SECOND AVENUE IS ONE OF O’HARA’S MOST IMPORTANT LONG POEMS. In 1953, it was his longest poem to date and his most sustained exploration of the expressive limits of language. It is a sprawling amalgam of absurd images, disconnected phrases and quotation, newspaper clippings, short dramatic scenes, anecdotes, gossip, and literary and artistic references. O’Hara worked on the poem over a period of two months in spring 1953, writing most of it in between poses in Larry Rivers’s garden studio overlooking the avenue itself as Rivers sculpted (CP, 529). Kenneth Koch explains that O’Hara had read an early draft of Koch’s poem When the Sun Tries to Go On (1953) and that O’Hara had encouraged him to continue adding to it for as long as he could. Koch discovered that O’Hara began what was to become Second Avenue shortly after. A friendly competition ensued, with each sharing his daily results over the phone or lunch.1
Despite its length and radical linguistic innovations, Second Avenue is often dismissed as a mere experiment in “straight” surrealism, valuable only to the extent that it led to a breakthrough in poetic form.2 Such an approach to the poem, however, is problematic. For one thing, it is incorrect to dismiss Second Avenue as an early experiment in poetic language and form. The linguistic inventiveness of the poem—O’Hara’s surprising and illogical turns of phrases, dazzling metaphors, and absurd word combinations—can be seen in a great number of O’Hara’s poems throughout his life. For example, poems such as “Oranges” (1949), “Easter” (1952), “In Memory of My Feelings” (1956), “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births)” (1957) and “Biotherm (For Bill Berkson)” (1962) contain numerous absurd images and fragmented sentences and phrases, while a number of later poems, such as “F.O.I (A Vision of Westminster Abbey)” (1961), are even more indeterminate than Second Avenue. Furthermore, while O’Hara’s later poems are, for the most part, more concrete, some examples of his direct, matter-of-fact “I do this I do that” poems can be found as early as 1950. In “Poem (Although I am a half hour)” (1950), for example, O’Hara begins by placing the poem and the poet at a specific time and place, and recounts what he thinks and what he does in simple diction and conversational tone. These are essential aspects of later “I do this I do that” poems, such as “A Step Away from Them” (1956) and “The Day Lady Died” (1956). Thus, the supposed shift in O’Hara’s work from the more obscure language of Second Avenue to the more concrete language of these later poems cannot be described as a “breakthrough.”
Added to this is the fact that Second Avenue was one of O’Hara’s favorite poems throughout his life. In 1956, in a letter to Barney Rosset, editor of Grove Press, he communicates his love of the poem and expresses his desire that if not all, then at least part, of the poem be included in the then forthcoming Meditations in an Emergency (1957).3 While Rosset did not include the poem in the volume, O’Hara himself arranged to have it published as a chapbook in 1960 with Totem Press. O’Hara’s attitude toward the poem implies that he himself did not understand it to be part of an earlier, formative style, and while, as we shall see at the end of chapter, the poem has some clear shortcomings, the notion that Second Avenue is a mere experiment in plotting “a not-yet-existent tradition” is a rather simplified account of its place in O’Hara’s work as a whole.
Perhaps more importantly, however, it is reductive to conceive of Second Avenue as an effort to write a “straight” surrealist work. This glosses over O’Hara’s complex relationship to surrealism and hides a number of other important sources of the poem’s style—in particular, the influence of Pasternak. While O’Hara never denied the influence of surrealism, he never claimed Breton or the surrealists as a direct influence on his work, either. Rather, as David LeHardy Sweet notes, he tended to speak of his love of French poets in general, and, in a letter to Kenneth Koch, equated surrealism with “modern French poetry as a whole.”4
Instead of a means of accessing a so-called surrealty, automatism; for O’Hara, is an example of the aesthetic potential of the individual freedom or “openness” of the artist, and it is not a political or philosophical tool, as it is for Breton. In examining the influence of surrealism on Jackson Pollock, O’Hara states:
The basic theory of Surrealism is a far greater liberation from the restrictions of preconceived form than any amount of idiosyncratic experimentation, and it finally destroyed the post-Renaissance vision of visual structure supported by the rationalizations and syllogisms of semi-popular science. That the principles of Surrealism were often expounded in painting by means perversely counter to the genuine accomplishment of Cubism does not negate the fact that Surrealism destroyed, where Cubism only undermined on the same rationalistic basis as before. Cubism was an innovation, Surrealism an evolution. The former dealt with technique, the latter with content.... Surrealism enjoined the duty, along with the liberation, of saying what you mean and meaning what you say, above and beyond any fondness for saying or meaning. (AC, 17–18)
While O’Hara struggles with the notion of freedom in his poems, it most often means an individual’s immediate response to his or her present circumstances. Thus, it is not a surprise that artistic freedom is defined as the artist’s immediate response to his or her materials and thus entails the dutiful rejection of “preconceived forms” and the breaking of artistic rules.5 While cubism broke the rules of style—of how art represented the visual world—surrealism broke with the rationalistic basis of art itself. While O’Hara acknowledges that the freedom surrealism offers (and that he himself desires) is also a prescriptive one (it is, after all, a “duty”), it is nevertheless one that provides the artist with more creative possibilities than other theories of artistic creation—in particular, what O’Hara calls the “post-Renaissance vision of visual structure supported by the rationalizations and syllogisms of semi-popular science.” Here, O’Hara seems to be referring to the traditional use of perspective in painting to re-create what was thought to be the “real” visual structure of the world. While Braque and Picasso’s early cubist paintings were the first works of art to call into question this understanding of the visual structure of the world, the paintings themselves were still preoccupied with objects of visual experience, and it was not until surrealism and abstract expressionism that the source material of artistic creation was something other than visual experience. There is also a sense, however, in which the freedom that surrealism offers is not from rules and content alone, but from reason—which, for O’Hara, is defined as prose hypotaxis, or what he calls the “syllogisms of semi-popular science.”
