THE POETRY OF FRANK O’HARA (1926-66) IS DIFFERENT FROM THAT OF many of his contemporaries. Some forty years after his death, however, his work is still largely misunderstood. As Marjorie Perloff points out, in the years that directly followed his fatal accident on Fire Island, New York, O’Hara’s poetry was often dismissed as the work of an idiosyncratic minor poet, written at a specific time and place for a limited audience, and, therefore, worthy of little interest (FOH, xi–xii). Perloff notes that in 1966, for example, Gilbert Sorrentino writes that Lunch Poems (1964) is part of “a world of wry elegance, of gesture, a world made up of a certain kind of strictly New York joie de vivre.”1 In 1971, Herbert Leibowitz, in his review of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1971), writes that O’Hara was a “fascinating amalgam of fan, connoisseur, and propagandist,” a man who was “the Apollinaire of his generation, an aesthetic courtier who had taste and impudence and prodigious energy.” His poetry, he says, exhibits “a precocious air of command and a throwaway charm.”2 In 1978, Thomas Byrom writes that the poems collected in the posthumous Early Writing (1977) and Poems Retrieved (1977) “are from a catalogue of late Victorian camp, a matter of excellent personal taste.”3 In each of these reviews, while O’Hara is praised for his distinctive style, his distinctiveness is characterized in terms of “Victorian camp” and “strictly New York joie de vivre”—terms that make the implicit claim that his work is less important than the work of his contemporaries.
In 1972, however, while preparing a review essay on the volumes of poetry published in the preceding two years, Perloff herself read Ron Padgett and David Shapiro’s Anthology of New York Poets (1970), in which O’Hara’s poetry figured prominently. After having read O’Hara’s work, Perloff too felt that his poetry was different. Unlike Sorrentino, Leibowitz, and Byrom, however, she became convinced as she read his work that he should be considered “one of the central poets” of the so-called postwar period (FOH, xxxii). “The more O’Hara I read,” she would later recall, “the more enthusiastic I became about his work” (xxxi–xxxii). “Here was a writer who made poetry look like a delightful game but who also had an uncanny way of getting what John Ashbery has called, with reference to Picabia, ’the perishable fragrance of tradition’ into his work” (xxxii). “The age,” Perloff continues, needed “a raison d’être for O’Hara’s casual, improvisatory, nonmetrical and generally nonstanzaic ’I do this, I do that’ pieces, pieces that hardly seemed to qualify as poems at all” (xiii). Hence her Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1978), in which she argues that O’Hara is a “serious” poet, indebted in particular to painters such as Jackson Pollock (1912–56) and French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918).
For Perloff, the source of O’Hara’s original style is his break from the symbolist tradition in poetry. He writes using a version of surrealist automatism, where he expresses the coming into being of conscious experience in language that lacks rational coherence. In this sense, O’Hara does not use words, Perloff claims, as signs to represent his feelings; rather, he fuses his feelings with the material elements of the words and structure of his poems. For Perloff, what holds his poems together as wholes is not predetermined themes or formal structures but rather the “tension” of the “surface” of the completed works, which is said, in turn, to be akin to the “surface” of Pollock’s abstract paintings (FOH, 23). O’Hara’s poems, Perloff claims, create irreducible semantic ambiguities, which, in turn, are “equivalent to the painter’s ’push and pull’—the spatial tensions that keep a surface alive and moving”—and thus make for poems that have no “beginning, middle, and end” and that are of “great speed, openness, flexibility, and defiance of expectations” (131, 135).
