[In the following essay, Lowney explores O'Hara's utilization of parody, appropriation, and allusion in his poetry and addresses his treatment of the “issue of cultural memory in postwar America.”]

It's so
original, hydrogenic, anthropomorphic, fiscal, post-anti-esthetic, bland, unpicturesque and WilliamCarlosWilliamsian!
it's definitely not 19th Century, it's not even Partisan Review, it's new, it must be vanguard!

—Frank O'Hara, “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's”

In “Personism: A Manifesto,” Frank O'Hara writes that “Personism” was “founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone” (Collected Poems 499). In accentuating the moment in which this “movement” was “founded and which nobody knows about,” this manifesto / “diary” (498) mocks the pretentiousness of vanguardist polemics. Similarly, “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's,” O'Hara's celebration of Jane Freilicher's impending marriage to Joe Hazan, playfully inscribes his poetic stance within the “vanguard,” as “it's” signifies not only the poem's occasion but the act of celebration itself. Like “Personism,” “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's” dramatizes a moment of emotional urgency: the fear of losing his close friendship with Jane Freilicher informs O'Hara's subtle satire of the institution of marriage. Yet like so much of his poetry, this “occasional poem” self-consciously reflects on its own place in the “tradition of the new.” The description of the marriage combines economic and aesthetic terms, situating this poetic act within the cultural politics of representing the “vanguard”; an “original” act, as the intensifier “so” implies, is original only insofar as it is mediated by definitions of the “new.” The proper name describing this “original” marriage, “WilliamCarlosWilliamsian,” epitomizes this recognition, for Williams's name represents a site of contention in the 1950s “poetry wars,” not only for his literary reputation but for the meaning of American modernism. While Williams was variously invoked as a predecessor for the “new American poetry,” the academic writing of him into the modernist canon was blunting the critical edge of his early “vanguard” poetics.¹ This “WilliamCarlosWilliamsian” marriage marks both O'Hara's affiliation with Williams's poetics and the objectification of his name as the commodity, “vanguard” writer. The parodic tone of this gesture furthermore suggests O'Hara's critique of the masculinist, Americanist stance associated with Williams's postwar protégés.² Whether in mock manifesto or mock epithalamion, such references to modern literary history—although seemingly offhand—challenge claims like Helen Vendler's influential overview of O'Hara that “the will not to impute significance has scarcely been stronger in lyric poetry” (183). Instead O'Hara's modulations of vanguardist rhetoric frequently foreground not only the politics of literary reputation but also his own position within conflicting constructions of modernism. In the following pages I will examine how the intertextual devices of parody, appropriation, and allusion operate in O'Hara's revision of modernism, especially of the modernist lyric, to show how his “post-anti-esthetic” poetics of the quotidian addresses the issue of cultural memory in postwar America.

The majority of O'Hara's academic readers have concurred with Vendler that his poetry levels the “significant” with the mundane, thus rejecting traditional modes of poetic transcendence. His best-known poems, the occasional poems he called his “‘I do this I do that’ poems” (Collected Poems 341), are most frequently cited to exemplify his interest in the “ordinary incident” instead of the “important public” event (Perloff 147). Vendler attributes O'Hara's refusal to “impute significance” to his effort “to make the personal the poetic” (183), thus severing the personal from the ideological. Other critics have explained O'Hara's evasion of symbolist correspondences by demonstrating his radical transformation of lyric subjectivity. In his reading of O'Hara's revisionary “poetics of immanence,” Charles Altieri stresses the anxiety informing O'Hara's play of surfaces, his landscape without depth, without underlying significance (108-22). In emphasizing the ever-changing experience of temporal process in O'Hara's poetry, James E. B. Breslin similarly concludes that experience in his poetry is “absorbed with a kind of evenly suspended attention that does not permit discrimination, emphasis, or even interpretation” (217). Even those analyses that situate O'Hara's poetics in socioeconomic terms, such as Charles Molesworth's summation that his poetry represents the “highest product of commodity-market capitalism” (94), or in the oppositional politics of gay language practices (Boone), base their claims on the leveling process effected especially by his paratactic syntax. I would like to concentrate on one question this leveling process raises, that of O'Hara's postmodernist representation of modern literary and cultural history. None of O'Hara's readers fully account for his intertextual evocations of the vanguardist stance whose critical edge he seeks to retain yet whose critical mode appears inadequate for addressing postwar American historical conditions. The tone of crisis so prevalent in O'Hara's poetry is informed by an acute sensitivity to the oppressive mechanisms that an ideology which represses difference can deploy. And this tone evokes the more general threat of nuclear annihilation, a threat which paradoxically levels distinctions between kinds of experience while heightening awareness of the ephemerality of the quotidian. O'Hara's poetry demonstrates that the progressivist faith in technology and technique that animates Williams's vanguardist dictum to “make it new” can no longer be asserted unproblematically.

