poetry works to clothe the Idea in sensible form” [la poésie symbolique cherche à vêtir l’Idée d’une forme sensible].4 While Moréas argues that this sensible form is often ambiguous or mysterious because of its relationship to “the Idea,” concrete descriptions of the material world, such as one finds in Machado’s work, are scorned.5 Moréas would later distance himself from symbolism, but he continued to understand poetry as clothing “the Idea” in sensible form, and drew from classical texts in his later work, such as in Les stances (1899–1901).6 In contrast to the confident, Neoplatonic poems of Moréas, Machado’s poems are tentative, often ending in uncertainty. As Hutman notes: “Water is the flow of the river to soundless sea and the source of life; roads signify our mortal existence and also continuity; nature is reborn and man may therefore hope—but never with certainty of fulfillment—also to be reborn.”7
This does not mean, however, that Machado’s poems are no longer concerned with meaning. Rather, while Machado, according to O’Hara, continues to be involved with questions of meaning in his poems, it is not the propositional content of these “classical revisions” that is valuable, but rather the form created out of the process of correction. This is the reason that O’Hara refers to this continual revision of ourselves as a trial of “ceremonial worth” as opposed to actual worth—one that is furthermore characterized as an example of “purple excess.” What is valuable, in other words, is the form left over from the search, the beauty of the ceremony itself long after the significance of the ceremony has been forgotten. According to O’Hara, therefore, Machado recognized rightly that “sensible form” alone (again in contradistinction to Moréas) is the principal end of poetry. It is because of this that all who follow Machado in this recognition, and here we can include O’Hara, will improve his or her “soul’s expansion.”
Whether or not Machado’s work can be characterized as a commitment to a less ambitious view of poetic images and form, such a characterization can be applied to O’Hara’s. Like painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, and poets such as Walt Whitman and Boris Pasternak, O’Hara understands artistic creation as a form of expression. It is, for him, the process of exploring his feelings in the material elements of his medium. While O’Hara is aware of the fact that his feelings are inseparable from the words and forms he uses to express them, and he recognizes that there is an element of construction in all art, he does not espouse a reductive materialism that reduces all feelings to constructs. For O’Hara, artistic creation is a form of what Robert Motherwell calls “plastic automatism” —the exploration of the artist’s or poet’s feelings that come into being as the artist works in a particular medium—as well as an “intuitive craft.”
Unlike a number of artists who understand artistic creation to be a form of expression, however, O’Hara thinks that these new forms do not provide us with some sort of insight regarding the nature of the force that provides form to the material world, including the self, and sustains it. In this sense, O’Hara has a much less ambitious, and more pragmatic, view of poetic form and images. This does not mean that poetry is no longer involved with questions of meaning; but for O’Hara the principal end of art is to reinvigorate our experience of the world. In his poems, therefore, O’Hara figures himself as “the Lover of the quick world”—a world that includes both “tree waves and thieves” and that is both comprehensible and incomprehensible (CP, 69). It is this view of the end of poetry—a view that is, indeed, more pragmatic and less ambitious—that most distinguishes O’Hara’s work from the work of previous poets and the work of his contemporaries.
After his death in 1966, two groups of poets positioned themselves with respect to O’Hara—the so-called second generation of the New York School of Poets and the “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” poets. Both of these groups are indeed indebted to O’Hara. However, a close examination of their respective responses to O’Hara shows that each group oversimplifies O’Hara’s poetics in certain respects. If Ted Berrigan (1934–83) is too quick to appropriate O’Hara’s style and tone with little interest in the larger questions that inform O’Hara’s poetics, Bob Perelman (b. 1947) and Charles Bernstein seem to respond to the poststructuralist version of O’Hara rather than to O’Hara himself. Somewhat surprisingly, poets such as David Shapiro (b. 1947) and James Tate (b. 1943), while not often associated with O’Hara, have a poetics that is much closer to O’Hara’s than either of the above two groups.