Perloff’s book is both rich and insightful, and provides a helpful introduction to O’Hara’s work. She is correct, for example, to note O’Hara’s expressionist poetics and the value he himself placed on the process of artistic creation. There is no doubt, furthermore, that O’Hara was indebted to the example of Rimbaud and the work of Pollock, and that his use of proper names and parataxis is at the heart of what makes his work so different. However, as helpful as Perloff’s book is, there are two problems with it. First, she overstates O’Hara’s debt to painting. O’Hara’s interaction with painters in New York City from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s confirmed rather than created his views regarding artistic creation—views that were established through his interest in all the arts, including the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) and John Cage (1912–92) and the poetry of Walt Whitman (1818–92), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), and Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), among others. Second, her more detailed readings of O’Hara’s work sometimes lack precision—in particular her reading of the “surface” of O’Hara’s poems—because in her use of the language of art criticism to discuss the formal elements of his poems she provides too little explanation as to what these terms might mean in relation to writing. Perloff’s use of such language might be expected from a book first published by George Braziller, the famed arts and foreign literature publishing house in New York, and from a book with the subtitle “Poet among Painters,” thus evoking Francis Steegmuller’s well-known Apollinaire, Poet among the Painters (1963). The reason she uses such terms, as she makes clear in one of her first published pieces on O’Hara, is that she believes that the traditional vocabulary of poetry criticism is inadequate for discussing O’Hara’s highly idiosyncratic work.4 Yet, Perloff’s use of painting terms such as “frottage,” “push-pull,” “surface,” “depth,” and “catalogue raisonné” is limiting in its own right, as we shall see in a moment (FOH, 42, 82–3).
Perloff’s rightly motivated but sometimes too facile application of such terms to O’Hara’s work, has been repeated by a number of critics since 1978, and now it is not uncommon to read critics who seem to begin with the assumption that the formal aspects of O’Hara’s poems differ from those in Pollock’s paintings in no significant way. This is not to say that there have not been some very helpful studies on O’Hara’s relationship to painting since Perloff. In his chapter on O’Hara in Savage Sight, Constructed Noise: Poetic Adaptations of Painterly Techniques in the French and American Avant-Gardes (2003), David LeHardy Sweet, for example, provides an excellent, nuanced evaluation of how O’Hara’s work is similar to Pollock’s and other painters’ work, such as that of Willem de Kooning (1904–97) and Larry Rivers (1923–2002). Yet, how it is different, while noted, is not examined in detail. While Sweet admits that O’Hara himself maintained a “categorical distinction between the arts,” he too quickly dismisses this by arguing that O’Hara arrived at this distinction as a result of his search for “residues of communication” and “symptoms of filiation” between them.5 This dismissal is, in part, due to the focus of Sweet’s book, but it does not do justice to the difference between O’Hara’s work and that of the so-called abstract expressionists.
Interestingly enough, Perloff’s book has been one of the main catalysts for another approach to O’Hara’s work. For a growing number of critics who have applied the theories of poststructuralism to O’Hara’s poetry,6 her conclusion that O’Hara expresses his feelings in the “push-pull” tension of the “surface” of his poems has proven to be an important starting point, along with Charles Altieri’s 1973 article for the Iowa Review comparing O’Hara’s compositional practices to Jacques Derrida’s notion of “différence.” The crowning example of this approach is Hazel Smith’s Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: Difference/Homosexuality/Topography (2000). For Smith, what most distinguishes O’Hara is his use of “hyperscapes”—a term that she has coined to refer to various types of difference in his work, including textual, spatial, sexual, and political.7 In her definition of the “textual difference” of O’Hara’s work, Smith cites Perloff’s argument concerning the “surface” of O’Hara’s poems. Perloff, Smith argues, rightly shows how O’Hara “destabilizes the meaning” of his poems and creates “an overlaying of different meanings” in his use of indeterminate language.8 She then, in effect, restates Perloff’s argument in Derridean terms. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that while for Perloff O’Hara is a “poet among painters,” for Smith he is “the arch-deconstructionist.” 9
It needs to be noted that a great number of O’Hara’s poems do indeed lack formal coherence. O’Hara’s poems also often simultaneously possess more than one meaning because of his use of indeterminate or ambiguous phrases, parataxis, or proper nouns and simple verbs that lack rich connotative meaning, and Perloff’s and Smith’s understanding of his use of language can be applied—with a few important modifications—to poems such as Second Avenue. This lack of formal coherence is related, in part, to O’Hara’s understanding of art as a form of expression, where the poet is said to express his feelings in the material of the creative medium rather than to represent some predetermined object or image. This is a notion that O’Hara gleaned from expressionist painters, as well as from poets such as Rilke and Pasternak. However, while O’Hara understood creation to be a form of expression, he did not hold that the mechanics of expression in poetry were no different from the mechanics of expression in painting. Words have a de facto representational element—this is what makes them words—and O’Hara recognized this. Furthermore, while there are some similarities between O’Hara’s work and the theories of poststructuralists such as Derrida, it is reductive to treat O’Hara as a mere forerunner of Derridean deconstruction. While his poems are sometimes disconnected and lack an explicit thematic coherence, this does not mean that he somehow avoids using language as language or that his poems contain no themes other than that of “destabilizing” meaning.