If formulations of postmodernism tend to dispute how postmodernist texts reflect or subvert the social effects of postwar capitalism, they generally agree that postmodernist and modernist aesthetics can be differentiated by their positions toward the past. Fredric Jameson has argued that postmodernism's “commitment to surface and the superficial” signifies a retreat from the “protopolitical vocation and the terrorist stance of the older modernism” (Foreword xviii). In distinguishing pastiche from parody, Jameson further argues that postmodernist art thematizes the failure of the modernist project (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society”).³ Given the eclipse of conditions for modernist stylistic innovation—that is, of individualism and of any linguistic norm with which to contrast styles—postmodernist imitation lacks any satirical impulse. Instead of parody, pastiche is thus the only possible mode for responding to the past: “All that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and through the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past” (115). Jameson's formulation accurately describes the play of allusion and quotation on the textual surface of a writer like O'Hara. O'Hara's writing, however, represents less an “imprisonment in the past” than the recognition that history is accessible only through its representations. If O'Hara's multivalent texts suggest that style is not freely expressed but is written through cultural codes, they also reveal that history is not a given that is immediately accessible by allusion but rather must be always constructed. Furthermore, Jameson's totalizing formulation of postmodernism as a cultural dominant, following Ernest Mandel's socioeconomic periodization, obscures how postmodernist practices often retain the vanguardist oppositional impulse while rejecting the formalist notion of textual autonomy, as Andreas Huyssen and Linda Hutcheon have argued. Huyssen's analysis of postwar American cultural politics is especially germane for analyzing the poetry of the New York school. He underlines the importance of the reception and institutionalization of modernism—in the academy, as well as in the “burgeoning museum, gallery, concert, record and paperback culture”—for defining the adversarial stance of 1960s postmodernism: “It was this specific radicalism of the avantgarde, directed against the institutionalization of high art as a discourse of hegemony and a machinery of meaning, that recommended itself as a source of energy and inspiration to the American postmodernists of the 1960's. … The irony in all of this is that the first time the U.S. had something resembling an ‘institution art’ in the emphatic European sense, it was modernism itself, the kind of art whose purpose had always been to resist institutionalization” (192-93).⁴ From his prominent position within “institution art,” that is, within the New York art-publishing and museum world, O'Hara in his poetry actually invokes a dialogical relation between past traditions and the present more analogous to Charles Jencks's examples of postmodernist architecture and Hutcheon's examples of “historiographic metafiction” than to clearly politically marked postmodernist practices. Jencks argues that postmodernist architecture subverts modernist aestheticism through a process of “double coding,” an interplay of modernist technique with allusion to popular traditions to communicate both with “experts” and a more general public audience (14). In O'Hara's case, if the “experts,” literary critics and historians, concentrate primarily on the narrative surface of his poetry, it is because his process of double coding challenges this dichotomy of experts and public. Many of his most obscurely autobiographical texts also participate in the general project of rewriting modern literary history. While his poetry appeals to a general audience through its recognizable narrative structures, it challenges “experts” to become conversant with the details of his life, especially within the New York art world and the gay community, as well as with modern literary history. In stressing the moment and site of enunciation, and frequently the specific receiver as well as the sender of the poetic text, O'Hara subverts the expertise of literary critics while enhancing the value of “local” knowledge.

An early O'Hara poem which cogently, although obliquely, evokes the postwar crisis of historical memory that Jameson associates with the postmodern is “Memorial Day 1950.” This “pastiche” of modernist styles critically interrogates the concept of the “vanguard,” anticipating O'Hara's more specific, more explicit practice and explanation of intertextuality in his later lyric poetry and criticism. Marjorie Perloff cites this poem, written during O'Hara's final year at Harvard, as a breakthrough which adumbrates his later distinctive poetic achievement, the fusion of the surrealist “dialectic of polarized images” with Williams's colloquialism (49). Yet this poem not only replicates the vanguardist techniques of the artists it names, it enacts an interrogation of the subtexts relating modernism and modernity. From the poem's title—specifying a moment of reflection at the midpoint of the twentieth century—until its enigmatic yet apocalyptic conclusion, “Memorial Day 1950” fuses and confuses personal memory with codified historical memory, personal desire with textual knowledge, imagination with recollection. The title memorializes not only the moment of reflection but the moments reflected on, from the reflection on the war dead designated by the official holiday to the poet's reflection on his biological and literary “parents.” In what seem like random associations between fractured literary fragments and recollections of childhood trauma, the poem explores the structures of feeling linking aesthetic vanguardism with military vanguardism. While mocking the self-aggrandizing posture of both the aesthetic manifesto and the bildungsroman, the poem conveys a version of modern literary history that acknowledges the rhetorical appeal of vanguardist utopianism while questioning the corresponding impulse to destroy past accomplishments. In parodying modernist texts, it mocks its own destructive impulse. In leaving the poet's attitude toward his modernist predecessors ambivalent, “Memorial Day 1950” implicates its readers in a questioning of how aesthetic forms represent modes of interpreting history.

The semantic instability of “Memorial Day 1950” begins with its cryptic opening sentence:

Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world;
just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down
outside my window by a crew of creators.

(Collected Poems 17)