According to Allen Ginsberg, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in New York’s Lower East Side had been hosting poetry readings since at least the mid-1930s, when he first went there with his father, Louis, who was also a poet.8 The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, however, did not begin until 1966, when Harry Silverstein, a sociologist at the New School for Social Research, applied for a grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity to work with youth from New York’s Lower East Side.9 A number of poets were already meeting at St. Mark’s at the time to read their work, in particular Joel Oppenheimer and Paul Blackburn, who moved the reading series that took place at the Metro coffeehouse on Second Avenue to St. Mark’s due to problems relating to free speech.10 When the project started in 1966, Joel Oppenheimer was hired as the director of the project, and Anne Waldman (b. 1945) was hired as the assistant director.11 Waldman served as the director of the project from 1968 to 1978. According to Waldman, Ted Berrigan served on the advisory board of the project, led a writing workshop, and was unofficial “bouncer” at the church, who “reasoned patiently and convincingly with the belligerent stray or drunk who reeled into the Parish Hall.”12 Ron Padgett (b. 1942) was also very involved. He founded the Poetry Project Newsletter and also served as the director of the project.13
While St. Mark’s is often seen as being the center for a group of New York poets indebted to the example of O’Hara and Ashbery, the work of those associated with St. Mark’s is very diverse. For example, in a number of important respects, Anne Waldman’s early work is more related to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) than it is to either O’Hara’s or Ashbery’s work. In her first books of poems, for example, Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays (1976), she draws from Ginsberg’s use of repetition in the long title poem and in a great number of the shorter poems in the collection—hence the “Chants” in the subtitle. For Waldman, poetry is a kind of energy, and she associates this energy with the divine force that in Buddhism is said to underlie the material world. She writes in her essay, “ ’I Is Another’: Dissipative Structures,” which appears at the end of Fast Speaking Woman: “Poetry is a kind of siddhi (Sanskrit for accomplishment) or energy. The poems that arrive for ’performance’ (or those that have performance possibilities) seem to manifest psychological states of mind as well as states of energy. This is what attracts me so passionately to Vajrayana Buddhism, because this level of study and practice engages energy.”14
This spiritualization of energy or power is one of the aspects of Waldman’s work that shows it to be more related to that of Ginsberg and other so-called Beat poets. While the influence of O’Hara’s later poems can nevertheless be seen in some isolated poems in the volume—such as “Talking Mushrooms”—the work is a product of California, not New York. While Waldman’s second volume of poetry, Journals and Dreams (1976), which contains poems that are collages (as Waldman notes in the acknowledgments page) of phrases from her journals and travel writing, shows the influence of O’Hara and Ashbery in her use of disconnected phrases, her spacing, her personal and casual tone, and the integration of letters to friends and family members, overall the work continues Waldman’s earlier investigation into what she calls “psychological states of mind” as manifestations of the divine energy at work in the world and in the self.
In the work of Berrigan and Padgett, the influence of O’Hara is much more evident. In 1964, Ted Berrigan published his first—and, as it would turn out, most original—book of poems, The Sonnets. While the influence of O’Hara is less present in The Sonnets than in later collections, such as in Many Happy Returns (1969) and Train Ride (1971 and 1978), a number of Berrigan’s “sonnets” are nevertheless written almost entirely in the style of O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems, while others imitate O’Hara’s epistolary poems. Part of the reason that the style and diction of O’Hara’s poems are so evident in The Sonnets is that Berrigan, according to Padgett, understood himself to be following the example of “found” art in the collages of Jean Arp (1886–1966), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), Max Ernst, and Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), as well as “the heroic example” of abstract expressionist “all-over” paintings. Padgett writes: “Ted had a license to operate in this no-holds-barred manner, a license granted by Duchamp, Tzara, Arp and Ernst (and later, Burroughs); particularly Duchamp, who was like a god to us. The heroic example of Abstract Expressionism (especially de Kooning, Pollock, and Hans Hofmann) was constantly before us, with each big and exciting and “all-over.” And—to help tie it all together—hadn’t Frank O’Hara written a book on Pollock?” 15 In his “book on Pollock,” O’Hara remarks that both cubism and surrealism undermined the “post-Renaissance vision of visual structure supported by the rationalizations and syllogisms of semi-popular science” and, therefore, gained “greater liberation from the restrictions of preconceived form” and content (AC, 13). It is this liberation from “preconceived form” and content, Padgett seems to argue, that has granted Berrigan the “license” to use whatever material he wants in the creation of new artifacts.
The irony of needing a “license” to be free aside, while Berrigan is indeed indebted to O’Hara for the idea that one can include anything in a poem, no matter how corny or offensive, Berrigan’s continued use of this freedom to create works that are, in the end, very similar to O’Hara’s in terms of voice, style, and subject matter after The Sonnets is somewhat strange. As Libbie Rifkin has argued in her fascinating article on Berrigan’s poetics in Contemporary Literature: “Like many of the poets in his cohort, Berrigan’s formal experiments are best understood through their social aims and effects.”16 The main aim, for Berrigan, according to Rifkin, was to be recognized as a poet. This necessitated creating poems that, while original, embodied the accepted tenets of the particular group he hoped to join. Thus, in Berrigan, we have poetry that is written more in imitation of O’Hara’s style than out of an engagement with O’Hara’s poetics.
