Gilbert Sorrentino, “The New Note,” in Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City, ed. Scott Elledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 15.
Herbert Leibowitz, “A Pan Piping on the City Streets: The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara,” in Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City, ed. Scott Elledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 24.
Thomas Byrom, review of Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters, by Marjorie Perloff; Early Writing, by Frank O’Hara; and Poems Retrieved, by Frank O’Hara, Times Literary Supplement, January 27, 1978, 78.
Marjorie Perloff, “New Threshold, Old Anatomies: Contemporary Poetry and the Limits of Exegesis,” lowa Review 5, no. 1 (1974): 89.
David LeHardy Sweet, Savage Sight / Constructed Noise: Poetic Adaptations of Painterly Techniques in the French and American Avant-Gardes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 186.
To note but a few examples: Bruce Boone examines the notion of “textuality” in O’Hara’s work based on “critical” definitions of that notion in the work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Frederic Jameson in a 1979 piece for the inaugural issue of Social Text; Mutlu Konuk Blasing relies heavily on Derrida’s “La parole soufflée” in a 1982 article on O’Hara for Contemporary Literature; John Lowney uses Jameson’s theories on “pastiche” in his 1991 essay on O’Hara in Contemporary Literature; and in PMLA Gregory W. Bredbeck couples O’Hara and Barthes in a 1993 essay on what he calls “homosexual semiotics.” See Bruce Boone, “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O’Hara,” Social Text 1 (1979): 59–92; Mutlu Konuk Blasing, “Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of Speech: The Example of ’Biotherm,’ Contemporary Literature 23, no. 1 (1982): 52–64; John Lowney, “The ’Post-Anti-Esthetic’ Poetics of Frank O’Hara,” Contemporary Literature 32, no. 2 (1991): 244–64; and Gregory W. Bredbeck, “B/O-Barthes’s Text / O’Hara’s Trick,” PMLA 108, no. 2 (1993): 268–82. In addition to these articles there is the critical work of the “L=A=N=-G =U=A=G=E” poets, in particular that of Charles Bernstein (b. 1940) and Bob Perelman (b. 1947), who treat the link between O’Hara’s work and poststructuralism as a given. See Charles Bernstein, “Stray Straws, Straw Men,” in Content’s Dream (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1986), 40-49; Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Despite this, and somewhat strangely, Lytle Shaw claims in his introductory chapter to Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006) that the “interpretive language” that currently “constitutes the field” in O’Hara criticism is the application of O’Hara’s own words in texts such as “Personism.” See Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 10-11. The example he cites to prove his point, however, is Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur, eds., Homage to Frank O’Hara, (Bolinas, CA: Big Sky, 1978), 23839 n. 13. It is important to note that this volume, published over twenty years ago, was not edited by critics but by two of O’Hara’s friends; and instead of critical appraisals of O’Hara’s works, it contains a mix of poems, letters, memories, and reviews written by O’Hara’s friends and acquaintances to commemorate O’Hara’s death. Shaw is right, of course, that the book is both “rich and frustrating” (Shaw, Frank O’Hara, 11). However, it is hardly an example of the approach to O’Hara’s work that has held court over the past twenty years.
Hazel Smith, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: Difference/Homosexuality /Topography (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 9, 1.
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 1.
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 26; Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crisis in Poetry,” in Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, ed., and trans. Bardford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 38.
Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, trans. Peter Read (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 35-36.
Sweet, Savage Sight, 44-48.
Perloff runs into a similar problem in her use of “surface” and “indeterminacy” in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). As Paul Breslin notes in an insightful review of the book: ”There is some sliding in Perloff’s use of the word ’indeterminacy.’ At times it refers to a severance of correspondences: instead of referring the surface of a text to a ’deeper’ meaning behind it, as we do in interpreting a Symbolist poem, we must stop at the surface. This metaphor of surface and depth obscures the fact that there are more than two levels of correspondence in question: the correspondence of words to concepts, of concepts to states of affairs, and of states of affairs themselves to some implied spiritual state of which they are Eliotic ’objective correlatives.’ ... Such distinctions would have provided a way of explaining the obvious differences among Perloff’s indeter-minist writers, and they would have allowed a more rigorous definition of the senses in which a work can and cannot be ’indeterminate.’” Paul Breslin, review of The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, by Marjorie Perloff, Modern Philology 81, no. 3 (1984): 336.
Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 14-15.
Hans Hofmann, The Search for the Real and Other Essays, ed. Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 45.
Hans Hofmann, “The Color Problem in Pure Painting—Its Creative Origin,” in Hans Hofmann: A Retrospective, ed. Karen Wilken (New York: George Braziller, 2003), 40-42.
Sweet, Savage Sight, 15.
For more on Salutati’s definition of poeticum narrationem, see Alan Fisher, “Three Meditations on the Destruction of Vergil’s Statue: The Early Humanist Theory of Poetry,” Renaissance Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 609-10; and Richard Waswo, “The ’Autonomy of Art’ Is a Wish, Not a Fact,” Criticism 22, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 350.
Robert Goodnough, “Pollock Paints a Picture,” ArtNews 50, no. 3 (May 1951): 60; Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” ArtNews 51, no. 8 (December 1952): 22.
There have, of course, been a few studies that have compared O’Hara’s work with the work of other poets. James E. B. Breslin examines O’Hara in the context of the “modern” lyric in his excellent From Modern to Contemporary (1983), and Geoff Ward treats O’Hara in the context of other New York poets such as Ashbery and Koch in Statues of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (London: Palgrave 1993). While these are very helpful studies of O’Hara’s style, each devotes but one chapter to O’Hara. Other works that examine O’Hara’s style with respect to other poets are histories, such as David Perkins’ two-volume A History of Modern Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1976, 1987), the Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), edited by Emory Elliot, and The Cambridge History of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994–2004), edited by Sacvan Bercovitch. As helpful as the histories are, in the end they are too predetermined by the period terms “modern” and “postmodern,” which juxtapose the “personal” and “spontaneous” writing style of so-called postmodern poets such as O’Hara against the “academic” writing style of so-called modern poets. How O’Hara might be unlike other “postmodern” poets and how he might be similar to “modern” ones is rarely explored in detail in such histories, because it is excluded a priori by the logic of the period term paradigm. For more on the problems of period terms with respect to O’Hara’s work, see Micah Mattix, “Periodization and Difference,” New Literary History 35, no. 4 (2004): 685–97. As Keith Waldrop eloquently puts it in The Locality Principle (Berkeley, CA: Avec Books, 1995), “The past lies in layers, not neatly in calendar years, but folded over sometimes like earth strata—uneven” (ibid., 66). To assume otherwise—to cut up the past into neat calendar years, or period terms—is to be blind to the inherent “messiness” of the past.
Charles Altieri, Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979), 78.
Ibid., 116.
Apollinaire, Cubist Painters, 38.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid.
Ibid., 20, 39–40.
Apollinaire writes, for example, that “Picasso studies an object like a surgeon dissecting a corpse” and that in order to re-create the human figure in his work, Picasso had to “assassinate himself as scientifically and methodically as a great surgeon” (ibid., 13, 38).
See, for example, Ronald Bush, “Art versus the Descent of the Iconoclasts: Cultural Memory in Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” in American Poetry: Whitman to the Present, ed. Robert Rehder and Patrick Vincent Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature (SPELL) 18, (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2006), 87-112.
Werner Spies, “An Open-Ended Oeuvre,” in Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism, trans. John Gabriel, ed. Simon Haviland (Munich: Prestel Verlag and the Menil Collection, 1993), 27.
Ibid.
Eberhard Fisch, “Guernica” by Picasso: A Study of the Picture and Its Context, trans. James Hotchkiss (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1988), 22-23.
Pablo Picasso, Picasso in His Words, trans. and ed. Hiro Clark (San Francisco: Collins Publishers, 1993), 39.
Ibid.
Paul Klee, Paul Klee on Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay, ed. Herbert Read (London : Faber and Faber, 1949), 51.
Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye, trans. Ralph Manheim, ed. Jurg Spiller (New York: George Wittenborn, 1961), 17.