The comma which separates “and the world” from the initial clause is especially puzzling, as it raises questions concerning both the production and the reception of complex artistic texts. What is the status of “made” in this clause? Do we locate the semantic stress on the act of making, the “made” text, or the audience “made … tough and quick” by the text? Did Picasso make “me … and the world,” thus implying the poet's total identification with Picasso's made world? Or is he maintaining some distance from Picasso while affirming the effects of his painting? Such interpretive questions are specific to complex artistic texts, but they also foreground the interpreter's historical difference. To consider Picasso in 1950 calls into question the relation of cubist aesthetics to modern warfare posited by such commentaries as Gertrude Stein's: “I very well remember at the beginning of the war being with Picasso on the boulevard Raspail when the first camouflage truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not yet seen it and Picasso amazed looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism” (37). Furthermore, it is impossible to read “Picasso,” perhaps the signifier for the international avant-garde, without acknowledging the diverse appropriations of his aesthetics and his name. As the poem's parody of Stein's syntax and diction suggests, the effect of Picasso's multiple technical revolutions on the poet's own development cannot be severed from the objectification of Picasso as a cultural icon. As the opening line of “Memorial Day 1950” dramatizes the semantic instability of vanguardist texts through its fractured syntax, the conclusion of this opening sentence, although an apparently straightforward statement, becomes more questionable in its equation of destruction and creation. The textualized trees, “in a minute plane” of the cubist surface, fuse with the “plane trees … outside my window.” The mundane act of knocking down trees to “create” a new landscape, an act epitomizing bourgeois progressivism, evolves into the image of Picasso the ax wielder. In the understated tone of this first verse paragraph, the poem establishes a problematic affiliation of vanguardist manifesto rhetoric with the rhetoric of warfare: “to fight for the last ditch and heap / of rubbish” in response to Picasso asserts the value of the quotidian and the demotic for artistic texts, but only because the context of modern warfare animates our awareness of such value.

It could be argued that “Memorial Day 1950” is hardly surrealist at all, that the images of artistic production, warfare, and bourgeois family life follow an internal logic of violent rebellion that challenges the polarity of destruction and creation. The poem does not follow consistently logical rhetorical patterns, however. Its generative principle appears to arise from the exhaustion felt by the artist in the wake of the historical avant-garde, as the second verse paragraph implies:

                                                            Through all that surgery I thought
I had a lot to say, and named several last things
Gertrude Stein hadn't had time for; but then
the war was over, those things had survived
and even when you're scared art is no dictionary.
Max Ernst told us that.

This passage epitomizes the anxiety of the postmodernist poet that everything has been said, that formal innovation is no longer possible, and that the world wars have achieved the act of revolutionary destruction that vanguardist rhetoric called for. The postwar artist must then accept a role analogous to that of Alice B. Toklas, the “autobiographical” subject constructed by Stein, as the poet is “made” by Picasso. The remainder of the poem enacts this process of literary ventriloquism, as the names and words of Klee, Auden, Rimbaud, Pasternak, and Apollinaire, among others, comically reverberate through the fragments of battles the young poet has with his parents. In fusing vanguardist models of rebellion with the recollections of his own adolescent rebellion, O'Hara imparts an absurd sense of the quotidian to these artists whose earlier transformations of everyday life had earned them a monumental status by 1950. And in situating these fragmentary fusings of manifestos and family disputes in the bloodshed of modern warfare, O'Hara imparts an urgency to his poem's articulation of its own historical moment. “Memorial Day 1950” enacts a process of appropriation and distancing from O'Hara's modernist predecessors, as one of its buried narratives, the transformation of Picasso's “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” epitomizes. At first the original “maker,” Picasso is next invoked through his best-known commentary on wartime destruction: “Guernica hollered look out.” Immediately following this, the poet figures himself as the artist in “tight blue pants,” as he confronts his disapproving parents. His parents are then generalized as the “older people” who “entered / my cheap hotel room and broke / my guitar and my can / of blue paint.” The figure made by Picasso has now become the maker, the man with the “can / of blue paint,” as well as the made, the man with the guitar. This image reappears in the poem's conclusion:

Guitar strings hold up pictures. I don't need
a piano to sing, and naming things is only the intention
to make things.

In distancing himself from the maker of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” O'Hara does not reject the technical accomplishments of Picasso, not to mention Wallace Stevens; rather, he rejects the definition of art that limits the object to its exchange value as a commodity. In figuring his own poetic stance as an improvisational act of holding up pictures with guitar strings, O'Hara portrays the postmodernist representation of the past as a mode of bricolage. “Memorial Day 1950” is indeed a pastiche of vanguardist rhetoric, yet its parodic play on modes of rebellion underscores the complex historicity of any aesthetic, including (and especially) that of its own.

O'Hara's statements on the social functions of art are diffuse and sometimes contradictory, but his occasional writings on his contemporaries, in both the literary and visual arts, express a more complex consideration of the historical difference of the avant-garde in postwar American culture than is generally acknowledged. In differentiating between the European notion of vanguardism and its American counterpart in “American Art and Non-American Art,” O'Hara claims that European art treats the aesthetic and the political as equally important distinct categories, whereas American art combines the aesthetic with the political, thus resulting in its “metaphysical quality” (Standing Still 97). Yet this does not mean that art in America serves no social function. Citing Gregory Corso's poem “Bomb,” he writes: “It is the character of the avant-garde to absorb and transform disparate qualities not normally associated with art, for the artist to take within him the violence and evil of his times and come out with something. … In this way society can bear and understand and finally appreciate the qualities of alien and even dangerous things” (98). This description of the avant-garde's relation to “society” corresponds with O'Hara's understanding of how the vanguardist stance is internalized. In a 1965 interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, O'Hara generalizes that the avant-garde can no longer be defined by a political or socioeconomic condition of detachment or isolation, arguing that when artists such as Andy Warhol become celebrities, such a stance is absurd: “there's no reason to attack a culture that will allow it to happen, and even foster the impulse—and create it. Which is a change, you see, from the general idea of, that all avant-garde art has to be attacking the bourgeoisie” (Standing Still 9). As postwar American capitalism contains opposition to the extent that the marketplace even encourages it, the vanguardist impulse for innovation no longer plays such a viable critical role. What becomes most important, then, is how art positions itself within traditions of innovation and in doing so transforms our perception of past forms. O'Hara's monograph on Jackson Pollock is especially instructive for explaining this conception of intertextuality.