O’Hara’s understanding here of surrealism as an example of the aesthetic value of freedom from logic and the “restrictions of preconceived form” and content is a version of surrealism that was common among American artist in New York long before O’Hara wrote either Second Avenue or his monograph on Jackson Pollock. In his excellent study on the influence of surrealism on American painting in the 1940s, Jeffrey Wechsler traces the influence of automatism on American painters from Breton and Salvador Dali (1904–89) to Gerome Kamrowski (1914–2004), William Baziotes (1912–63), and Pollock.6 While these painters, Wechsler notes, were interested in automatism as a method of composition, they rejected its more radical political implications and philosophical foundations, applying it rather, with typical American pragmatism, “directly toward the problem of picture-making.” 7
This American recasting of automatism as a technical tool in the creation of paintings is most evident in a paper that Robert Motherwell wrote for the exposition “The First Papers in Surrealism” at the Whitelaw-Reid Mansion in 1942, which included the work of Motherwell himself, as well as that of Baziotes, Pollock, Kamrowski, and Peter Busa (1914-85).8 Robert Hobbs writes that Motherwell formulates here what would later become a tenet of so-called abstract expressionist art:
[T]he Abstract Expressionists did not envision the unconscious as a potential conduit to a no-longer-accessible realm defined as “the marvelous,” as Matta’s description suggests. For them, its chief characteristic was its amorphous potential, which was not at all understandable until it became immanent. The initial and necessary translation of this amorphous content works to the advantage of the unconscious since it preserves its distinct otherness while spontaneity and pentimenti (layering), which became the group’s trademarks, are signs of their improvisational way of working, reinforcing the contingency that attends the unconscious’ conversion to an artistic medium.9
In other words, Motherwell’s “plastic automatism” is a means of picture making, whose principal purpose is not to discover some “absolute reality” but to harness the “amorphous potential” of the unconscious for pictorial effect.
When O’Hara writes in his monograph on Pollock that surrealism provided “a far greater liberation from the restrictions of preconceived form,” it is, it seems, Motherwell’s version of surrealism to which he is referring (AC, 17). His understanding, furthermore, that Pollock’s “insight” in his work is the result of “the accumulation of decisions along the way and the eradication of conflicting beliefs” is evocative of Motherwell’s definition of art as the product of an individual consciousness (AC, 25). Thus, like numerous artists before him, O’Hara maintains a place for personal choice, however predetermined or limited, in his poetics. O’Hara’s numerous references in his criticism to the “achievement” and “perceptions” of a particular artist—be it Willem de Kooning’s in “Nature and New Painting” (1954), Pasternak’s in “About Zhivago and His Poems” (1959), or his above remark with respect to Jackson Pollock—show that, for O’Hara, like Motherwell, one of the minimum requirements of art is that it be shaped, to some degree, by the conscious intervention of the artist. Hence, as he writes in “A Terrestrial Cuckoo” (1951), the act of writing is not pure intuition, or pure expression, but an “intuitive craft” (CP, 62).
