In Favor of One's Time (1954-61)
—and it was given to me
as the soul is given the hands
to hold the ribbons of life!
as miles streak by beneath the moon's sharp hooves
and I have mastered the speed and strength which is the armor of the world.
(“There I Could Never Be A Boy,” CP, [The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara] 216)
In 1954, Frank O'Hara was twenty-eight. Within the seven “green and turbulent” years that followed, he produced his finest poems and collaborations as well as his best art criticism. It was, both personally and artistically, the golden period of his life. During the summer of 1955, for example, he wrote to Fairfield Porter that he had written a new batch of poems, “so summery I don't know how they'll make the difficult transition to fall. Perhaps just shrivel up, turn brown and blow away. That would make me feel very grand. After all, if we can't make leaves, neither can god poems.”1
By the late fifties, O'Hara was at the center of a circle of artists that included … the poets John Ashbery (then living in Paris but in close communication), James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Edwin Denby, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, and LeRoi Jones; the composers Ned Rorem, Ben Weber, and Virgil Thompson; the dancers Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Vincent Warren, and Merle Marsicano. I do not mean to imply that all these artists belonged to one circle. There were, of course, many related circles, and diversity was O'Hara's special gift: the composers he knew, for example, ranged from the conservative Samuel Barber to the avant-garde Morton Feldman and Lucia Dlugoszewski. Or again, moving out into a wider circle, he was friendly with Leonard Bernstein and Tennessee Williams.
The poet's closest personal friendships—with Joe LeSueur, with whom he shared four apartments between 1955 and 1965, with Vincent Warren, the object of his most tender love poems, and with Grace Hartigan and Patsy Southgate—took place during this period.2 And although he was now assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art, organizing important exhibitions, his duties were not yet so extensive that there wasn't plenty of time for movies, concerts, operas, ballet, late evenings at the Cedar, parties all over town, and weekends at Southampton. In a letter to John Ashbery, characteristically dashed off in spare moments over a four-day period (1-4 February 1961), O'Hara lists a dizzying series of gallery openings and plays attended, new Balanchine ballets, and even his and Vincent's “assiduous TVing”; the following paragraph gives a good idea of his daily life:
Hello, it is now February 4th, Friday thank heaven, and I think I am going to paint my bedroom this weekend. I veer between orange and blue, though Mario says the latter is the brightest color and would be very nerve-wracking. (That might be quite appropriate.) The opera [Aaron Copland's The Second Hurricane] was a lot of fun and afterwards we went to Donald Droll's for supper where were Elaine de Kooning, Edwin, John Button, Edward Bagaline (who is very nice and is supposed to have a great collection—as I said above; we couldn't accept his invitation to see it as it was 2:00 when he issued it), and Beatrice Monti, who is Joan and Jean-Paul's dealer in Milano. She was very interesting and the quiche lorraine was divine.3
“It's lucky,” Joe LeSueur has commented wryly, “that he didn't become famous because it would have intruded upon his working hours and the way he lived.”4
O'Hara certainly didn't work at becoming a famous poet. All his friends agree that he was reluctant to submit poems for publication or to assemble them in a volume. The selection for Meditations in an Emergency (1957) was largely the work of James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch; later when O'Hara was supposedly putting together Lunch Poems for City Lights Books at the request of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, he kept procrastinating so that Ferlinghetti had to send him constant reminders like “How about Lunch? I'm hungry,” to which O'Hara would respond “Cooking” or something similar.5 Thus the “lunch poem” project, initiated at least as early as 1959, did not come to fruition until 1964, and when O'Hara supplied a biographical note for the dust jacket, he adopted the playful stance of “Personism”:
Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or fire-house, to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, co-existence and depth, while never forgetting to eat Lunch his favorite meal.6
Many of the important poems of this period—for example, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” (1958)—remained unpublished during O'Hara's lifetime. And those that did get into print often did so by chance. Diane di Prima, whose Floating Bear published such major O'Hara poems as “Mary Desti's Ass” and “For the Chinese New Year and Bill Berkson,”7 has given an amusing account of how she acquired the poet's manuscripts:
I would go over to Frank O'Hara's house pretty often. He used to keep a typewriter on the table in the kitchen, and he would type away, make poems all the time, when company was there and when it wasn't, when he was eating, all kinds of times. There would be an unfinished poem in his typewriter and he would do a few lines on it now and again, and he kept losing all these poems. They would wind up all over the house. … The poems would get into everything and I would come over and go through, like, his dresser drawers. There would be poems in with the towels, and I'd say, “Oh, hey, I like this one,” and he'd say, “OK, take it.” Very often it would be the only copy. My guess is that huge collected Frank O'Hara has only about one-third of his actual work.8
O'Hara's attitude toward his poetry thus struck most people as casual, if not downright careless. “As far as I could tell,” Joe LeSueur recalls, “writing poetry was something Frank did in his spare time. He didn't make a big deal about it, he just sat down and wrote when the spirit moved him.” He didn't need much time “because he usually got what he was after in one draft, and could type very fast, hunt-and-peck fashion. And from the very beginning it seemed to me that he never tried to get a poem going, never forced himself to write; he either had an idea or he didn't, and that was all there was to it” (“Four Apartments,” pp. 288-89).