Edward Brown tells the story of Mayakovsky’s last public appearance, which was a poetry reading at the Plekhanov Auditorium of the Institute of the National Economy in Moscow. Following the reading of a poem that, given its paean to communism, should have caused little problem, Mayakovsky entered into a long debate with the audience with respect to the use of harsh language in poetry and obscure imagery, among other things. The night ended with students questioning Mayakovsky’s communist commitments. He shot himself five days later. Edward J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 12–26.
Angela Livingstone, introduction to Pasternak on Art and Creativity, ed. Angela Livingstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2.
Marina Tsvetaeva, “Art in the Light of Conscience,” in Modern Russian Poets on Poetry, trans. Angela Livingstone and V. S. Coe, ed. Carl R. Proffer (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1976), 148.
Karmel, Picasso, 4.
Sweet, Savage Sight, 200.
For more on dolls in Rilke, see Eva-Maria Simms, “Uncanny Dolls: Images of Death in Rilke and Freud,” New Literary History 27, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 663-77.
Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 14, 124.
Sweet, Savage Sight, 200. It is worth noting that O’Hara’s corrective perhaps applies to more than just the surrealists. As Jeff Encke notes, the line, for example, also evokes the opening quote from Yeats’s Responsibilities (1914), “In dreams begins responsibility,” which Yeats attributes to an “old play,” as well as Delmore Schwartz’s book of short stories In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, published in 1938. Jeff Encke, “Why I Am Not a Manifestor: Postwar Avant-Gardism and the Manifestos of Frank O’Hara,” Octopus Magazine 3 (2003)) http://www.octopusmagazine.com/ issue03/ encke_ohara.html; William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996), 100; Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1978). James Logenbach remarks that the source of Yeats’s quote is, in fact, Nietzsche. James Logenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 159. Though Logenbach does not specify where in Nietzsche, it is likely that it is Nietzsche’s remark on dreams in The Dawn of Day (1881), “You would wish to be responsible for everything except your dreams! What miserable weakness, what lack of logical courage! Nothing contains more of your own work than your dreams! Nothing belongs to you so much! Substance, form, duration, actor, spectator—in these comedies you act as your complete selves!” Frederick Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day, trans. J. M. Kennedy, vol. 9 of The Complete Works of Frederick Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 131–32.
Livingstone, introduction, 3–4.
Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct: An Early Autobiography, and Other Works, trans. Beatrice Scott (New York: New Directions, 1958), 30–31.
Eudo Mason, Rilke (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1963), 66.
Livingstone, introduction, 16.
William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1991), 2:54.
Apollinaire, Cubist Painters, 39.
That O’Hara disagreed with his real father regarding the extent to which we can make sense of death is clear in his poem “To My Dead Father” (1953) in which O’Hara asks his father not to insist “that I be other than your / strange son understanding / minor miracles not death” (CP, 161).
As an aside, this an important corrective to Lytle Shaw’s claim that O’Hara is preoccupied in his poems with establishing an alternative “kinship structure.” We find the poet here imaginatively reconciling himself to his father by becoming, in a common literary trope, the child-parent to his biological father (Shaw, Frank O’Hara, 6, 19).
In his Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, Joe LeSueur, on more than one occasion, attributes to O’Hara an almost heroic confidence in his own greatness. Joseph LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), xxv. From his poems, however, we know that he often experienced his share of self-doubt. For example, in “At Joan’s” (1959), O’Hara writes: “I sit at the marble top / sorting poems, miserable / the little lamp flows feebly / I don’t glow at all.” And in “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul” (1959), he writes: “it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night / wondering whether you are any good or not / and the only decision you can make is that you did it” (CP, 327, 328).
Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 242.
Quoted in Mason, Rilke, 40; quoted in Livingstone, introduction, 12.
Frank O’Hara, “Paul Klee,” ArtNews 53, no. 1 (March 1954): 41.
Karmel, Picasso, 8-9.
Frank O’Hara, “Cubism to 1918,” ArtNews 52, no. 9 (January 1954): 65.