While Second Avenue was written six years before O’Hara’s monograph on Jackson Pollock, there is nothing in O’Hara’s criticism or poems to suggest that he moved from an espousal of “straight” surrealism in Second Avenue to a more nuanced and up-to-date version. In addition to the fact that O’Hara rejected the philosophical and political idealism of surrealism in his poem “Memorial Day 1950,” it is important to note that after O’Hara moved to New York in 1951, he immersed himself in the lives and work of artists such as Joan Mitchell (1925–92), Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928), Nell Blaine (1922–96), Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, and Larry Rivers, as well as poets such as Ashbery, Koch, and Barbara Guest (1920–2006), among others. The initial contact with the New York art world took place at the Cedar Tavern at the corner of University Place and Eighth Street, where the artists would gather after a day of isolation in their respective studios. O’Hara writes: “The milieu of those days, and it’s funny to think of them in such a way since they are so recent, seems odd now. We were all in our early twenties. John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and I, being poets, divided our time between the literary bar, the San Remo, and the artist’s bar, the Cedar Tavern. In the San Remo we argued and gossiped; in the Cedar we often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue and gossip” (CP, 512).
In addition to frequenting the Cedar and the San Remo, however, soon O’Hara would often visit the artists’ studios during the day. Because of this, in his first year in New York he appeared in five paintings—three by Nell Blaine, one by Larry Rivers, and one by Grace Hartigan. Freliecher explains that O’Hara “used to just love to be around the studio and he would come and help me stretch my canvases, which was like a great privilege to him,” and Rivers explains that O’Hara “was a professional fan.”10 At the rather late date of 1953, two years after O’Hara had moved to New York, at a time when he had been invited to give a second talk at The Club, and shortly before he would begin work as a reviewer for ArtNews, it is unlikely that he was trying his hand at “straight” surrealism in a poem such as Second Avenue.
Rather than a mere experiment in surrealism, Second Avenue is a poem in which O’Hara, indebted to Boris Pasternak’s notion of art as an expression of the energy of life itself and Robert Motherwell’s notion of “plastic automatism,” explores the coming into being of conscious experience and shows the flow of experience. In the process of his exploration, furthermore, the poet expands language’s expressive possibilities, through which our experience of the world is, in part, mediated. In this sense, the poem could be understood as an exploration of the potential value of language and of present experience as a sort of existential argument against the need to posit an extraexperiential telos that organizes and gives meaning to present experience.
The poem is written in the first-person singular and is addressed to an unidentified “you.” The representational content of the poem is, for the most part, obscure. While the title of the poem is Second Avenue, there are few recognizable images of New York City or references to city life. Furthermore, while there is a semblance of narrative relation between the eleven sections of the poem, the poem is, in the end, disjunctive and disconnected.
The first section of the poem begins with an allusion to John Milton’s “L’Allegro” (1633). O’Hara writes:
Quips and players, seeming to vend astringency off-hours,
celebrate diced excesses and sardonics, mixing pleasures,
as if proximity were staring at the margin of a plea....
(CP, 139)
The noun “quip” is, of course, a witty or sarcastic remark. O’Hara uses it in this case, however, to refer to people who are “jokers” or “jesters”; and, in this sense, the phrase “Quips and players” recalls Milton’s “Quips and Cranks” in “L’Allegro.”11 The rest of the opening lines confirm this allusion. While O’Hara’s “Quips and players” “vend astringency off-hours,” Milton’s “Quips and Cranks” possess “wanton Wiles.”12 Furthermore, while Milton writes of living in “unreprovèd pleasures free,” O’Hara writes of celebrating “diced excesses and sardonics, mixing pleasure.”13 And while there are “wreathèd Smiles” in Milton, which implies that there is something not quite right about these “unreprovèd pleasures,” there is also something abnormal about the “excesses” and “pleasures” in Second Avenue, sold by jokers and jesters “off-hours.”14
The opening section of Second Avenue is also evocative of Hart Crane’s “Moment Fugue” (1926).15 In “Moment Fugue,” Crane describes a “syphillitic [sic] selling violets calmly / and daisies” and “hyacinths,” which has certain similarities to O’Hara’s outcast quips and players selling “astringency off-hours.”16 However, while in “Moment Fugue” the eyes of the “syphillitic” fall “mute and sudden (dealing change / for lilies) / Beyond the roses that no flesh can pass,” O’Hara’s “I” bursts forth in what seems to be an effort to avoid silence at all costs.
Rather than exploring these strange pleasures or expanding on these allusions to Milton or Crane, O’Hara leaves both, only returning to Crane at the end of the poem. However, these first three lines do set up a comparison to lines 4–13 that follow, to which O’Hara returns later in the poem. In these lines, O’Hara shifts his attention, as he states in his “Notes on Second Avenue” (1953), to logic. Referring to lines 5–13 of the opening section, O’Hara writes in his “Notes”: “To put it very gently, I have a feeling that the philosophical reduction of reality to a dealable-with system so distorts life that one’s ’reward’ for this endeavor (a minor one, at that) is illness both from the inside and outside” (CP, 495). As it was for the surrealists, both European and American, reason is a sort of disease for O’Hara because it excludes the irrational and contingent elements of human existence that he sometimes associates with “life.” Thus, the first three lines of the poem on “sardonics” and “mixing pleasures” can be contrasted with the “philosophical reduction of reality” in lines 4–13.