There is nothing unusual about situating the urgency of Pollock's “action painting” in the context of cold war tensions, but the terms of O'Hara's analysis are rarely considered in relation to his own poetic practice: “it is not surprising that faced with universal destruction, as we are told, our art should at last speak with unimpeded force and unveiled honesty to a future which well may be non-existent, in a last effort of recognition which is the justification of being” (Jackson Pollock 22). Pollock's painting thus responds to the inescapable demands of the historical moment with a heightened sensitivity to the passing of time. His paintings are “painfully beautiful celebrations of what will disappear, or has disappeared already, from his world, or what may be destroyed at any moment” (21). If Pollock's method of painting represents a process fundamentally different from that of previous generations of modern painters, it is because his world compels a reconception of history. The postwar threat of annihilation represents an unprecedented scale of apocalypse, for the destruction of the entire world indeed becomes as fundamentally possible as the destruction of the individual body. Action painting's mode for internalizing this sense of crisis is its revolutionary use of scale. The scale of the painting becomes the scale of the painter's body, and the setting for the scale becomes the canvas surface itself. And foregrounding the act of painting preserves the act of resistance to totalizing systems in its historical specificity. For O'Hara's poetics, breath becomes the physiological analogy to the painter's body as a compositional force (Blasing, “Frank O'Hara's Poetics”); foregrounding the act of enunciation similarly enacts resistance to totalizing systems, including those of closed poetic forms.

What ultimately distinguishes O'Hara's interpretation of Pollock from the conventional image of the heroically destructive modern artist is his emphasis on how Pollock's painting preserves what is valuable in previous traditions of painting. Differentiating Pollock's “spirited revaluation” of modern painting from Arshile Gorky's more destructive mode of “assimilation,” O'Hara writes that Pollock

did not appropriate … what was beautiful, frenzied, ugly or candid in others, but enriched it and flung it back to their work, as if it were a reinterpretation for the benefit of all, a clarification and apotheosis which does not destroy the things seen, whether of nature or art, but preserves it in a pure regard. Very few things, it seems, were assimilated or absorbed by Pollock. They were left intact, and given back. Paint is paint, shells and wire are shells and wire, glass is glass, canvas is canvas. You do not find, in his work, a typewriter becoming a stomach, a sponge becoming a brain.

(16)

Although analogous to T. S. Eliot's familiar concept of intertextuality in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” O'Hara's explanation not only rejects the priority of a canonical tradition of high art but emphasizes the way artistic texts transform our perception of the world, or “nature,” as well as our perception of previous texts. Pollock's painting retains the materials, techniques, and imagery of modern art, but they are transformed by his interpretation: the past takes on “reality for us outside his work, as a cultural by-product of his own achievement” (16). With this emphasis on the historicity of formal innovation, the act of preservation O'Hara attributes to Pollock involves a nondestructive, nonadversarial attitude to the past that differs from the historical avant-garde as well as from Eliot's high modernism. Furthermore, Pollock's oeuvre exposes the limitations of reductive definitions of “tradition” or “the individual talent.” In noting that artists who succeed in sustaining a “multiplicity of truths” in a multiplicity of styles are “met with the accusation of ‘no coherent, unifying style,’ rather than a celebration” (11), O'Hara could be answering his own critics. His formulation of Pollock's intertextual “revaluation” of past traditions is especially appropriate for reinterpreting his relation to his modernist predecessors. I will now concentrate on one key example of O'Hara's “revaluation” of vanguardism, the example of his revision of Williams's objectivist poetics, to show how his appropriations of Williams's form, prosody, syntax, and diction play a role similar to Pollock's in accentuating the historical transmission of aesthetic forms.

In 1944, after repeated rejections by publishers who blamed the wartime shortage of paper, Williams published a volume of poems he had first conceived of as “The Lang(WEDGE)” then simplified to “The Language” before finally settling on a military metaphor for his title, The Wedge.⁵ Williams's introduction to The Wedge is an important wartime reconsideration of the social function of poetry, but perhaps more importantly, it represents a crucial point of reference for “avant-garde” poets in the 1950s and 1960s. In emphasizing the continuous “war” of poetic forms, Williams simultaneously universalizes and historicizes the place of formal innovation. To make new forms, the poet must meet the linguistic demands of his or her immediate time and place. Or, to transpose what Williams once said about Whitman (“America” 2), the only way to write like Williams is to write unlike Williams. If this paradox informs the reception and transformation of Williams's poetics by the postwar “new American poetry,” O'Hara's early parodies of him enact a postmodernist revision of his objectivist poetics that inverts his modernist dictum: the only way to write unlike Williams is to write like Williams, but to foreground the intertextual act of doing so.⁶