, Frank O’Hara, “George Hartigan,” ArtNews 52, no. 10 (February 1954): 45.
Frank O’Hara, “Three Sculptors,” ArtNews 52, no. 8 (December 1953): 42.
Frank O’Hara, “Bennett Bradbury,” ArtNews 52, no. 8 (December 1953): 65.
Frank O’Hara, “Miles Forst,” ArtNews 53, no. 3 (May 1954): 43.
Koch writes: “Frank and I both wrote long poems in 1953 (Second Avenue and When the Sun Tries to Go On). I had no clear intention of writing a 2400-line poem (which it turned out to be) before Frank said to me, on seeing the first 72 lines—which I regarded as a poem by itself—’Why don’t you go on with it as long as you can?’ Frank at this time decided to write a long poem too; I can’t remember how much his decision to write such a poem had to do with his suggestion to me to write mine. While we were writing our long poems, we would read each other the results daily over the telephone. This seemed to inspire us a good deal.” Kenneth Koch, “A Note on Frank O’Hara in the Early Fifties,” in Homage to Frank O’Hara, ed. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur (Bolinas, CA: Big Sky, 1978), 27.
John Ashbery claims, for example, that while Second Avenue is a useful experiment in attempting “to plot a not-yet-existent tradition with reference to what it was and what it wasn’t,” it is ultimately an unsatisfactory poem because of obfuscation (CP, ix). It “would not be necessary,” Ashbery concludes, for O’Hara to make such an attempt again (CP, ix). Marjorie Perloff makes a similar, though more nuanced, remark when she writes that after Second Avenue, “O’Hara begins to put what we might call ’straight Surrealism’ behind him” (FOH, 74). While she identifies a number of aspects of the poem that are clearly not surrealistic, Perloff, following Ashbery, nevertheless concludes that “[i]n the poems of 1954-1961, O’Hara’s great period, we can no longer identify the echoes of Péret or Tzara or Desnos as readily; Surrealism has now been assimilated into an American idiom” (FOH, 74). O’Hara’s “great period,” as Perloff calls it, is the period in which he wrote the majority of what he calls his “I do this I do that” poems, in which he wrote in a direct and personal tone of the seeming insignificant details of a particular day.
Frank O’Hara to Barney Rosset, February 29, 1956.
Sweet, Savage Sight, 183.
For more on O’Hara’s notion of free choice, see Michael Clune, “ ’Everything We Want’: Frank O’Hara and the Aesthetics of Free Choice,” PMLA 120, no. 1 (January 2005): 181–96.
Jeffrey Wechsler, Surrealism and American Art, 1931–1947, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Art Gallery, 1976), 54–56.
Ibid., 63.
Robert Motherwell, “The Modern Painter’s World,” in The Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Dore Ashton (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 33.
Robert Hobbs, “Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism: From Psychic to Plastic Automatism,” in Surrealism USA, ed. Isabelle Dervaux (New York: National Academy Museum, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005), 59–60.
Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Harper, 1994), 206.
John Milton, The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (New York: Penguin, 1998), 21.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Peter J. Sheehan, “Crane’s ’Moment Fugue,’” The Explicator 31 (1978): 151.
Hart Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Letters, ed. Langdon Hammer (New York: Library of America, 2006), 87.
In Song of Myself, Whitman writes: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold Blodgett (New York: New York University Press, 1965), lines 1324–26.
Mary McCarthy, “A Prince of Shreds and Patches,” in Focus on Shakespearean Films, ed. Charles W. Eckert (New York: Prentice Hall, 1972), 66.
Gregory Machacek, “Allusion,” PMLA 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 530.
Paul Goodman, “Advance-Guard Writing, 1900–1950,” Kenyon Review 13, no. 3 (Summer 1951): 375–76.
Williams, Collected Poems, 2:202
Ibid., 1:203.
James E. B. Breslin, “Frank O’Hara,” in Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City, ed. Jim Elledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 261.
Peter Halter, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 61.
Breslin, “Frank O’Hara,” 262.
Ibid., 260.
Ibid., 262.