While O’Hara returns to this comparison of “sardonics” and “mixing pleasures” and the “philosophical reduction of reality” later in the poem, rather than contrasting “sardonics” with this “philosophical reduction of reality” in more detail in the lines that follow, line 14 marks a shift of both subject matter and tone. The poet addresses an unidentified “you,” who, throughout the rest of the section, is presented as both antagonistic and ambivalent toward an “I” that is both insecure and confident, and which, at least in the first section, is the “I” of the poet. The section is peppered with images of sex, violence, and filth in what is, perhaps, a much more obscure representation of O’Hara’s artistic coming-of-age recounted in “Memorial Day 1950.” The final words of the section, “But now I have a larger following,” seem to point to the poet emerging triumphant out of the jungle of critics and aesthetic trial and error (CP, 140). However, as is clear from sections 2 and 3, this sense of triumph is temporal, both repudiated (“My spirit is clouded”) and reasserted (“I lead you to a stream which will lick you like a wasp”) later in the poem (CP, 142).
In the second section, rather than expanding on the poet’s nascent aesthetic, the poem shifts again. The section begins with the surprising line “What spanking opossums of sneaks are caressing the routes!” which seems to be intended to shock, as well as to break the rough thematic coherence of the first section (CP, 140). O’Hara addresses his poetics in the third line, stating, “I can only enumerate the somber instances of wetness,” and asks in the fourth, “Is it a triumph?” He thus returns to the note of artistic triumph struck at the end of the first section. The rest of the second section is not devoted to enumerating “instances of wetness,” or to reflecting on the poet’s artistic triumphs, but to exploring images of light and motion. Here, the poet addresses himself as a “you” that accepts the “poisonous sting of the spine,” the “golden efflorescence of nature” that, in turn, blossoms as a tree. The poet looks to the sky and sees “an animal kingdom of jealousy in parachutes / descending upon the highway,” which, in turn, evokes an image of “open fields” in the poet’s mind. These images are faintly resonant of the cubist and futurist understanding of art as, among other things, an expression of energy akin to light and motion, but, perhaps, with more references to nature (trees, clouds and fields) than are found in the work of Apollinaire or Marinetti, for example. O’Hara ends this much shorter section with one final reference to the first section of the poem. Evoking the “diced excesses” of the opening lines of the poem, he writes:
Dice! into the lump and crush of archness and token angels
you burn your secret preferment and ancient streaming,
as a gasp of laughter at desire, and disorder, and dying.
(CP, 141)
Here, the rejected “philosophical reduction of reality” in the opening section is presented as “a gasp of laughter at desire, and disorder, and dying” and is contrasted with the image of dice, which evokes the notion of chance.
At the beginning of the third section, O’Hara shifts his attention again. Picking up on the tangential phrase “token angels” at the end of the second section, he explores what he calls “the science of legendary elegies” (CP, 141). The section is devoted to the religious images of “Blue negroes” who resemble “priests . . . in their bedrooms at dawn,” “Mayan idols,” “circumcision of a black horse,” “drunken Magi,” and “Apollo” (CP, 141–42). At the end of the section, O’Hara turns from these religious images and addresses the “you” of the poem, which is both the “you” of the reader and, perhaps, the “you” of the first section of the poem:
so you are silent, aren’t you? Well, I shall be older
and uglier than you, and my least motion shall wither
the vertiginous breath which is earth meeting sky meeting sea,
as in the legend of a sovereign who did and who was.
Immense flapping. I hold all of night in my one eye. You.
(CP, 142)
The final religious image of this section is the image of the artist as God, who like the Son of God in Revelation 4:8 is praised by a host of angels, singing “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.” What makes the poet a “sovereign,” however, is the fact that he, like the “I” of Whitman’s Song of Myself (1891), contains “multitudes.”17 The word “eye” in this final line is a pun on “I”; thus, the poet holds “all of night” and all of “You” in his “I” or self. O’Hara thereby reverses both the biblical trope of God as light, and, it is interesting to note, the artistic trope, as expressed in Apollinaire’s The Cubist Painters, of the work of art as a representation of light.
In the fourth and shortest section of the poem—a mere seven lines—O’Hara addresses the reader: “Is your throat dry with the deviousness of following? / I lead you to stream which will lick you like a wasp” (CP, 142). While these lines raise the question of the obscure language of the poem, O’Hara does not maintain this “metanarrative” position, but rather returns to the sexual images of the first section, figuring the “you” of the poem reclining on “boards of starry nudging, / sisters of bar-girls in the haunches of the Himalayas.” He ends the section with the question: “Or are you altitudes?” This, in turn, evokes Whitman’s “multitudes,” alluded to at the end of the third section (CP, 142).