At times, Padgett too imitates O’Hara’s style too closely. In his first individual book of poems, Great Balls of Fire (1969), a number of the poems are clearly indebted to O’Hara. In poems such as “Careless Ape,” for example, Padgett draws from the spacing and the disconnected lines of O’Hara’s later poems, and in “Words to Joe Ceravolo” Padgett follows O’Hara in his numerous epistolary poems. Padgett draws from O’Hara’s rant poems in “You Again,” and his odes, which are far less serious than O’Hara’s odes, nevertheless evoke O’Hara’s humorous use of logical fallacies and whimsical repartees.
However, while Padgett’s work and much of his criticism is very much indebted to O’Hara, his interest in cubism distinguishes him from O’Hara in a number of important ways. For Padgett, artistic creation is primarily a form of construction. In his essay “Four French Poets and the Cubist Painters” (1983), he defines the basic elements of “cubist” poetry. It contains, he writes, “a multiplicity of viewpoints (different planes in the same poem) and shifting voices (on the same plane)” and a “play on appearance and reality” in the use of “found materials and trompe l’oeil” as well as what Padgett calls ’trompe l’esprit.’” 17 Furthermore, it creates simultaneous meanings with “fragmented syntactical arrangements” and treats “everyday objects and occurrences (including dreams)” with what Padgett calls ”a subdued palette.“18 The qualities of cubism that Padgett identifies in “Four French Poets and the Cubist Painters” can be found throughout his own work. In “16 November 1964,” for example, Padgett recounts in a few lines of poetry the elements of his day. The poem serves as an example of Padgett’s constructivist aesthetics. As he goes through his day, Padgett tells us, he encounters words and phrases that he writes down in a alphabetized “small blue notebook,” which he carries with him ”At all times, in case of emergencies.“19 As the poet comes across interesting phrases and words, he writes them down in his book:
For example, the lady and her newspaper. She wanted
To show me a headline which must have disturbed her,
Because her hand trembled as she read to me, “FIREMEN CHOP
THEIR WAY THROUGH SHED.” I thanked the lady
And started toward the stairs when I realized that
The headline she had read me was rather astonishing.
I went back inside and wrote it down.20
As he walks, he writes down the phrase “Do you realize that they are undermining your existence?” and later the phrase “Finger talk” after he meets a deaf mute who gives him a card.21 He writes: “’Who knows,’ I said to myself, ’by the end of the day I may have written a poem!’ ”22 The poem, therefore, is a narrative of Padgett’s aesthetic of using “found” words to create a poem.
At the end of the poem, however, the poet opens his book to show us the four lines of poetry he has “written down during the day.”23 What is interesting here is that the lines do not correspond to the words or lines he found earlier in the poem. They are:
This offers us the stale air of the balcony
Of the future which you don’t want or can,
Blue, marigolds, the sum of all that you love in him,
Where is it?24
On the one hand, these lines possess a number of further “cubist” qualities that Padgett notes in his essay on cubist poets. They create, for example, a number of simultaneous meanings through the use of “fragmented syntactical arrangements” and shifting voice. Everyday objects are named, but appear in a context that makes them seem strange and dreamlike. Furthermore, the fact that the words do not correspond to the lines “found” in the body of the poem corresponds to the element of surprise that one often finds in cubist paintings. The fact that the lines do not correspond to the lines “found” in the body of the poem, however, could also be understood to signal a break from cubist composition.
While it is unclear if this is how these lines should be read, there is no doubt from Padgett’s other poems that cubism is an inspirational tool he uses to create poems. He does not use a cubist aesthetic out of an ethical interest to shape present values (though it is difficult to see how this could be avoided) but out of a desire, as he notes in “Four French Poets and the Cubist Painters,” to create lines that are “lyrical, and continually fresh.”25 Thus, while Padgett differs from O’Hara in seeing poetic composition primarily in terms of cubist construction, he follows O’Hara in his understanding of the end of a poem. Furthermore, while Padgett’s poems are perhaps less “continually fresh” than he would like, he nevertheless uses this constructivist paradigm to create poems that are less derivative, and, therefore, more interesting, than Berrigan’s.