Ibid.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 44–45.
Ibid., 22–23.
Gooch, City Poet, 327.
Ibid.
Ibid., 328.
Goodman, “Advance-Guard Writing,” 375.
Mutlu Konuk Blasing, The Art of Life: Studies in American Autobiographical Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 147, 151.
Eric Mottram, “Frank O’Hara,” in American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, ed. Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 149–51.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1:304.
While O’Hara’s hiding behind a tree, rejecting his parental lineage, is evocative of D. W. Winnicott’s later theories regarding the movement from nonself to self and the relationship between play and the self, his most well known works on the subject were first published after 1964. While Winnicott published a number of reviews and articles in specialized journals and his early Critical Notes on Disorders of Childhood in 1931, O’Hara is unlikely to have read any of these. For more on Winnicott, see Michael Jacobs, D. W. Winnicott (London: Sage, 1995), 146–47.
Frederick Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism, trans. William A. Haussman, vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Frederick Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 27.
Christoph Cox, “Nietzsche, Dionysus, and the Ontology of Music,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 500.
Adrian Del Caro, “Nietzschean Self-Transformation and the Transformation of the Dionysian,” in Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, and Daniel W. Conway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 71.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1957), 23.
Victor Lowe, Understanding Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), 17.
Ibid.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 28.
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 26.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. A. Poulin Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), 22.
Eugène Loudun, the pseudonym of Eugène Balleyquier, a frequent contributor of reviews to various art journals of the time, wrote this, for example, of Courbet’s L’atelier: “What M. Courbet is looking for is the representation of people as they are, as ugly and as gross as he encounters them; in fact, the commoner they are the more he is attracted to the painting of them, it is one reason more; but everything is at the end of his brush, there is nothing generous, nothing lofty, nothing moral in the head which guides his hand; he invents nothing, has no imagination.” Quoted in Bernard Goldman, “Realist Iconography: Intent and Criticism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 18, no. 2 (1959): 186.
O’Hara wrote “In Memory of My Feelings” on what he thought was his thirtieth birthday. Twenty years after his death it was discovered that O’Hara was, in fact, born on March 27, 1926 rather than on June 27, the day which he had celebrated as his birthday his entire life. Russell Joseph O’Hara and Katherine Broderick, O’Hara’s parents, married on September 14, 1925; then moved to Baltimore, where Katherine gave birth to O’Hara six months later, and only returned to Grafton after O’Hara was two years old (Gooch, City Poet, 14–15).
See FOH, 210 n. 7.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University Press of New York Press, 1996), 120.
Gooch, City Poet, 283.
Gooch, City Poet, 273.
Pasternak, Safe Conduct, 31.
John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffic (New York: Modern Library, 1952), 421; Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1934), 34.
Alan Feldman, Frank O’Hara (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 105.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, ed. Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 59.
Willis Barnstone, introduction to Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, trans. Willis Barnstone (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003), xlix-liii.
Norma Louise Hutman, Machado: A Dialogue with Time; Nature as an Expression of Temporality in the Poetry of Antonio Machado (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), 39–41.
Antonio Machado, The Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, trans. Betty Jean Craige (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), xv.
Jean Moréas, “Le symbolisme,” Figaro, September 18, 1898, 150.
Ibid., 151.
See John Butler Davis, Jean Moréas: A Critique of His Poetry and Philosophy (The Hague: Mouton, 1967).
Hutman, Machado, 41.
Allen Ginsberg, forward to Out of this World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–1991, ed. Anne Waldman (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991), xxiv.
Anne Waldman, introduction to Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966-1991, ed. Anne Waldman (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991), 3.
Ginsberg, forward, xxv-xxvi.
Waldman, introduction to Out of This World, 4.
Anne Waldman, introduction to Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, ed. Anne Waldman (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1991), vi-vii.
Waldman, historical notes in Out of this World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–1991, ed. Anne Waldman (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991), 668-69.
Anne Waldman, Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1975), 145.
Ron Padgett, “On The Sonnets,” in Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, ed. Anne Waldman (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1991), 10.