One of the difficult things about O’Hara’s work is his refusal to be pigeonholed. Regarding Larry Rivers, who most resembles O’Hara in his antitheoretical position with respect to artistic creation, O’Hara once wrote: “He shifts and feints like Sugar Ray Robinson, if you double he redoubles like George Rapée. He is an enigma, and he is fascinating” (SS, 97). Indeed, so is O’Hara in some respects. It could be said that the sole constant in O’Hara’s work is its lack of consistent theoretical or aesthetic convictions; however, this too would be an overstatement. Nevertheless, there is needed a fuller, less reductive account of O’Hara’s work that is flexible enough to take into consideration his stylistically diverse work. The present work is an effort to provide such an account.
While still acknowledging O’Hara’s debt to the so-called abstract expressionists, this work will place O’Hara’s work in the context of poets such as Rilke, Williams and Pasternak, among others, and show how O’Hara differed from these artists with respect to his mechanics and the value he attributed to the completed work. While O’Hara, like Pollock and Pasternak, understands art to be an expression of feeling (which, in turn, is understood to be analogous to the energy or power at work in the material world), the end of art, for O’Hara, is not so much to tell us about these elemental forces that shape the material world, but rather to renew our experience of it. This does not mean that art does not tell us something about our feelings and about the world in which we live. However, for O’Hara, it does not express, in André Breton’s (1896–1966) words, some hitherto imperceptible “superior reality,” or detail some “supreme language,” as Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) hoped.10 It is this somewhat less ambitious, more pragmatic view of art that, in the end, most distinguishes O’Hara’s work from the work of previous poets and from the work of a number of his contemporaries. Before a new evaluation of O’Hara’s work is offered, however, the claim that O’Hara somehow uses words in the way that Pollock uses paint, and the theory of language implicit in such a claim, must first be examined in detail.
While it is often claimed that O’Hara’s use of language in his poems is similar to Pollock’s use of paint in his abstract paintings, this notion fails to take into consideration the essential differences between the two mediums. Nowhere are these differences clearer than in O’Hara’s poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” (1956). While the poem is light and humorous, O’Hara makes a serious distinction between painting and poetry. Indeed, O’Hara often uses humor when referring to his own work or aesthetics simply to keep from sounding too self-important.
In the poem, O’Hara compares the processes of creation in Mike Golderg’s painting Sardines (1955) and his own poem “Oranges: 12 Pastorals” (1949). While there are a number of similarities, in particular between the process of creation in painting and the process of creation in writing, O’Hara also makes a number of distinctions. In fact, the title of the poem is a play on a proposed but never completed book by Apollinaire called Et moi aussi je suis peintre (And I Too Am a Painter), the advertisement of which was printed at the end of Robert Motherwell’s 1949 translation of Apollinaire’s Les peintres cubistes (1913). In his chapter on Picasso, Apollinaire writes that Picasso uses words and numbers in his paintings as “pictorial elements.”11 While Apollinaire did not argue that a poet could use words as paint, as is clear from his Calligrammes (1918), he tried to apply the cubist notion of simultane-ism and bring the “plastic” elements of words to the fore.12 In his poem, however, O’Hara highlights the material differences between poetry and paint.