The first four sections, therefore, are disparate and lacking in a coherent subject matter or theme, but they nevertheless contain several recurring images and thematic fragments. Images of sex, mythology, and the bizarre (such as “toothpaste falling on guitar strings”), staples of surrealistic art, are scattered throughout the first four sections, as the poet speaks in an all-inclusive “I,” addressing an instable “you” that is at times both antagonistic and passive as the poet reflects on, among numerous other things, artistic creation itself. In fact, if O’Hara had stopped the poem at the end of section 4—and one wonders if he had, in fact, considered stopping here, given the shortness of the section, the metanarrative position he assumes, and the poetic turn in the first line of the section—Perloff and Ashbery would have been more correct in identifying at least the style of the poem itself in terms of conventional surrealism.
The fifth section of the poem, however, marks a major shift. While in the first four sections of the poem, O’Hara explores the language of the unfolding conscious experience, in the fifth section O’Hara begins to include language from other sources, ranging from anecdotes and fictional stories to parodies of rational argumentation and newspaper clippings. Because of this, the fifth section and the sections that follow become both more comprehensible and more obscure. While individual passages of some of section 5 and of the sections that follow are often clear enough as self-contained units, in the context of the respective sections it is, in fact, much more difficult to extract a theme for the sections because of these passages that seem to be dropped into the poem at random.
The fifth section begins with the same sexually charged dialectic of the “I” and the “you” of the first four sections, where the “you” becomes an object of desire of the “I” of the poem (“You are lean, achieved, ravished, acute, light, tan, / waving, stolen, lissome in whispering, salivary in intent). However, O’Hara shifts his attention to his personal life and writes in a conversational tone and in a simple, if abbreviated, prose:
I met Joe, his hair pale as the eyes of fields of maize
in August, at the gallery, he said you’re the first Creon
of 1953, congrats. Your costume, he said, was hand
over fist. If you worked harder you could remake
old Barrymore movies, you’re that statuesque, he said.
(CP, 143)
After this brief anecdote, O’Hara returns to the disconnected, dense, and absurd language that characterized the first four sections, writing: “For when the window, the ice in it, ran, the fish leaped forth / and returned where they wished to return to and from” (CP, 143). This is followed, however, by the beginning of what seems to be a rape scene and at least one further anecdote. The section, then, ends with a long parody of logical argumentation, which itself, in turn, includes another fictional scene—which O’Hara himself identifies in his “Notes on Second Avenue” as the beginning of a western—and more anecdotes and quotations from the poet’s personal life, as well as an allusion to the romanticized relationship of Verlaine and Rimbaud (CP, 144).
In the following sections, the poem returns again to images of artistic creation, anecdotes, newspaper clippings, and further references to artists and poets. In the eleventh and final section of the poem, however, O’Hara writes in the first person and returns to the tone and diction of the first four sections. He begins the section with a reference to the sculpture that Rivers is making of him, reveling perhaps in the concrete example of what is one of O’Hara’s favorite tropes—that of the artist himself as a work of art. He writes:
My hands are Massimo Plaster, called “White Pin in the Arm of the Sea”
and I’m blazoned and scorch like a fleet of windbells down the Pulaski Skyway
tabletops of Vienna carrying their bundles of cellophane to the laundry,
ear to the tongue, glistening semester of ardency, young-old daringnesses
at the foot of the most substantial art product of our times
(CP, 150)
O’Hara’s focus on the hands of the statue, rather than on other more common centers of attention such as the head or the face, begins what is a double description in this final section of both Rivers’s actual statue and O’Hara’s work, figured in the statue itself. The hands, as the physical means of artistic creation for both the artist and the poet, are called here the “White Pin in the Arm of the Sea,” which recalls the “distinction” of the poet described in the first section as “a quill at the bottom of the sea.” Here the beauty of the poet’s hands, and, in turn, his art, is lost on most people, who are, both literally and figuratively, looking elsewhere. The statue is “blazoned” and scorched, symbolizing, perhaps, the poet himself, whose “wounds” become a sort of flute (here “windbells”) as he flies in the “Pulaski Skyway.” The statue, in which both O’Hara’s actual body and his body of work are figured, is pronounced with some tongue-in-cheek the “most substantial art product of our times.”
However, this “substantial art product”—both Rivers’s statue and O’Hara’s work—is not recognized in the artists’ home country. It flies in the air like an airplane and arrives in Mexico, “the palace of stammering sinking success” (CP, 150). O’Hara writes:
O paradise! my airplanes known as “Banana Line Incorporealidad,”
saviors of connections and spit, dial HYacinth 9-9945, “Isn’t that
a conundrum?” asked him Sydney Burger, humming “Mein Yiddisher Mama”
I emulate the black which is a cry but is not voluptuary like a warning,
which has lines, cuts, drips, aspirates, trembles with horror
(CP, 150)
O’Hara associates blackness in this final section of Second Avenue with both horror and sex. O’Hara writes, for example, of “black looks at the base of the spine!” and “kisses on the medulla oblongata / of an inky clarity!” (CP, 150).