Drawing from the notion that poetic composition is a form of construction and poststructuralist theories of language, the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, beginning in the early 1970s, positioned themselves with respect to O’Hara as well. Unlike Berrigan and Padgett’s work, however, the work of these poets is very different from O’Hara’s. These poets, beginning with Clark Coolidge (b. 1939), read O’Hara as a critic of poetic voice, who rejects meaning and self-expression in favor of the free play of linguistic signifiers. In “FO’H” Notes (1978), Coolidge writes:
The secret is that flamboyance can be so exact. (discrete?) And the word “discreet” can be used for something more precise than prudence if you move one of those e’s to that end. The feeling that he must have “talked” to himself (in mind) a lot, practicing up for those brightening placements on the perfectly flowing (swaying?) page. “you go on your nerve” And he’s not afraid to include all-out rhapsody so that you titter but not out of embarrassment for his loss of possession. The lines can always be held entire. A pan-shot across gleaming NYC morning facades, which somehow stand for a completely different set of objects to be remembered, as in the mind of a mnemonist.26
Coolidge points to what he understands to be the constructed nature of O’Hara’s seemingly “perfectly flowing” phrases and the feelings to which these phrases refer. His poems, Coolidge argues, are elaborate constructions that establish O’Hara’s discreteness, or his individual voice. This voice, however, is not O’Hara’s voice. While O’Hara often claimed that his work was the result of spontaneous enunciation—going on his “nerve”—and wrote, as Koch himself notes, seemingly without premeditation, Coolidge argues that “he must have ’talked’ to himself (in mind) a lot”—hence, the numerous “perfectly flowing” phrases in his work.
To prove his point, Coolidge provides a number of such phrases that, in turn, seem to be constructed. Coolidge argues that O’Hara’s phrases seem to precede the feeling contained in them. They are not immediate expressions of feeling spontaneously produced out of the poet’s interaction with the world but rather carefully constructed lines. He uses words, Coolidge argues, to “inhabit certain points of the still world,” and it is in this space that the poet’s feelings are produced. Writing is thus a form of constructing a space in which, in the process of construction, the poet’s feelings begin to inhabit that space; and therefore it is a form of “[r]ecording in awe of what’s arriving, new to you who are speaking.”27
Up until this point, Coolidge does not so much provide a basis for a “new materialist poetics” as he reformulates O’Hara’s poetics in constructivist terms, pointing correctly to the fact that there is always an element of revision or planning in art no matter how seemingly spontaneous the final product. Yet, Coolidge’s treatment of what he calls O’Hara’s “loss of possession” in the more rhapsodic moments in his poems belies an uneasiness in Coolidge with respect to O’Hara’s view of poetic voice as a form of “self-declaration” (CP, 310).28 On two occasions in Coolidge’s short creative piece, he refers to the possible embarrassment of O’Hara’s rhapsodic moments in his poems, moments when O’Hara becomes preoccupied with his feelings to such an extent that he seems unaware of the fact that the construct of the poem is itself the cause of these feelings. In the section quoted above, for example, Coolidge writes, “[H]e’s not afraid to include all-out rhapsody so that you titter,” but is quick to add, “but not out of embarrassment for his loss of possession. The lines can always be held entire.”29 Furthermore, at the end of the piece, Coolidge writes: “His poems, almost embarrassingly these days (In Favor of One’s Time), remind of the velocity of inspiration, or is it aspiration, everything following in its arrangement outward until it’s all exhausted. A definite bonus that he never knows when to stop.”30 While Coolidge admits that O’Hara’s preoccupation with his own feelings in his poems seems somewhat embarrassing, he tries to reassure his readers that this “velocity of inspiration” is staged.31
Following Coolidge, Charles Bernstein offers an explanation of what he calls Frank O’Hara’s “achievement” in his essay “Stray Straws and Straw Men.” It resides, Bernstein claims, in how O’Hara has “fronted” the notion of “naturalness.”32 For Bernstein, naturalness is the use of personal subject matter and a certain kind of syntax and diction that makes the events of the poem, and the “voice” of the poet, seem “authentic.”33 For Bernstein, however, there is no such thing as a “natural” or “authentic” language. These notions, he claims in “Three or Four Things I Know about Him,” which is the opening piece of Content’s Dream (1986), are the impositions of an “imperialistic” bourgeoisie that enforce things such as a “standardized spelling” and grammar as a means of enforcing a view of language as a representational tool, and, in turn, a view of the real world as “suprapersonal” and extralinguistic.34 It is in removing language from the “participatory control of its users” that “the state” legitimizes capitalistic ideology as natural.35 He writes:
Imperial reality has as its essential claim not so much that it is a version of reality but that it is the version, i.e., (imperially) clear. That the composition of reality is suprapersonal: the mistakes & plain takes of a person are not an essential part of reality’s composition. Standardized spelling, layout, & punctuation enter into a world of standardization—clocks & the orbit of the moon & the speed of light. A social science epistemologically self-conceived on the model of the natural sciences becomes possible & grammar becomes a social science. Language is thus removed from the participatory control of its users & delivered into the hands of the state.36