If we consider “A Sort of a Song,” the introductory poem of The Wedge, as a sort of a summary of Williams's objectivist poetics, we can examine O'Hara's response in two significant instances, in “Today” and in “Poetry.” Its title accentuating its historicity, O'Hara's poem “Today” answers the conclusion of “A Sort of a Song,” Williams's demand for “No ideas / but in things,” with a motley assortment of objects: “kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas” and “pearls, harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins” (Collected Poems 15). This “stuff they've always talked about” that “still makes a poem a surprise!” is hardly “what they've always talked about” in American poetry, hardly the “things” Williams refers to, and hardly the “stuff” which makes a poem a “small machine made of words.” Yet what ultimately makes this short poem a surprise is its shift in tone as it concludes. The association of “these things” with “beachheads and biers” compels a reconsideration of their significance, as “Today” refers to the immediate postwar years. Rather than defamiliarizing the everyday, “Today” foregrounds the ephemerality of everyday “stuff,” including everyday language, as objects seem to be linked as much by the sonorous sequence of names as by appeal to any readily apparent semantic codes. The poem affirms the “meaning” of “things” but does not impose a recognizable order on these things. The use of “stuff” to summarize these objects seems to flaunt a lack of specificity involved in quoting colloquial language. It raises the question of whether these objects are the “stuff” of which this poem is made or the “stuff” from which a poem may yet be made, engaging readers to question their role in producing the poem's meaning. The semantic range of “stuff” itself recalls the war, but its connotations of drugs, of other forms of contraband, and even of literary or journalistic copy call into question the rhetorical function of the poetic image. As if in direct response to “A Sort of a Song” (“through metaphor to reconcile / the people and the stones”), “Today” exerts no demonstrative control over readers' interpretations of the sequence of objects. Instead of Williams's “saxifrage,” the poet's metaphor that “splits / the rocks,” the “things” named are “strong as rocks.” In relinquishing the will to power (to “reconcile,” to “split”), “Today” affirms not “things” in themselves but the dialogue inherent in interpreting the codes that inform this surprising network of names, and that inform our conceptions of poetry's relation to the world of “today.”

O'Hara answers “A Sort of a Song” even more explicitly in “Poetry,” as comparison of the poems' beginnings shows:

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

(Williams, Collected Poems 55)

                    The only way to be quiet
                    is to be quick, so I scare
                    you clumsily, or surprise
                    you with a stab.

(O'Hara, Collected Poems 49)

“Poetry” differs from “A Sort of a Song” most noticeably in its comic, self-deprecating tone. But more significantly, “Poetry” resembles a conversation in its address to an unidentified interlocutor, a “you” that gives this poem a sense of intimacy missing in Williams's more polemical mode. Accordingly, O'Hara replaces Williams's phallic figure of the “snake … under his weed” with the less aggressive, more enigmatic praying mantis, crickets, and zebra, images united by “time,” the measured time of the poetic line figured in three diverse “natural” rhythms. But these “times” are also allusions to inevitable, unpredictable change, the historical “time” which makes such confident proposals as Williams's seem archaic to O'Hara. The conclusion of his poem reiterates this hypersensitivity to time and transformation. The return to the conversational mode of address is accompanied by the speaker's recognition of the fictionality, and perhaps even solipsism, of his projections. Williams's imperative mode of address is replaced with “all this I desire … as if you / were logical and proven, … as if / I were used to you; as if / you would never leave me.” Yet the method of rejecting solipsism, of affirming a dialogical relation with the addressee, is adapted from Williams's characteristic use of enjambment, where the breaks of the short lines occur at surprising syntactic junctures. Thus to “deepen you by my quickness / and delight as if you” simultaneously suggests the speaker's production and reception of “delight.” Similarly, with the line break in the concluding lines, “inexorable / product of my own time,” the addressee/reader is simultaneously the “inexorable” and the “inexorable product” of the poet's time. In appropriating Williams's strategies of enjambment, O'Hara achieves a dramatic structure that engages readers to reflect on the desires informing their own sense of time and historical difference.

From the playful subversion of interpretive authority in “Today” to the more complex dramatization of historicity in “Poetry,” O'Hara's early parodies of “A Sort of a Song” exemplify the prominence of his “appropriation” of Williams's technique during the immediate postwar years. They also exemplify the significance of O'Hara's wartime experience for his ironic interpretation of the 1950s “poetry wars.”⁷ In his “I do this I do that” poems, especially in “lunch poems” such as “The Day Lady Died,” “A Step Away from Them,” or “Personal Poem,” O'Hara's postmodernist “revaluation” of modernist poetics more subtly confronts the philosophical and ideological subtexts of vanguardism. There is certainly minimal subordination of seemingly insignificant elements to greater patterns of meaning in these poems. Because they are narratives, the sequencing of events often overshadows any pattern of symbolic meaning. Although such poems resemble what Roland Barthes would call the classical “readerly” text in their apparently straightforward narrative structure, they continually submit the narrated events to questions concerning their ideological significance, concurring with Barthes's notion of structure in the “writerly” text: “structure is not a design, a schema, a diagram: everything signifies something” (51). The two polar hypotheses describing O'Hara's poetry—the “will not to impute significance” and “everything signifies something”—inform the process of “double coding” which compels readers continually to decide on what is significant while concurrently reflecting on the grounds for such decisions. Such tension makes readers simultaneously attentive to significance in the seemingly insignificant and wary about attributing significance at all, as closer examination of O'Hara's best-known “lunch poem,” “The Day Lady Died,” will show.