Rather than exploring this motif of darkness in further detail, however, O’Hara returns to Rivers’s statue:
Elbow of roaches! You wear my white rooster like guerdon in vales
of Pompeian desires, before utter languorousness puts down its chisel,”
and the desert is here. “You’ve reached the enormous summit of passion
which is immobility forging an entrail from the pure obstruction of the air.
(CP, 150)
Rivers has completed his work (“utter languorousness puts down its chisel”), which is experienced as both a moment of dejection (“and the desert is here”) and exuberant triumph (“You’ve reached the enormous summit of passion”), as O’Hara completes his poem as well.
The syntactic and structural dislocation and disjunction of Second Avenue serves a number of ends. First, these elements express what O’Hara perceives to be the nature of experience. Events happen. One perception of the mind follows another. The previous experience does not have a discursive relationship to the next, nor does each perception or experience relate to the overall meaning of our life, because, for O’Hara, our experience has no meaning outside of itself. While all our experiences constitute who we are, we do not, nor can we, rationalize them in some harmonious narrative. Rather, each moment should be felt in the present for whatever it is, and valued for the sensations it produces.
That life, for O’Hara, has no continuous pattern in the sense that there is no constant extraexperiential telos that orders and gives meaning to our experience is clear from remarks he made in his journal in 1949. He writes: “Mary McCarthy says ’the most harrowing experience of man’ is ’the failure to feel steadily, to be able to compose a continuous pattern’; but if one does feel steadily and the pattern is horrific? ... I feel steadily but there is no pattern, there can be no pattern, there is only being; you cannot sell yourself, you cannot stand that far apart from your self to dicker, if there is any integrity in you” (EW, 109–10). The comment by McCarthy that “ ’the most harrowing experience of man’ is ’the failure to feel steadily’ ” is from her essay on Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet in the Partisan Review, where, in examining the character of Hamlet, she writes: “Sir Laurence Olivier’s is the only Hamlet which seizes this inconsecutiveness and makes of it an image of suffering, of the failure to feel steadily, to be able to compose a continuous pattern, which is the most harrowing experience of man. Hamlet, a puzzle to himself, is seen by Olivier as a boy, whose immaturity is both his grace and his frailty.”18 For O’Hara, however, “this inconsecutiveness,” as McCarthy calls it, is not due to a “failure to feel steadily.” Rather, it is what he feels to be the structure of feeling itself. Feeling, for him, has no inherent pattern, and no “continuous pattern” can be composed from it; because in order to do so one must assume a position outside of one’s own experience, which is impossible.
Second, the syntax and structure prevent the reader from reducing the meaning of the poem to individual words or controlling “deep” images or metaphors. O’Hara’s use of logical qualifiers and conjunctions both to create an expectation of correlation and, and the same time, to prevent such correlation thwarts all efforts of locating the meaning of the poem at the level of the image or phrase itself. As he does throughout the poem, O’Hara avoids the use of periods, and uses commas (where it would be more correct to use periods) as a means of adding new, and often unrelated, images to previous ones. He places exclamation points in relation to a particular word rather than in relation to a sentence, and uses logical markers to evoke and postpone, rather than provide, a sense of connectedness. He begins clauses without finishing them, or, if he does, he often finishes them with a non sequitur. The result is that it is impossible to hold either individual sections of the poem or the poem as a whole together as a unit of thought, or to assign some sort of essential meaning to particular references or metaphors.
Indeed, the most common function of allusion, as Gregory Machacek notes, is hermeneutic.19 An allusion contributes to the meaning of a particular text, most often in either unlocking the meaning of the passage in which it appears or in nuancing what might otherwise be too simple a statement. In Second Avenue, however, O’Hara’s allusions, in particular his learned references, do not tend to unlock the meaning of a particular passage, but rather most often place us in front of a reference that we are unable to make rational sense of in the context of the poem as a whole.
O’Hara’s references to Milton’s “L’Allegro” and Hart Crane in the first section of the poem and to the second coming of Christ in the third do not help us to understand the themes of the poem, but rather evoke and frustrate a search for meaning. In doing so, one could say that O’Hara represents our effort to reduce the meaning of his poems to a particular word or phrase, or allusion, an effort that functions as a metaphor for our search for meaning in life. O’Hara uses meaningless allusions to show that this search for meaning is misplaced and to focus our attention on the present moment of conscious experience. Instead of looking past our present experience to find some hidden “deep image” or posited teleological end in which all of our experience finds meaning, O’Hara hopes to focus our attention on the richness of conscious experience itself.