Because speed and spontaneity were of the essence, the typewriter was the essential instrument. LeSueur recalls only two non-typewriter works: “his poem about James Dean, ‘written in the sand at Water Island and remembered’ and his ‘Lana Turner has collapsed’ poem, which he wrote on the Staten Island Ferry on the way out to a reading at Wagner College” (p. 290). And indeed, during Frank's six months' leave of absence from the Museum in the winter of 1956 when he accepted a grant from the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, he wrote to Mike Goldberg: “There were a couple of weeks of foul depression, gnashing teeth, pacing and boredom, when I felt that I would never, Never … be able to play the typewriter again. But the presence of this Steinway you all gave me [a Royal portable donated by his friends after Frank lost his own typewriter in Penn Station] has finally asserted itself, and I now stagger from bed, stride to the desk, and begin my scales each morning, or almost each.”9
“Playing the typewriter” rather than writing in longhand inevitably leads the poet to emphasize visual prosody. For example, O'Hara used long lines frequently, evidently because he liked their appearance on the page—their ability to convey sensuality and strength.10 When spoken, however, these lines tend to break down into groups of twos or threes, as in the following example:
Now the violets are all gone, // the rhinoceroses, // the cymbals
(CP, 346)
What is heard does not, then, reflect what is seen. O'Hara was not, for that matter, a particularly good reader of his own poetry. Like Williams, he wrote primarily for the eye rather than the ear; like Williams, he placed special emphasis on speed and spontaneity, only rarely revising more than a phrase or two of a poem. But this is not to say that he didn't take his poetry very seriously. As Joe LeSueur remarks with great insight: “I didn't realize right away that if you took poetry so much for granted as you did breathing it might mean you felt it was essential to your life” (p. 288).
Poetry and life—O'Hara refused, at least consciously, to make a distinction between the two. He regarded both as part of the same vital process, living every moment as if it were his last, forcing himself to go without sleep so as not to miss anything. “There's nothing so spiritual about being happy,” O'Hara says in a poem of 1956 (CP, 244), “but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.” We are now in a better position to understand why O'Hara was so reluctant to judge or to rank his own poetry. Given his intense relationships with people, he naturally tended to prefer whatever poem he had just written because it could remind him of a particular person or incident. All his best poems grow out of personal relationships. I have already talked of the “Grace Hartigan” poems; other important figures in the lyrics of the later fifties are Mike Goldberg, Kenneth Koch, Joan Mitchell, and of course Joe LeSueur and Vincent Warren. It is interesting that the poems written for Joe LeSueur—“Joe's Jacket,” “Waking Early Sunday,” “Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Jean-Paul”—are written in the realistic, documentary “I do this, I do that” mode which LeSueur himself admires most,11 whereas the love poems to Vincent Warren, whom O'Hara met in 1959, tend to be less factual, more emotional, direct, Romantic. And the lyrics addressed to Bill Berkson or directly concerned with him have a very different quality again—they are more elusive, detached, abstract.
To understand O'Hara's method of composition in this period, we might begin by looking at a specific poem whose genesis has been amusingly described by LeSueur in “Four Apartments”:
Sometimes … the details in a poem will remind me of a day I would otherwise have forgotten. Mother's Day, 1958, for example. Frank was struck by the title of a Times book review, “The Arrow That Flieth by Day,” and said he'd like to appropriate it for a poem. I agreed that the phrase had a nice ring and asked him for the second time what I should do about Mother's Day, which I'd forgotten all about. “Oh, send your mother a telegram,” he said. But I couldn't hit upon a combination of words that didn't revolt me and Western Union's prepared messages sounded too maudlin even for my mother. “You think of a message for my mother and I'll think of one for yours,” I suggested. We then proceeded to try to top each other with apposite messages that would have made Philip Wylie applaud. Then it was time to go hear a performance of Aaron Copland's Piano Fantasy by Noel Lee. “It's raining, I don't want to go,” Frank said. So he stayed home and wrote “Ode on the Arrow That Flieth by Day,” which refers to the Fantasy, Western Union, the rain, and Mother's Day.
(rpt. CP, 541).