The opening lines of the poem state that it will be about “why” O’Hara is not a painter—that is, “why” what O’Hara does cannot be considered painting. Despite this, O’Hara begins with a shared aspect of his and Goldberg’s work: both are created out of a process of exploration. O’Hara writes:
WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
(CP, 262)
O’Hara notes that Goldberg begins with the word “SARDINES,” not because the painting is about sardines but because the painting “needed something.” This nonchalant explanation of Goldberg’s artistic decision implies that the word “SARDINES” is used for no other reason than that it happened to be available. O’Hara himself begins with “thinking of a color,” which happens to be “orange.” He begins with orange not because the poem will be about the color—after all, he finishes the poem and does not even mention the color—but because he happened to be thinking of orange. While the ironic inversion of Goldberg beginning with a word and O’Hara beginning with a color could be used to claim that O’Hara equates painting and poetry, the opposite is in fact the case, as we shall see in a moment. What is important here is that the word “SARDINES” and the color orange are the respective starting points for both Goldberg’s and O’Hara’s exploration of their feelings in the material of their mediums. Both artists produce, after a number of days, a completed work that does not contain the initial word or color. Goldberg’s painting entitled SARDINES no longer has the word “SARDINES” in it (though it still contains some of the letters), and O’Hara’s poem “ORANGES” does not contain the word “orange” in the completed text of what are now twelve poems.
Despite this shared aesthetic of exploration, there are a number of differences between the two works that are related to the differences between the two mediums. The first is found in how both Goldberg and O’Hara explore themselves in the materials of their respective mediums. While Goldberg both adds and suppresses images and words, O’Hara only adds words. Furthermore, this addition of words seems to be paratactical. The seeming speed of composition (“I write a line / about orange. Pretty soon it is a / whole page of words, not lines”) and O’Hara’s reference to his nascent poem as a “page of words” implies that what holds the poem together as a unit is the material limits of the page itself and not some unifying theme or subject matter to which all of the words on the page are related. While O’Hara could, of course, return to previous sections of the poem and delete words, the mechanics of writing itself means that such a return would be perceived as an act of editing and not as an act of exploration. Unlike Golderg’s layering, deleting words in a poem neither seems spontaneous nor leaves a trace of the original word or phrase. While O’Hara could have used a line to strike through a particular word or phrase, which would leave a trace of the original word or phrases, such an action would seem too planned. O’Hara, of course, did revise his poems; however, it was important to him that his work appear spontaneous.“I don’t believe in reworking—too much,” he writes tellingly (SS, 21, emphasis added).
This leads to a second difference between the two works, which is found in the respective scales of each. While Goldberg’s exploration of paint takes place on a predetermined scale, O’Hara’s exploration creates the scale of the work as he writes. This has important implications, as we shall see in a moment, for the use of painting terms such as “push-pull” and “surface,” because these terms assume a predetermined scale.
A third difference between Goldberg’s painting and O’Hara’s poem is found in the nonrepresentational use of words. O’Hara points to the fact that while a painter can use words or letters as abstract expressive images, a poet must use them, at least in part, as representational vehicles for no other reason than that part of what makes a word a word is its representational function. For example, Goldberg uses the word “SARDINES” in his painting not because the painting is a representation of sardines or the word “SARDINES,” but rather because in the process of exploring his feelings in his materials, Goldberg finds that it needs the image of the word “SARDINES” much in the same manner that it might need a bit of blue here or a bit of red there. The fact that he later discovers that the word “SARDINES” is “too much” underlines the use of the word as a nonfigurative expression of the painter’s feelings. This abstract expression of the artist’s feelings through letters in painting is quite different from the poet’s expression of his feelings in words. While the poem is not about the color orange, the poet, unlike the painter, cannot express his feelings in pure abstraction, but must use words, which, in turn, evoke the concrete objects or concepts represented in them. Therefore, while O’Hara writes that his poem is not “of orange” but “of words,” he immediately adds “of how terrible orange is / and life.”