Libbie Rifkin, “’Worrying about Making It’: Ted Berrigan’s Social Poetics,” Contemporary Literature 38, no. 4 (2008): 641.
Ron Padgett, “Four French Poets and the Cubist Painters,” in The Straight Line: Writings on Poetry and Poets (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 33.
Ibid., 33-34.
Ron Padgett, Great Balls of Fire (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1990), 12.
Ibid.
Ibid., 12-13.
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 14.
Ibid.
Padgett, “Four French Poets and the Cubist Painters,” 34.
Clark Coolidge, “FO’H Notes,” in Homage to Frank O’Hara, ed. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur (Bolinas, CA: Big Sky, 1988), 183.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 185.
In her 1997 introduction to her reissued Frank O’Hara, Perloff herself notes Coolidge’s response to O’Hara in “FO’H Notes” and sanctions his reading. She writes that “perhaps it took a New York Poet manqué like Coolidge to understand that O’Hara’s ’discreet’/’discrete’ language (as opposed to the O’Hara mystique), far from sanctifying the ’natural,’ the casual, and the unique speaking voice, was actually providing a groundwork for the new materialist poetics” (FOH, xxiv–xxv).
Charles Bernstein, “Stray Straw and Straw Men,” in Content’s Dream (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1986), 41.
Ibid., 41, 44.
Charles Bernstein, “Three or Four Things I Know about Him,” in Content’s Dream (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1986), 26.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 27-28.
Ibid., 28-29.
Bernstein, “Stray Straws and Straw Men,” 45–46.
Ibid., 41.
Ibid., 43.
Ron Silliman, “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 362.
Perelman, Marginalization of Poetry; 158.
Ibid., 159.
In his interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, O’Hara criticizes Olson for his preoccupation with what O’Hara calls the “important utterance” (SS, 22).
Perelman, Marginalization, 159, 161.
Ibid., 164.
Kenneth Koch, “All the Imagination Can Hold (The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara),” in Homage to Frank O’Hara, ed. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur (Bolinas, CA: Big Sky, 1978), 205.
Ibid.
Ibid., 206.
Bill Berkson, “Frank O’Hara and His Poems,” in Homage to Frank O’Hara, ed. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur (Bolinas, CA: Big Sky, 1978), 163.
Kenneth Koch, “A Note on Frank O’Hara in the Early Fifties,” in Homage to Frank O’Hara, ed. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur (Bolinas, CA: Big Sky, 1978), 27.
Ibid. It sometimes seems that Bernstein’s and Perelman’s rejection of poetic voice in O’Hara’s poems is grounded in the very terms they claim to reject. Coolidge notes, for example, that O’Hara’s work can sometimes be “embarrassing.” And both Bernstein and Perelman reject O’Hara’s “voice” because of its lack of faithfulness to certain materialistic presuppositions regarding what is and what is not real. These criticisms, in other words, are grounded in a predetermined notion of what counts as an authentic utterance and what does not. In the work of Bernstein and Perelman (both of whom use the term “critical” to mean “authentic”), for example, authentic utterances are defined as those utterances that foreground the material nature of language (though how much is unclear). Those that do not are inauthentic.
Thomas Fink, The Poetry of David Shapiro (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 15.
Ibid., 23.
Thomas Fink, “Uncanny Narrative in Shapiro’s A Burning Interior,” in Burning Interiors: David Shapiro’s Poetry and Poetics, ed. Thomas Fink and Joseph Lease (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 123–24.
Quoted in Fink, “Uncanny Narrative,” 124.
David Shapiro, New and Selected Poems (1965–2006) (New York: Overlook Press, 2007), 14.
James Tate, The Lost Pilot (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 7.
Brian Henry, “Emersonian Transition in James Tate’s The Lost Pilot,” in On James Tate, ed. Brian Henry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 85–86.
Ibid., 87.
Ibid.
Mark Ford, “Distance from Loved Ones,” in On James Tate, ed. Brian Henry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 107.
Ibid., 113.
James Tate, Oblivion Ha-Ha (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1970), 3, 9.
James Tate, lliper Jazz (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 11.