O’Hara discusses this use of allusion to represent the search for meaning in his short essay on Rivers’s work, “Larry Rivers: The Next to Last Confederate Soldier” (1959). O’Hara notes, first of all, that the conversion of subject and object in abstract paintings, where the painting is the object itself of its own creation, forces us as viewers to associate the painting with another object for it to have meaning for us. In this sense, the artist no longer represents his meaning by using figures, which then function as metaphors, but forces us as viewers to produce the metaphors ourselves. It is in this sense that the artist can be said, according to O’Hara, to hold up “a mirror of color and/or impasto to the viewer,” representing the viewer himself in his effort to associate the work of art with another object of perception, a particular feeling or emotion (SS, 96). Rivers, however, uses both recognizable images and abstract forms in his paintings; and while he seems to provide the meaning of his paintings in the images he produces, in the end he withholds his meaning in presenting these images in a context that prevent us from making sense of them. Unlike painters who recognize the audience and provide them with a mirror of themselves, “Rivers,” O’Hara writes, both refuses “to recognize the audience” and denies “the audience the opportunity to recognize him” (SS, 96). While Rivers’s refusal to recognize his audience in presenting them with images that cannot be scrutinized could be understood as catering to some form of coterie, O’Hara himself provides another explanation of Rivers’s images. He writes: “The Soldier’s fluctuation between figurative absence and abstract presence comes from an adamant attachment to substance, which is its source of energy. That is all, no identity. In his work Rivers is playing out, at whatever cost to himself, the drama of our lack” (SS, 96). Rivers’s use of recognizable images, in other words, whose meanings in the respective works cannot be identified represents the “drama” of our failure to rationalize all of experience.
Third, the syntax and structure of the poem as critics such as Perloff, Smith, and Sweet have noted, make the tactile qualities of the words themselves much more evident. This is one of the principal strategies of the poem itself. When the words are detached from a recognizable discursive context, the material elements of the words—the visual and aural qualities of the words on the page—come to the fore. As O’Hara writes with respect to the work of Claes Oldenburg in 1963, in focusing our attention on the material nature of the subject matter of a work of art the artist causes us to become more aware of the tactile contrasts of present experience. O’Hara writes:
Where most of the other artists grouped by opinion into the “new realists” or “pop art” movement tend to make their art out of vulgar (in the sense of everyday) objects, images and emblems, Oldenburg makes the very objects and symbols themselves, with the help of papier-mâché, cloth, wood, glue, paint and whatever other mysterious materials are inside and on them, into art.... With the perverse charms of Gulliver and of Alice-in-Wonderland, Oldenburg makes one feel almost hysterically present, alert, summoned to the party. There is no hint of mysticism, no “significance,” no commentary, in the work. (SS, 141-42)
This attention to the materials of the work itself, which, in turn, makes us feel “present, alert,” can be observed at the beginning of the eighth section of Second Avenue, where O’Hara writes:
Candidly. The past, the sensations of the past. Now!
in cuneiform, of umbrella satrap square-carts with hotdogs
and onions of red syrup blended, of sand bejewelling the prepuce
in tank suits, of Majestic Camera Stores and Schuster’s,
of Kenneth in an abandoned storeway on Sunday cutting ever more
insinuating lobotomies of a yet-to-be-more-yielding world
of ears, of a soprano rallying at night in a cadenza, Bill,
(CP, 146)
While the words here are not “in cuneiform,” the material elements of the words themselves are made more evident because of the fact that the passage lacks a clear discursive narrative. For example, the harsh sound produced by the alliteration of s in “satrap square-carts,” coupled with the spondaic foot of “square-carts” contrasts with the smoother s sound and more fluid meter of “red syrup blended” and “sand bejewelling the prepuce” in the following line. This contrasting repetition of s continues throughout the rest of the passage as it fluctuates from its harsher sound in words such as “Majestic Camera Stores and Schuster’s” and its smoother sound in “storeway” and “Sunday.” This attention to the aural and visual elements of the words provides them with a certain tangible presence that is often lost or at least ignored when used in the context of the narrative prose sentence.
In addition to bringing the material elements of words to the fore, a fourth and often ignored aspect of dislocation and disjunction in Second Avenue is that these serve to expand our experiential knowledge of the material world in expanding the connotative possibilities of words themselves. O’Hara coins absurd metaphors, for example, in order to break out of our repetitive and narrow representations of experience, which, in turn, condition our interactions with the world. Finding new metaphors is part of O’Hara’s effort to find new, exhilarating ways of representing our experience to ourselves and, therefore, a means of opening ourselves up to nuances or complexities of our existence that are ignored or undervalued.