For Bernstein, “modern” poets have responded to the imposition of this supposed “suprapersonal” reality by reasserting the value of the “subjective” in various radical linguistic experiments. While subjectivity is defined in the current bourgeois state as that which is opposed to its version of the real world—as mere “fumbling clouds of vision that are to be dissolved by learning”—so-called modern artistic experiments (Bernstein refers to surrealism and the Beats) have defined “subjectivity in a sort of Nietzschean reversal, not as ’mere’ but as exalted.” 37 This, however, Bernstein claims, has not reversed subjectivity’s marginalization, but, in some respects, provided justification for it by making the imposed ideological distinction between the objective real world and our subjective experience of it seem all the more natural. 38
In “Stray Straws and Straw Men,” Bernstein sees O’Hara’s accomplishment as slightly above that of the surrealists and the Beats. For while O’Hara, too, is preoccupied with the events of his personal life in his poems, Bernstein notes that O’Hara’s work “proposes a domain of the personal” and “not simply assuming it, fully works it out.”39 This, however, is not enough. What O’Hara fails to do, according to Bernstein, and what he implies he in fact accomplishes in his own work, is to show how personal feelings and poetic voice are always constructed. In the end, O’Hara does not “front” naturalness enough.40
While Bernstein argues that the constructed nature of experience must always be established in a poem, this does not mean, he claims, that the poem is always about the act of writing alone, or that the feelings or the events of the poem cannot be experienced as real. He writes: “ ’But can I actually experience it?’ Yes. But it reveals the conditions of its occurrence at the same time as it is experienced. So I don’t feel a part of it as much as facing it.... Of course at times you forget. All of a sudden a few hours, a week, flash by before you actually notice, & you say to yourself ’how the time slips—[.]’ ”41 In other words, for Bernstein, while one can experience the feelings or events of a poem as natural or real, such an experience necessitates that the reader “forget” that such feelings and events are constructed. Thus, the emotive effect of the poem is, in the end, dependent on the reader’s suspension of disbelief.
Bob Perelman understands O’Hara’s accomplishment in terms similar to those of Bernstein. In “A False Account of Talking with Frank O’Hara and Roland Barthes in Philadelphia,” Perelman, following perhaps Ron Silliman’s (b. 1946) criticism of Barthes’s idealization of the reader (which, in turn, functions to replace the absent author in Barthes’s hermeneutic), uses O’Hara to call into question Barthes’s idealized reader, and Barthes to criticize what Perelman sees to be O’Hara’s failure to “front” (to borrow Bernstein’s word) poetic voice.42 While Perelman represents O’Hara as being aware of the constructed nature of poetic voice, he points to what he believes is O’Hara’s failure to follow such a notion to its logical conclusions. For example, while Perelman, referring to “Personism,” imagines O’Hara to state, “I hated poetic phrases,” and has him scold Barthes for taking his use of the word “jolly” in “The Critic” (1951) literally. (He has O’Hara say, “Ah, Sir Roland, when I write it, you mustn’t take ’jolly’ to mean jolly. But perhaps your appetite for falseness was different from mine. All my words were as false as false eyelashes: but of course I’m looking directly at you when I say them.”) But he depicts O’Hara as conflicted in his actual practice.43 Furthermore, when Perelman has O’Hara read “Heroic Sculpture” (1958), he presents him as somewhat embarrassed at the serious tone of the poem and its lack of “fronting”: “ ’Wait! How about this? We join the animals not when we fuck or shit not when tear falls but when staring into the light....’ O’Hara inserted a thin pause. ”... we think. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t buy it myself. David Smith made me say it.“44
The “thin pause,” which provides the final lines with a serious, important tone, is something that O’Hara both likes and dislikes, and Perelman very humorously presents O’Hara as subject to losing “possession” of himself—to forgetting that the feelings presented in the poem are, in fact, constructs of the poem itself.45
Elsewhere, Perelman uses Barthes to call into question what Perelman believes to be O’Hara’s uncritical understanding of poetic diction. For example, Barthes interrupts O’Hara’s reading of “A Step Away from Them” with the remark: “Languorously agitating: Frank, I detect a poetic phrase—even an elaborately sounded structure.”46 O’Hara, preoccupied, misses the jibe. He responds: “It is nice, isn’t it?” and continues reading. This, in the end, is Perelman’s criticism of O’Hara. While Perelman understands O’Hara to be aware of the constructed nature of poetic diction, he was unable to follow those presuppositions to their logical conclusions. “That’s why” Perelman states in his own voice and with a bit of self-aggrandizement, “neither of you were language writers.”47
As interesting as it is, this implicit identification of O’Hara by Bernstein and Perelman as a forerunner of their own poetics is, it seems to me, based on a misunderstanding of his work. Both Bernstein and Perelman take certain statements in O’Hara’s work—statements such as “the clear architecture of the nerves” and his remarks on mechanics in “Personism”—as pointing to a poststructuralist understanding of feeling and the self as constructed. Yet, such an understanding of O’Hara’s poetics does not square with O’Hara’s view of artistic creation as a form of expression and his understanding of poetry as a form of “self-declaration” in addition to its being a form of reinvigorating our experience of the world (CP, 310).