“The Day Lady Died” is probably the poem most frequently cited for demonstrating O'Hara's antipoetic stance. Because this poem is an elegy, it is somewhat atypical of the more casual “I do this I do that” poems. The occasion of the poem, the death of Billie Holiday, heightens the significance of the poem's details. Nevertheless, the relation of the details to the poem's generic form remains problematic. The majority of critics agree that the details observed by the poem's speaker are random, that there is little significance to the times, people, places, and events mentioned. These details are the poem's “anti-poetic weight” (Molesworth 19) or mere coincidences which contrast sharply with the seriousness of the occasion. Robert von Hallberg's assessment that the poem's impact depends on its “inadvertent, banal approach to an earnest genre” (178) typifies this critical reaction. On the other hand, critics such as Altieri have argued that the details of the poem do contribute to the feeling of the elegy, although these critics still maintain the contrast between the discontinuity of the reported experiences and the poem's elegiac conclusion (Altieri 120-22). Despite this disagreement about the relation of the poem's details to its impact as an elegy, no one is willing to read too much significance into the details; the appearance that the poet just coincidentally and randomly notices them forecloses such conjecture.

“The Day Lady Died” epitomizes the tension between first and second readings of O'Hara's “I do this I do that” poems. Except for the cryptic title, whose significance would be noted only by those familiar with Billie Holiday, there is no indication that the poem is an elegy until the closing stanza. Like so many of O'Hara's poems, “The Day Lady Died” narrates events in the present tense; the events occur concurrently with the utterance itself. This process of simultaneous composition is less stream of consciousness than consciousness of stream, the stream of urban streets reported in rapid succession. The rapidity of reporting, emphasized through paratactic syntax, constant enjambment, and minimal punctuation, precludes attention to detail. It is only with the poem's apocalyptic closure (“everyone and I stopped breathing”), closure which unites the remembered event with the present, the performance of Holiday's song with the performance of the poem, that the narrated events become significant. Yet even when the poem has “stopped breathing,” the details do not fit into a readily apparent design other than that of the speaker's lunchtime walk itself. The genre of the poem demands the reconstruction of design from its disparate details, but the details resist such reconstruction.

There are a number of references to time in “The Day Lady Died,” typical for the lunch poems O'Hara wrote with one eye on his wrist watch, but particularly significant for a poem about death. These references are hardly uniform, however; there is quite a difference in saying “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday” and saying “three days after Bastille Day” (Collected Poems 325). The first reference situates the poem in a specific yet repeatable time frame, while the second calls attention to the poet's selection of a dramatic descriptive term. “Bastille Day” gives the poem a sense of historical depth which contrasts with the matter-of-fact reporting of departure and arrival times of the Long Island trains the poet plans to take that evening. The reference to Bastille Day hardly seems gratuitous, for many of the poem's succeeding historical and geographical references represent examples of oppression, imprisonment, and revolution, issues intimately related to Billie Holiday's life. When the poet buys “an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days,” he refers to a country (formerly the Gold Coast) which had gained independence in 1957, only two years before the “day Lady died.” The reference to Ghana, rather than to another African country, is especially relevant for Holiday's African-American genealogy, for the Gold Coast had been an important center for the slave trade. Similarly, the books the poet considers buying for “Patsy” are relevant for the final years of Holiday's life, years in which she was trailed by the FBI. The books mentioned, “Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres / of Genet,” concern oppression and rebellion, and the authors were not only noted rebels but had spent time in prison themselves. Behan was twice imprisoned while a member of the IRA, Jean Genet spent much of his life in jails, and Paul Verlaine, whose book the speaker finally decides to buy, spent two years in a Belgian prison after shooting his lover, Arthur Rimbaud. As casual and coincidental as such references to authors and literary texts appear, the pattern of oppression and rebellion they convey casts a powerful shadow over a life the poem elegizes but never explicitly describes.

The other names the poet mentions, names of friends, familiar places, and consumer products, become more resonant with their historicity when juxtaposed to other historical periods, people, and places. The juxtaposition of names (“Patsy,” “Mike”) and places (“the GOLDEN GRIFFIN,” “the PARK LANE / Liquor Store,” “the Ziegfeld Theatre,” “the 5 SPOT”) the poet knows with historical figures and foreign places personalizes the poem's historical references. The mention of people the poet does not know (“the people who will feed me,” “Miss Stillwagon”) along with international trade names (“Strega,” “Gauloises,” “Picayunes”) conflates the impersonal and the international with the personal and the local. As the literary and artistic center of 1950s American culture, New York offers unlimited choice, but only in exchange for the reified subjectivity of consumer capitalism. Finally, except for the reference to Bastille Day, all of the poem's references to “foreign” and “past” history (the poem as well as consumer capitalism problematize the meaning of “foreign” and “past”) are references to texts. History is always represented, in this case bracketed between the covers of the journals and books the poet browses through at newsstands and in bookstores. Even the first mention of the figure the poem celebrates appears in a “NEW YORK POST with her face on it.” This emphasis on the textuality of history foregrounds the relation of this literary text, “The Day Lady Died,” to its immediate historical referent, the day “Lady” died. “The Day Lady Died” is concurrently a repeatable, ahistorical script and an unrepeatable historical transcript of events; the poem loses much of its resonance without historical knowledge of the day it records. In accentuating historical difference, the transience of the local people, places, and events named, the poem also suggests patterns of historical repetition, revolution in France and revolution in Ghana, persecution of artists in France and persecution of artists in America. By placing the death of Billie Holiday in the context of Bastille Day and official oppression of artists, O'Hara subtly comments on the state of the “avant-garde” artist in 1950s America.