The notion that the poet cannot escape the de facto representational element of words is underscored in the poem in Goldberg’s decision to begin with a word and O’Hara’s decision to begin with a color. Because Goldberg is a painter, everything he uses in his paintings, even the word “SARDINES” is a “pictorial element.” As a poet, however, O’Hara cannot use a word as a “pictorial element” alone, even if he can direct our attention to the material elements of words. Indeed, even pure “pictorial elements,” such as color, must be represented with a word or a string of words. This is the reason that O’Hara distinguished, on at least two occasions, between painting and poetry in terms of “naming.” In “Memorial Day 1950,” for example, which will be discussed in detail in the following chapter, O’Hara writes that “naming things is only the intention / to make things,” and in “To Larry Rivers” (1954), he writes: “You do what I can only name” (CP, 18, 128). In both of these remarks, O’Hara contrasts a poem’s inescapable linguistic nature with the made things of painting and the plastic arts.
If this is the case, it is problematic to apply painting terms, as Perloff does, such as “surface” and “push-pull” to O’Hara’s poems. As far as the term “surface” is concerned, for example Perloff seems to have two rather different definitions of it that slip in and out of the book depending on the needs of the argument. On the one hand, she uses “surface” to refer to the absence of symbolism, while, on the other, she uses it to refer to the absence of representational content. Nowhere is this double definition clearer than in a passage from her opening chapter where she defines the “surface” of O’Hara’s poems with reference to the “surface” of Pollock’s paintings. As Perloff points out, O’Hara referred to the surface of his own poems on two separate occasions. First, in his “Notes on Second Avenue” (1953), he writes that, “the verbal elements [of the poem] are not too interesting to discuss although they are intended consciously to keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious” (CP, 497). Second, in a 1957 letter to Larry Rivers, which Rivers incorporated into a collage, he writes: “Now please tell me if you think these poems are filled with disgusting self-pity, if there are ’holes’ in them, if the surface isn’t kept ’up,’ if there are recognizable images, if they show nostalgia for the avant-garde, or they don’t have ’push’ and ’pull,’ and I’ll keep working on them until each is a foot high” (quoted in FOH, 22).
To define O’Hara’s use of the term “surface” in these two instances, Perloff turns to O’Hara’s monograph on Jackson Pollock (1959). In it, she points out that O’Hara defines the “surface” of Pollock’s paintings as the “field” where “the physical energies of the artist operate in actual detail, in full scale” (FOH, 23). She then applies this definition of “surface” to O’Hara’s poems:
The surface of the painting, and by analogy the surface of the poem, must, then, be regarded as a field upon which the physical energies of the artist can operate, without mediation of metaphor or symbol. The poet’s images—for example, the “hum-colored / cabs,” the “yellow helmets” worn by the laborers, or the “glass of papaya juice” in “A Step Away From Them”—are not symbolic properties; there is nothing behind these surfaces. Rather, their positioning in the poet’s field, their push and pull interaction, function metonymically to create a microcosm of the poet’s New York world—a world verifiable on any city map yet also fictive in its fantastic configurations. (FOH, 23)
While Perloff uses the word “surface” in this passage to refer to “images” that lack symbolic significance, arguing in the subsequent paragraph that this “distrust of symbolism is a central tenet of O’Hara’s poetic,” she implies that the “images” also somehow lack representational content. This is implied in her statement that “there is nothing behind” the surface of the words of the poem, and that the “surface” of the poem is the “field” on which O’Hara’s “physical energies” somehow “operate, without mediation of metaphor or symbol.” That Perloff is using the word “symbol” here in its linguistic rather than literary sense is perhaps underscored when she claims that the words of his poems are not “symbolic properties,” which seems to mean that they are not signs, rather than claiming, for example, that they lack symbolic significance, which would mean that the words of the poem, while representational, do not have some second or third meaning.13
While Perloff is correct to point to O’Hara’s interest in the material nature of language, this interest cannot be discussed in the same terms that one discusses a painter’s interest in the plasticity and color of paint, for the simple reason that words and paint are different kinds of stuff. In painting criticism, for example, the term “surface” is used to refer to the artist’s use of the horizontal and the perpendicular dimensions of the canvas, and the term “depth” to refer to the illusion of a third dimension. In the cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963), however, the surface is not used as a means of providing the paintings with a more “accurate” re-creation of visual perception, but rather to create the illusion that the partial forms of the paintings are, in fact, protruding out of the canvas.14
When applied to the nonfigurative work of Jackson Pollock, the terms “surface” and “depth” still refer to the distinction between the two-dimensional plane of the canvas and the illusion of a third dimension. In Pollock, however, there is a difference, as there is in cubism, in how “depth” is created and in what it signifies. First, “depth” is no longer created through the interaction of two-dimensional images in Pollock’s nonfigurative works in the way that it is in the relative size and position of figures with respect to a vanishing point in the canvas in Raphael Sanzio’s The School of Athens (1509–11), or in the superimposition of spatial planes, as in cubism. Rather, it is created through the spatial relationship of points of color in the paint itself. This is Hans Hofmann’s classic point, when he writes, for example, in “The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts” (1948) that “depth” in Pollock’s paintings “in a pictorial plastic sense is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull.”15 Drawing from Wassily Kandinsky’s distinction in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) between warm, advancing colors and cold, retreating ones, Hofmann defines push-pull as the use of cool colors (blues and greens) to pull the picture backward and the use of hot colors (reds and yellows) to push the picture forward.16 Thus, depth becomes part of the material surface of the paint rather than an illusion, and is used, in turn, to express or evoke cognitive states or emotions rather than to re-create visual experience.