O’Hara is aware of the fact that artistic creation is always, to some extent, a form of construction. In “Post the Lake Poets Ballad” (1959), for example, in which O’Hara responds to Larry Rivers’s letter accusing him of “gorgeous self-pity,” O’Hara writes:
that is odd I think of myself
as a cheerful type who pretends to
be hurt to get a little depth into
things that interest me
and I’ve even given that up
lately with the stream of events
going so fast and the movingly
alternating with the amusingly
(CP, 336)
Rather than dramatized self-pity, which, it seems, is what Rivers refers to with the adjective “gorgeous,” O’Hara argues that while his poems are indeed full of staged hurts, he uses them not as an end in themselves, but to add emotional weight to “things that interest” him. The fact that the title of the poem evokes the Lyrical Ballads (1798) underscores O’Hara’s point that the moments of feelings in his poems are, at least in part, staged, though not, he hopes, melodramatic. It is interesting to note, however, that in the second section O’Hara turns and claims to have even given up such staging because of the speed of life. He does not have the time, he claims, to stage, much less dramatize, self-pity. The best he can do, he implies, is transcribe “the movingly / alternating with the amusingly” (CP, 336). The “movingly” and “amusingly” are instances of experience that exists at the moment of the self’s contact with the world and are the “facts” of the self prior to the poet’s naming of them; and it is this effort to name them—an effort that O’Hara viewed as always imperfect and temporal—that poetry is, in addition to a form of reinvigorating our experience of the world, a form and a never-ending testament of the self.
In this connection, Kenneth Koch’s evaluation of O’Hara’s accomplishment seems to be the most accurate. In “All the Imagination Can Hold (The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara),” Koch writes:
Frank O’Hara’s work has already influenced a generation of younger poets; some of those who are not poets may find it hard to judge the importance of what he has done when critics so often mistake solemnity for seriousness, obscurity for profundity, and the expression of pain for intensity of feeling. O’Hara’s poems are buoyant, exuberant, wild, personal, open in troubling and troublesome ways, sometimes humorous, often about seemingly ordinary or trivial things, and radically original in form. They are the result of an unfamiliar aesthetic assumption: that what is really there, in the poet’s thoughts, fantasies, and feelings, is what is richest in possibility and worth the most attention.48
What Koch points to here is that O’Hara’s valuing of actual feelings and not mere mechanical innovation is what makes his work so valuable. Responding in many ways to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets’ criticism before that criticism had even been formulated, Koch continues: “In a book of twenty or thirty poems, certain of Frank O’Hara’s subjects (lunch, movies) could seem trivial and willful because chosen at the expense of others; in this book of five hundred poems what strikes one is the breadth, sincerity, and exuberance of his concern for life. At first overwhelming, it is also liberating: by caring so much for so many things, he gives us back feelings of our own and permits us to respect them.”49
It is important to note that Koch does not reject the notion that O’Hara’s poems create feelings; however, O’Hara does not restrict his poems, as Bernstein does his, for example, to nothing but this notion. Noting the fact that O’Hara wrote quickly in order to capture a feeling “while it [was] really there and still taking place,” Koch writes: “There is a difference between a feeling seized rapidly, while it’s happening, or while it’s being created (for his poems create feelings as much as they expose them) and feeling considered in any other way. In catching a feeling in the process of coming into being, or as it first explodes into a thousand refractions, one can hope to reveal some of the truth that lies hidden in our unconscious, in all the things we have known and felt but can’t be aware of simultaneously.”50 While Koch is too quick to take O’Hara’s claim at face value and is incorrect to claim that O’Hara was concerned with discovering some hidden “truth” in the unconscious, it is true that the expression of his feelings in his poems does indeed propose certain truths about the world—the principal one being, as Koch himself notes at the outset of his review, that feelings are the irreducible building blocks of the self.51
His reading, therefore, of poems such as “Easter” and Second avenue differs from that of later critics in his understanding that these poems were far from mere constructs or confections. Noting that “Easter” “burst on us all like a bomb,” Koch continues:
I remember two things about it which were new: one was the phrase “the roses of Pennsylvania,” and the other was the line in the middle of the poem which began “It is Easter!” ... What I saw in these lines was 1) inspired irrelevance which turns out to be relevant (once Frank had said “It is Easter!” the whole poem was obviously about death and resurrection); 2) the use of movie techniques in poetry (in this case coming down hard on the title in the middle of a work); 3) the detachment of beautiful words from traditional contexts and putting them in curious new American ones (“roses of Pennsylvania”).52 Koch notes that the words O’Hara included in his poems were not so much constructions as they were names for O’Hara’s passions and, thus, a form of affirming these passions as not trivial, but real.53
Two poets that have followed O’Hara in his effort to use his personal experience of the world in his work to create poems that are, in turn, independent objects are David Shapiro and James Tate. As Thomas Fink points out in his excellent study of Shapiro’s work, his poems are neither instances of seamless “confession” nor instances of mere formal play, but rather end products of a process of creation that are dependent upon (without being reduced to) the personal subject matter out of which they are created.54 Fink writes: “In many of Shapiro’s poems, one can interpret the use of what the Russian Formalists called ’de-familiarization’ as a resistance to the degraded language of false collectivity (conformism) that characterizes much mass communication and the pronouncements of those in the American political establishment. The experimental poet creates a ’pocket’ of freedom by expanding both the possibilities of personal expression and shared linguistic experience.”55 While Fink does not refer to O’Hara as a possible source of Shapiro’s interest in Russian formalism or in the use of poetry to expand language’s expressive possibilities, these are, of course, touchstones of O’Hara’s verse.
Shapiro, furthermore, shares O’Hara’s interest in narrative in his “I do this I do that” poems. Shapiro’s use of what Fink calls with respect to A Burning Interior (2002) an “uncanny narrative,” which, in turn, holds his poems together, maintains a place for an identifiable voice.56 Shapiro recognizes that it is impossible to escape narrative, and, therefore, poetic voice, in lyrical poetry. In a 1990 interview with Joseph Lease, for example, he states, “I think if you’re going to give up one form of storytelling you’re going to have to do it another way.”57 Fisk correctly points out that Shapiro’s stance for narrative is, perhaps, a more convincing treatment of the question of the relationship between voice and language than those that have followed Bernstein and Perelman.
In January (1965), for example, while Shapiro narrates recognizable events in the fist person, events that provide the context and the occasion for the expression of emotion or feeling in the poems, he uses the absurd and parataxis to prevent the meaning of the poem from being reduced to the meaning of the words themselves. “From Travel,” for example, is a poem that is about the fear of oblivion and stasis, of losing one’s location in time and space. However, rather than speaking to us, the “I” of the poem addresses the wind, following the example of O’Hara in “Les Etiquettes Jaunes” (1950) and “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” (1958) in which the poet in a sort of panic addresses the material world:
Look, wind, I have run out of motion.
The four animals who wanted me now refuse
to have me; now that they have caught me,
and I seemed so desirable when I was running away.
The city limits are a kind of new dream for me.
I used to think a few blocks meant the country.58
Again, following O’Hara, the paradox of desire for Shapiro is that it is characterized by a constant yearning to possess someone or something, a yearning that then disappears once the person or thing is possessed. In this case, however, the poet himself is the possessed, and the lack of desire for him he sees in others (now that he has been “caught” by them) precipitates a loss of sense of self. As the poem progresses, the paranoia of losing one’s sense of self is expressed without the poem becoming a sort of confessional diatribe. The absurd element of the poet addressing the wind, the disconnected narrative, and the shifting voice of the poem work both to undermine our ability to reduce the poem to a mere confession and to express the slipping into oblivion itself. The short, direct, simple statements, furthermore, can be read with a certain amount of quickness. This expresses the poet’s sense of franticness and is a means of preventing the slide into oblivion itself by keeping the poem “moving,” so to speak. In this way, the poem embodies O’Hara’s idea that art is a “barrier against death” (EW, 106). Though Shapiro, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Ashbery at Columbia, is, January, very much influenced by Ashbery’s cool, meditative tone, he nevertheless mixes seemingly personal experiences with an “uncanny narrative” to create poems that have an effect similar to that of O’Hara’s work. While Shapiro’s later work has become less personal and less immediate, he continues to maintain a space for poetic voice in his work while, at the same time, retaining his formalist understanding of the end of poetry.