All of the actions represented in “The Day Lady Died” are acts of selection, especially the consumer's selection of what to do and what to buy for specific social occasions. Most of these are automatic or socially constrained acts of selection, but beginning with the decision of the bank teller, Miss Stillwagon, not to “even look up my balance for once in her life,” the process of selection raises fundamental interpretive questions. The poet does not speculate on Miss Stillwagon's intentions for her change of behavior, but by stressing the singularity of this occasion, he suggests his own act of reflection and encourages readers to consider the significance of the bank scene to the rest of the poem, and even the semantic possibilities of “Miss Stillwagon” and “my balance.” The next act of selection initially seems to be as unproblematic as the other purchases: “and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine / for Patsy.” This seemingly unreflective act is modified, however, by the catalogue of book titles the poet has already considered, a catalogue which concludes with the striking oxymoron “I stick with Verlaine / after practically going to sleep with quandariness.” “Quandariness” implies a state of agitated or distressed awareness, a state not normally associated with sleep. “Going to sleep with quandariness” suggests a weariness with selection, in this case the consumer's weariness with selecting a literary text to give to his friend, but a weariness as well with selecting the appropriate literary references to elegize Holiday. On the other hand, “going to sleep” also suggests an erotics of “quandariness,” as this weariness is belied by such linguistic inventiveness. The poem asserts that imaginative inventiveness can subvert imprisonment in tradition; likewise art can momentarily release one from the imprisonment of self-consciousness inherent in such anxiety of selection.

The final act of selection in “The Day Lady Died” appears not to be a conscious choice at all; the photograph of “Lady Day” invokes a memory of the artist's power literally to take one's breath away, and in doing so, to make the scenario of the poem's closure more vivid, more lasting. In closing the poem on this note, O'Hara not only closes the process of selection but heightens the significance of the poem's details as well. As the image of “Lady Day” conjures the precise memory of “leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT,” the conclusion of “The Day Lady Died” sharpens the images portrayed earlier. Such lines as “and I don't know the people who will feed me” or “Miss Stillwagon … doesn't even look up my balance” become laden with possibly ominous significance when viewed through the lens of Billie Holiday's death, a lens colored by the questions of oppression, revolt, and imprisonment which inform the references to other artists in the poem. It is possible to go to “sleep with quandariness” with the details of “The Day Lady Died” only by refusing to select how they are significant. Such a reading risks falling into a state of historical amnesia that the details of the poem insistently militate against.

In place of the specific intertexts invoked by his earlier pastiches and parodies, O'Hara's “lunch poems” foreground the New York cultural text in which modernism is disseminated, both in the institutionalization of “high art” and in mass culture. The temporal structure of the lunch break itself dramatizes the sense of exhausted urgency informing the “quandariness” of selection: the lunch break positions the poet within, but liminally outside, the restrictions of the employer's time clock, the employer of course epitomizing the “institution art” in postwar America, the Museum of Modern Art. Yet the lunch break also evokes the circular structure of what Harold Bloom has called the romantic “crisis-poem.” In accentuating the disjunctions of his autobiographical reflections with romantic and modernist constructions of subjectivity and landscape, O'Hara's lunch poems exhibit not so much “anxiety of influence” as a “revaluation” of lyric subjectivity, a revaluation that foregrounds the postmodern reception of “tradition.” As O'Hara claims in “Nature and New Painting,” “nature” cannot be distinguished from “human nature” in his modern urban landscape: “In past times there was nature and there was human nature; because of the ferocity of modern life, man and nature have become one” (Standing Still 42). The description of the local in an urban setting therefore always leads to consideration of the modes of signification that define the landscape. Similarly, the circular structure of O'Hara's lunch poems cannot be distinguished from the structure of the lunch break itself. Just as the urban landscape is a product of signification, the lunch break is a product of the work schedule. The urban scene does provoke meditation in these poems, but it is rarely depicted symbolically; significance is immanent in the names of people, places, and events. By adapting the circular pattern to the lunch break, and by transforming that pattern by attention to quotidian urban details, O'Hara interrogates the subject-object relations constructed in the romantic lyric. And by furthering the formal and linguistic experimentation of Williams's use of the vernacular, O'Hara “revaluates” the romantic definition of the local, both geographically and linguistically. In doing so he underscores the romantic impulse of Williams's desire to merge subject and object, while recuperating the formal and linguistic experimentation that revealed the impossibility of such a “marriage.” O'Hara simultaneously renews and deconstructs the romantic lyric; the dissonance resulting from this project arises from his postmodernist questioning of the expectations such a form raises.

The “I” which perceives the urban landscape in O'Hara's poetry is more a composite of multiple subject positions, the site of associations with the names of friends, places, and objects portrayed, than a coherent presence that stands apart to comment on them. O'Hara's poetry rehearses the paradox of modern urban subjectivity explained by sociologist Georg Simmel in “The Metropolis and Mental Life”:

On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulation, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself. On the other hand, however, life is composed more and more of these impersonal contents and offerings which tend to displace the genuine personal colorations and incomparabilities. This results in the individual summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve his most personal core.