While it may be possible in painting to express one’s feelings in the material “surface” of paint itself (to which “depth” has now been assimilated), the notion that one can do so with the material element of words alone does not hold up under close scrutiny. Thus, while David LeHardy Sweet suggests, following both Perloff and Smith, that poets such as O’Hara use fragmentation to join the “the signifier and its referent” at the “level of the sign itself as a material fact or facet,” this ignores the fact that in Western languages, at least, the meaning of words cannot be fused with the typography of signs alone, even if O’Hara uses what he calls “verbal elements” to highlight the material elements of words, as we shall see in chapter 2.17
Furthermore, it misunderstands O’Hara’s remarks on the “surface” of his poems in his “Notes on Second Avenue.” After stating that he hopes that the meaning of the poem and the surface of the poem are one, O’Hara adds: “I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it” (CP, 497). O’Hara’s main point in his “Notes” is that the meaning of the poem cannot be reduced to its constituent parts, but is found at the level of the completed work itself. Far from saying anything radical in these notes, O’Hara is restating (albeit using the occasional painting term) the ideas of both Pasternak and Pound concerning form and poetic meaning.
Recalling Pasternak’s remark that the work of art as a whole “does not lend itself to quotation,” O’Hara claims that the meaning of his poem cannot be reduced to its constituent parts, and states somewhat begrudgingly: “These notes which I’m attaching to the excerpts sometimes indicate, because you requested it, a more detailed identification of the subject matter (in some cases just a last name) than I wanted in the poem itself because it is beside the poem’s point in most cases; elsewhere the remarks are explanatory of what I now feel my attitude was toward the material, not explanatory of the meaning which I don’t think can be paraphrased (or at least I hope it can’t)” (CP, 495). The notion that the work of art cannot be paraphrased is common among artists, and has been in existence since at least Coluccio Salutati’s De laboribus Herculis (1406), which argues that the discourse of poetry (“poeticum narrationem”) is distinct from other forms of representation. 18 For O’Hara, however, Second Avenue cannot be paraphrased not so much because it is a different form of expression than prose (which, of course, it is), but because the meaning it embodies is not represented in the words alone but enacted in the verbal elements of the poem as well. Therefore, it cannot be reduced to a descriptive prose statement without losing something of its overall significance.