James Tate, too, follows O’Hara in a number of important respects. In his first volume of poetry, The Lost Pilot (1967), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, Tate draws from the events of his life but presents them in a form that prevents us from reducing the words of the poem to a mere statement of confession. Using the absurd (which increases the gap between the “I” of the poet and the “I” of the poem in lyric poetry), Tate, like O’Hara, forces us to look at the words and form of the poem as the principal object of experience, while, at the same time, maintaining a tone and style that are personal and accessible. The events are recognizable, which helps to maintain the poem’s relevance to the actual world. For example, in “Epithala-mion for Tyler” (1968), a poem that could easily slide down the slippery slope of confessionalism, Tate keeps poetic image and form at the center of the poem through the absurd element of it:
I thought I knew something
about loneliness but
you go to the stockyards
buy a pig’s ear and sew
it on your couch. That, you
said, is my best friend—we
have spirited talks. Even
then I thought: a man of
such exquisite emptiness
(and you cultivated it so)
is ground for fine flowers.59
From the opening section, the poet both asserts and retracts the fact that he knows “something about loneliness.” While the opening line implies that he does indeed know “something about loneliness,” even if it is asserted in the negative form, this is compared to the unidentified interlocutor’s “loneliness,” which far surpasses that of the poet’s loneliness and which is imaged by the pig’s ear attached to the couch. The pathetic nature of this image at first underscores the depth of loneliness experienced by this unidentified interlocutor. However, the poet subtly undermines this image by implying that it is an exaggeration, “cultivated” by the interlocutor to look “exquisite.” It is possible, furthermore, that the absurd image of the pig’s ear attached to the couch could be a metaphor for confessional poems, which are the “fine flowers” of a “cultivated” emptiness—beautiful but superficial. If this is the case, it is ironic that Tate uses the image to avoid writing about his own loneliness—a loneliness that, if this reading of the poem is correct, is the more authentic.
While he does not note the influence of O’Hara, Brian Henry correctly notes that Tate’s fascination with the absurd is, in part, a reaction against stasis and death.60 According to Henry, Tate’s use of monologues and sometimes surreal transitions “illuminates the flux of a person’s thinking.”61 The goal, Henry argues, “is not a well-wrought urn but a constant movement within language.”62 This constant shifting of voice is one of the hallmarks of The Lost Pilot, according to Mark Ford, who argues that “goofy anecdotes, surreal lyrics, and metaphysical meditations are all characterized by a treacherous instability; at any moment the poem may succumb to the arbitrary dictates of some unfathomable syntax, and what appeared to be solid ground proves merely quicksand.”63 The results, according to Ford, are poems that are, on the one hand, grounded in the voice of the poet, and, on the other hand, strangely impersonal.64
In his work after The Lost Pilot, Tate continues to mix seemingly personal experiences with absurd images, a shifting voice, and parataxis. His tone, however, becomes both lighter and darker at the same time; through this the poet, following O’Hara, expresses a sort of humorous malaise. In “Poem (High in Hollywood Hills a door opens)” from Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970), for example, Tate writes, “O Desire! it is the beautiful dress // for which the proper occasion / never arises,” and in “Crytozoa” from the same collection he writes, “I wish the stone lady would come home. / Parakeet or no parakeet / the night is a vial of lighterfluid.”65 Furthermore, in “Poem (I can’t speak for the wind)” from Viper Jazz (1972), the poet compares himself to “a double-agent who tortures himself / and still will not speak.”66 In all of these examples, Tate mixes absurd images and literary references (such as the possible reference to Wide Sargasso Sea [1966] in “Crytozoa”) with experiences from his personal life using parataxis and a shifting voice in an effort to use his life to create poems that, in O’Hara’s words, are “all art” (CP, 499).
Thus, while Berrigan follows O’Hara in his understanding of artistic creation as a form of expression, and Bernstein and Silliman follow O’Hara in his “fronting” of poetic language, Shapiro and Tate draw from both of these aspects of O’Hara’s work; and, in the end, it is this tension between poetry as a form of expression, coupled with elements of construction, and O’Hara’s emphasis on the effects of the completed work that most distinguishes his poetics. O’Hara’s work continues to influence new generations of poets. There are residues of O’Hara in the casual persona of Jon Anderson’s Death and Friends (1970) and In Sepia (1974), the urban surrealism of Denis Johnson’s The Incognito Lounge (1994), and the wry political commentary of Stephen Paul Miller’s Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam (1992) and Skinny Eighth Avenue (2005), as well as the work of Mark Ford (b. 1962).
O’Hara’s deep commitment to poetry itself allowed him to create a body of work that may indeed continue to influence poets for years to come. His hope that his work, like that of Gustave Courbet’s, might bend “the ear of the outer world” has, in some respects, been fulfilled.