(422)

O'Hara's poetry dramatizes the tension between what Simmel calls the “metropolitan blasé attitude”—the blunting of discriminations between the meanings and values of things which results from the money economy and from the “intensification of nervous stimulation”—and the compensatory exaggerated personality. A half century after Simmel's essay, O'Hara's “post-anti-esthetic” poetry repeatedly foregrounds how both representations of the “metropolis” and enactments of the exaggerated personality are culturally coded in “traditions of the new.” Yet this self-conscious process itself enables O'Hara's personality, in all its dramatic multiplicity, to become the site which “still makes a poem a surprise”:

and I read the letter which says
in your poems your gorgeous self-pity
                              how do you like that
that is odd I think of myself
as a cheerful type who pretends to
be hurt to get a little depth into
                              things that interest me
and I've even given that up
lately with the stream of events
going so fast and the movingly
alternating with the amusingly

(Collected Poems 336-37)

Frank O'Hara's poetry subverts the distinctions he posits here in “Post the Lake Poets Ballad.” The romantic dialectic of the “I” and the landscape becomes transformed into a colloquy of subject positions with the “stream of events / going so fast and the movingly / alternating with the amusingly.” The poet of “gorgeous self-pity,” who “pretends / to be hurt,” and the poet carried along by the “stream of events” continually collide and converge with each other in a pattern of the “movingly / alternating with the amusingly.” Neither the “pretending” poetic voice nor the “stream of events” predominates; the poems constantly remind us that the subject both constructs and is constructed by the “stream of events.” By foregrounding how the poetic enunciation is always situated, O'Hara's poetry is not restricted to the “merely” personal; rather, this poetry continually reveals the historical and ideological forces which inform the “personal” at every moment.

Notes

1. For an overview of Williams's critical reception, see Mariani, Poet.

2. Marjorie Perloff (44-45) documents O'Hara's professed admiration for Williams, especially his early lyric and prose poetry, in unpublished letters and notes. She quotes from O'Hara's notes for a 1952 lecture, “The New Poets,” that he praised Williams's “‘liberation of language,’ his ‘attempt to find an honest, tough, hard, beautiful thing’” (45). This praise, however, is tempered by a critique of his “WilliamCarlosWilliamsian” contemporaries, “the ‘WCWilliams-ites’ with their ‘I am the man your father was Americanism,’ their ‘cleanness thinned down to jingoism,’ their cult of the ‘He-Man’” (45).

3. For the expanded version of this argument, see Jameson's “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”

4. Huyssen bases his analysis of postmodernism on Peter Bürger's theoretical formulation of the “historical avant-garde” in Theory of the Avant-Garde. Bürger argues that Continental movements such as dada, surrealism, and futurism challenged the function of art's autonomy status, revealing the separation of art from bourgeois society as the basis for aestheticism. In rejecting the autonomy of art, self-critical texts like Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades succeeded in making “art as an institution” recognizable, as they critiqued the systems of the production, distribution, and reception of art works. Bürger restricts his argument to European movements, but I would argue that Williams's commitment to experimentation and the destruction of traditional forms exemplifies the critical stance of the “historical avant-garde.” But although he shares the European vanguardist goal of integrating art into the praxis of life, Williams of course articulates his commitment to the local and the quotidian as a distinctively Americanist, antielitist response to modernization.

5. On the editing and publication of The Wedge, see Mariani, New World 480-83, and Baldwin.

6. The most detailed account of O'Hara's appropriation of Williams's technique remains Perloff, especially 38, 44-48, and 54-56. See also Blasing, Art, especially 139; Baker; Breslin 218; and Molesworth 20.

7. Despite the prominence of war imagery in O'Hara's early poetry, this topic has received surprisingly little attention. O'Hara himself was reticent about his war experiences. According to Joe LeSueur, in over nine years of living with him, O'Hara never spoke about “what he did in the war” (x). The fullest account of O'Hara's Navy years can be found in an essay he wrote while at Harvard, “Lament and Chastisement: A Travelogue of War and Personality.”

Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960's. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1979.

Baker, Peter. Modern Poetic Practice: Structure and Genesis. New York: Peter Lang, 1986.

Baldwin, Neil. “Zukofsky, Williams and The Wedge: Toward a Dynamic Convergence.” Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet. Ed. Carroll F. Terrell. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1979. 129-42.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, 1974.

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. The Art of Life: Studies in American Autobiographical Literature. Austin: U of Texas P, 1977.

———. “Frank O'Hara's Poetics of Speech: The Example of ‘Biotherm.’” Contemporary Literature 23 (1982): 52-64.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.

Boone, Bruce. “Gay Language as Political Practice: The Poetry of Frank O'Hara.” Social Text 1 (1979): 59-92.

Breslin, James E. B. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1920. New York: Methuen, 1960. 47-59.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post-modernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.

Jameson, Fredric. Foreword. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. By Jean-François Lyotard. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. vii-xxi.

———. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay, 1983. 111-25.

———. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92.

Jencks, Charles. What Is Postmodernism? Rev. ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1987.

LeSueur, Joe. Introduction. Selected Plays. By Frank O'Hara. New York: Full Court, 1978. v-xix.

Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York: McGraw, 1981.

———. William Carlos Williams: The Poet and His Critics. Chicago: American Library, 1975.

Molesworth, Charles. The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1979.

O'Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. New York: Knopf, 1971.

———. Jackson Pollock. New York: Braziller, 1959.

———. “Lament and Chastisement: A Travelogue of War and Personality.” Early Writing. Ed. Donald Allen. Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1977. 112-31.

———. Standing Still and Walking in New York. Ed. Donald Allen. Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1975.

Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979.

Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: Free, 1950.

Stein, Gertrude. “Picasso.” 1938. Picasso: The Complete Writings. Ed. Edward Burns. Boston: Beacon, 1985. 19-91.

Vendler, Helen. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.

Von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture: 1945-1980. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.

Williams, William Carlos. “America, Whitman, and the Art of Poetry.” 1917. William Carlos Williams Review 13 (1987): 1-4.

———. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume II: 1938-1962. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1988.