Perloff runs into a similar problem in her use of the phrase “push-pull,” which she defines later in the book as the use of “syntactic and prosodic devices” to create a surface “energy” (FOH, 135). While Perloff does not analyze O’Hara’s use of these devices in detail, she is correct to note that O’Hara uses them in his poems and that his use of them is related, in part, to his poetics of expression. However, it can be confusing to claim, as she does, that the “tension” or “energy” that these devices create is “equivalent” to “the spatial tensions” of “the painter’s push-pull” surface (135). Perloff writes:
When these syntactic and prosodic devices are used in conjunction, we get a poetry of great speed, openness, flexibility, and defiance of expectations. Like the “all-over” painting, an O’Hara lyric often seems intentionally deprived of a beginning, middle, and end; it is an instantaneous performance. Syntactic energy is thus equivalent to the painter’s “push-pull”—the spatial tensions that keep a surface alive and moving. The rapid cuts from one spatial or temporal zone to another, moreover, give the poetry its peculiar sense of immediacy: everything is absorbed into the NOW. (FOH, 135)
Again, Perloff is correct to note that these elements create a certain structural “energy” in O’Hara’s poems. However, this energy or tension is also different from the “spatial tensions” of the works of abstract expressionism. First, as noted above, “push-pull” is the use of lines, planes, and colors in painting to either “push” the painting forward or “pull” it backward. The use of two dimensions in painting to create the illusion of a third dimension implicit in the term “push and pull” has no one-to-one parallel with the use of signs to refer to states of affairs. Second, unlike the absence of a coherent image in painting, the use of indeterminate language in a poem to create an incoherent thematic expression tends to slow the reading of a poem down rather than speed it up and absorb the constituent parts of the poem “into the NOW.” Poems that use the devices Perloff mentions—“Easter” (1952), Second Avenue, and “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)” (1962), to name a few—are long, difficult works that take time to read and assimilate. Third, to return to the issue of scale: unlike paintings, all of O’Hara’s poems have at least a beginning and an end (except for “Poem (WHE EWHEE)” (1950) in which O’Hara parodies Apollinaire’s Calligrammes), even if we are unable to attach a particular thematic significance to the first or last words of the poem. Thus, unlike a painting, the words of a poem are encountered in a set order. While an individual mark or image on a canvas (such as the letters of the word “SARDINES”) acts and reacts with all the other marks or images on a canvas, individual words or phrases in a longer poem, while perhaps acting and reacting in this manner with other words and phrases in close proximity, do not do so with all of the words and phrases of the poem. Furthermore, O’Hara uses other devices besides indeterminate language, including different kinds of allusion, double metaphors, and repetition.
What Perloff does not mention in her application of O’Hara’s comments on Pollock to his own work is that O’Hara is simply restating the accepted view of the elements of “surface” and “depth” in Pollock’s painting. O’Hara writes, for example, in Jackson Pollock (1959):
Pollock choosing to use no images with real visual equivalents and having not building in mind, struck upon a use of scale which was to have a revolutionary effect on contemporary painting and sculpture. The scale of the painting became that of the painter’s body, not the image of a body, and the setting for the scale, which would include all referents, would be the canvas surface itself. Upon this field the physical energies of the artist operate in actual detail, in full scale; the action of inspiration traces its marks of Apelles with no reference to exterior image or environment. It is scale, and no-scale. It is the physical reality of the artist and his activity of expressing it, united to the spiritual reality of the artist in a oneness which has no need for the mediation of metaphor or symbol. It is Action Painting. (AC, 34)
What O’Hara notes is that Pollock’s choice of scale is not determined by the objects he wishes to represent in his work, because his action paintings are not representations of visual experience at all but rather expressions of the “energies” of the artist himself. O’Hara restates here, for example, Robert Goodnough’s claim in “Pollock Paints a Picture” (1951) that artists such as Pollock “are not concerned with representing a preconceived idea, but rather with being involved in an experience of paint and canvas, directly, without interference from the suggested forms and colors of existing objects,” and Harold Rosenberg’s statement in “The American Action Painters” (1952) that the canvas for Pollock was “an arena in which to act—rather than ... a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or ’express’ an object, actual or imagined.”19
While O’Hara’s work is indeed different, this difference is not found in his supposed use of language as paint or espousal of poststructuralist theories of language. Taking O’Hara’s literary debt to so-called modern poets more seriously, and providing a more coherent explanation of his relationship with painters such as Picasso, Paul Klee (1879–1940), Max Ernst (1891–1976), Pollock, and Robert Motherwell (1915–91), among others, this work will argue that what distinguishes O’Hara is his radical combination of the notion of writing as an act of exploring his feelings in his work and the emphasis he himself places on the effects of the completed work.20 As will be shown in chapter 1, in “Memorial Day 1950” (1950), O’Hara draws from expressionist notions of creation, and distinguishes his “messy” poems from the controlled constructivism of other poets and artists. His expressionism is grounded in his love of the material world rather than “in dreams,” as it was for the surrealists, and has as its goal the enrichment of our experience of the material world. His poems, O’Hara implies, are like sewage plants. In exploring his feelings in his work, the poet transforms the old, exhausted forms of the self’s interaction with the world into new ones that he hopes are “richer than a river” (CP, 18).