In addition to using metaphors, O’Hara uses single recurring words to mean different, even antithetical things, and this expands the words’ connotative meaning. For example, O’Hara refers to “ice” on six separate occasions: twice in section 1, twice in section 5, and once in each of sections 7 and 10. In addition to this, he refers to “my glacial immodesty” and a “lampooned frigid scalper” in section 1 and the “snowing snow” in section 7. The image of ice, however, does not have some sort of stable symbolic meaning. In the first section, O’Hara uses ice to evoke an image of dazzling flashes of light (“I scintillate like a glass of ice”) and in the fifth section to evoke a sense of bizarre otherworldliness (“and ice / telephone wires! was knotted, spelling out farce”), while in the seventh and tenth sections, it has no particular significance at all (CP, 140, 144, 145, 149).
Another example is his use of the word “blue.” While O’Hara uses the word “blue” in the third and seventh sections to evoke a sense of otherness, referring to “Blue negroes” and “stillborn blue brothers of / entirely other races,” it is unclear what significance the color might have in the eighth section, where O’Hara refers to “the landscape / less blue than prehistorically,” and the ninth section, where he writes of “yellow and blue” lumber and a “blue fire-escape” (CP, 141, 145, 146–47, 148). Green and orange, instead of blue, fire escapes appear in the tenth section of the poem, furthermore, with no apparent shift in significance (CP, 149). O’Hara uses white on six and yellow on four different occasions.
Fifth, the syntax and structure in Second Avenue levels the hierarchy implied in hypotaxis. While the English prose sentence distinguishes between things such as main clause and subordinate clause, and subject and object, and, therefore, creates a hierarchy between the words within the sentence, parataxis creates a situation where each word is potentially just as important, just as worthy of our attention, as the main subject and verb in a typical English prose sentence. In this sense, the poem proposes a more “egalitarian” sentence, where each word is of equal value. The use of illogical phrases and false syllogism is also an attempt to break down the hierarchy established in prose, and perhaps is a critique of rational discourse.
Therefore, rather than a mere experiment in surrealism, or a simplistic effort to “deconstruct” meaning, Second Avenue is a poem in which O’Hara explores his present experience and, in the process, works to renew both language itself and our experience of the material world that is, in part, mediated through it. O’Hara’s use of meaningless allusions, parataxis, and absurd images and metaphors prevents us from reducing the meaning of the poem to one controlling image or symbol and becomes an enactment of the irreducible nature of experience. This lack of narrative and thematic structure removes words from their normal syntactical contexts and, therefore, focuses our attention on the material nature of words themselves. O’Hara’s absurd metaphors and images function to expand language’s connotative and expressive possibilities.
This understanding of the irreducible nature of experience implied in Second Avenue was one that was both a source of satisfaction and of dissatisfaction for O’Hara throughout his life, mitigated, as it was, by his awareness that experience is always temporal. In “Poem (And tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock in Springfield, Massachusetts)” (1956), reflecting on the recent death of his aunt, O’Hara writes:
When I die, don’t come, I wouldn’t want a leaf
to turn away from the sun—it loves it there.
There’s nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can’t miss a day of it, because it doesn’t last.
(CP, 244)
The image of the leaf in the sun as a metaphor for our experience of the present moment in all its fullness is followed with the knowledge that “it doesn’t last.” For O’Hara, this is the great tragedy of human existence.
It is at this point, however, that O’Hara, comparing his aunt’s life and his own, refigures his living in the present as a form of love for the present world. He writes:
So this is the devil’s dance? Well I was born to dance.
It’s a sacred duty, like being in love with an ape,
and eventually I’ll reach some great conclusion, like assumption,
when at last I meet exhaustion in these flowers, go straight up.
(CP, 244)
The “devil’s dance” is O’Hara’s lifestyle, which is, presumably, in stark contrast to the lifestyle of his aunt, who, O’Hara tells us earlier in the poem, is being buried in a convent. Yet, while O’Hara’s life may seem devilish according to certain standards, he recasts it here as a “religious” commitment to living in the present. It is a “sacred duty” that will end when the poet dies and (as in the ascension of Christ) goes “straight up.” Figuring living in the present as a “sacred duty”—which is, he notes, a form of love—is a means for O’Hara to transcend the tragedy of death. Though one could question whether or not this notion of love as something that is sacred and self-sacrificial (in the sense that it is an ethical obligation or“duty”) contradicts O’Hara’s otherwise hedonistic understanding of the meaning and value of experience. However, as will be shown in chapter 5, it is a notion of love that O’Hara espoused throughout his life, and one that provides an important balance to what might otherwise be decried as crass poetic solipsism.