The purpose of his poems can be characterized in at least two ways. In his “Statement for The New American Poetry” (1959), for example, he writes: “It may be that poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time” (CP, 500). On the one hand, then, as we shall see in chapter 3, certain poems are acts of naming the intangible world, with its rapid movements and the constant passing of time, so that moments of experience might be felt in the fullest possible sense. His poems make “life’s nebulous events tangible.” On the other hand, as we shall see in chapter 2, other poems function to highlight the irreducible nature of experience itself and point to the fact that an effort to organize it into some comprehensive, coherent whole is always reductive, and, for O’Hara, boring as well. It is in this sense that his poems highlight “the intangible quality of incidents” that are “too concrete and circumstantial.”
Failure to understand this can lead to a misunderstanding of the value and significance of O’Hara’s work. Thus, for example, while Charles Altieri is correct, at least in part, to see in O’Hara’s work an emphasis on “radical presence,” he defines this as “the insistence that the moment immediately and intensely experienced can restore one to harmony with the world and provide ethical and psychological renewal.”21 O’Hara, however, is not concerned with restoring “harmony,” but rather with renewing our interest in our present experience. Therefore, while Altieri provides a number of insightful remarks concerning O’Hara’s verse, in the end he faults O’Hara for failing to accomplish objectives that he never set for himself in the first place. Summarizing his treatment of O’Hara, Altieri writes: “His influence and popularity are considerably greater than his achievements—a phenomenon attributable to many factors including his sheer entertainment value and the notoriety of his pathetic and unexpected death.”22 The notion, however, that O’Hara’s “entertainment value” is “considerably greater than his achievements” misses the point of much of O’Hara’s work and ignores one of O’Hara’s principal concerns in it, which is precisely showing us the great value of “entertainment,” if we take the word “entertainment” to mean an intense interest in the present moment. For O’Hara, art teaches us how to experience time. O’Hara himself says as much when he writes in “Larry Rivers: A Memoir” (1965) that “[W]hile much of the art of our time has been involved with direct conceptual or ethical considerations, Rivers has chosen to mirror his preoccupations and enthusiasms in an unpro-grammatic way.” O’Hara concludes that to maintain interest in the present moment is one of the essential values of art: “What his work has always had to say to me, I guess, is to be more keenly interested while I’m still alive. And perhaps this is the most important thing art can say” (SS, 171, 173).
Thus, as we shall see in chapter 4, for O’Hara, writing is a testament of the self—of the fact that there is such a thing as the self—but it is not, in addition to this, a means of either discovering some absolute definition of the nature of some essential self or organizing one’s experience into some harmonious, coherent whole that can be recognized and comprehended. The self, as an expression of the creative force at work in the world, is irreducible, multiple, and always changing. Thus, unlike other poets in the lyric tradition since Wordsworth, O’Hara does not believe his work can somehow bring him closer to some aboriginal or transhistorical self. Rather, he hopes his work will renew our present experience of the world. It is in this sense, among others, that he characterizes, as we shall see in chapter 1 and in chapter 5, the creative act as an act of love toward the material world.
If what poetry and art teach us is how to feel and how to remain interested in our experience, it is of utmost importance for O’Hara that his poems are, as he writes in relation to Kenneth Koch (1925–2002), “not dull” (SS, 60). To fail to engage the interest of others is, for O’Hara, to fail to accomplish one of the basic functions of art. As he writes in “Digression on Number 1, 1948” (1956), art is that which reminds us that
They’ll
never fence the silver range.
Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see.
(CP, 260)
The “silver range” is O’Hara’s experience of the world, and poetry and art remind him of what he believes to be the infinite depth of it.