The Ode does indeed “refer” to these seemingly unrelated items but in a very oblique way. The key to O'Hara's transformation of the materials LeSueur describes is the poem's title, taken from Psalm 91:5: “Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night; nor the arrow that flieth by day.” How not to be afraid—this is the theme of the poem. To capture the mood of deepening anxiety, O'Hara eliminates all narrative, giving us instead snatches of his conversation, both spoken and unspoken. The opening note is one of deceptively light-hearted banter:
To humble yourself before a radio on a Sunday
it's amusing, like dying after a party
“click” / and you're dead from fall-out, hang-over
or something hyphenated
(CP, 300)
One might note that the awareness of death is introduced right away, however comically, but it is then deflected by the wonderfully absurd distillation of pseudo-Mother's Day Greetings invented by Frank and Joe on this occasion:
(hello, Western Union? send a Mother's Day message to Russia: sorry not to be with you on your day love and kisses tell the czar /
la grande
jatte wasn't damaged in the museum of modern art fire / s / frank)
David Shapiro has suggested that this kind of parenthetical injection, the mimetic representation of sending a telegram, corresponds to the introduction of noise in the “musique concrète” of Satie, one of O'Hara's favorite composers.12 It creates a discontinuity of texture, forcing the reader to shift gears, as it were, and commanding our attention. Such attention is important, for, despite the playful fantasy of the telegram, its “message” has serious implications in that the very thought that this is Mother's Day introduces a note of irritation and malaise.
the unrecapturable nostalgia for nostalgia
for a life I might have hated, thus mourned
but do we really need anything more to be sorry about
wouldn't it be extra, as all pain is extra
The poet tries to comfort himself with this last thought but he knows only too well that he will never “win a dream trip … somehow.” And indeed, in the next passage he must confront “the arrow that flieth by day” directly:
for God's sake, fly the other way
leave me standing alone crumbling in the new sky of the Wide World
without passage, without breath
a spatial representative of emptiness
if Joan says I'm wounded, then I'm wounded
The cause of his “wound” cannot be named. Neither tortured at the stake like Joan of Arc nor reviled by hostile critics like André Gide, he cannot put the blame on “moral issues or the intercontinental ballistics missile / or the Seer of Prague” [Kafka]. Indeed, the poet's anxiety has no cause. And this is precisely why it is so devastating:
(you're right to go to Aaron's piano fantasy, but I'm not up to it this time, too important a piece not to punish me
and it's raining)
It is a nice irony that the poet's original joke comes true: he does, after all, die from “something hyphenated”; he is gunned down by a nameless source, turning him, at least momentarily, into the “death of a nation / henceforth to be called small.”
What the “Ode” does, then—and this is entirely absent from LeSueur's narrative of the incident—is to reenact the mental process whereby amusement and horseplay gradually give way to anxiety and ultimately to withdrawal. But O'Hara's comic self-depreciation precludes sentimentality. The implication is that under other circumstances (if only it weren't Mother's Day and weren't raining to boot!) he could and does resist “the arrow that flieth by day.” “All pain,” as he puts it, “is extra.” Something amusing, distracting, challenging is sure to turn up. Maybe the air will once again “salute” him as he stands “leaning on the prow.”
The poem's mode reflects O'Hara's gradual shift from the Tzara-Péret model of his earlier years to the more open, flexible forms of Apollinaire and Reverdy, the laconic informality of the later Auden, the brutal and personal intensity of Mayakovsky. Williams continues to be a central influence, but Pound now becomes equally important. I shall return to the question of influence later in this … [essay]. But first I want to look at the poetic signature, the particular style that identifies a given lyric as a “Frank O'Hara poem,” the sort of poem that has been so widely imitated, if never quite reproduced, during the past decade.
“WHATEVER ENERGY I BURN FOR ART”
“Music,” the opening poem of Lunch Poems, written in 1954, contains most of the stylistic devices I wish to discuss.
If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian
pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf's
and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.
Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.
I have in my hands only 35¢, it's so meaningless to eat!
and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves
like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you
to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world,
I must tighten my belt.
It's like a locomotive on the march, the season
of distress and clarity
and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter's
lightly falling snow over the newspapers.
Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet
of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.
As they're putting up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue
I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,
put to some use before all those coloured lights come on!
But no more fountains and no more rain,
and the stores stay open terribly late.
(CP, 210)
This is at once an “easier” and a “more difficult” poem than such earlier lyrics as “Chez Jane,” “Easter,” or “Memorial Day 1950.” As in the case of “Ode (to Joseph LeSueur), “one's first impression is that “Music” is no more than a record of daily trivia; it recounts an uneventful lunch hour spent in the former Mayflower Donut Shoppe on Fifth and 59th, detailing Frank's random thoughts about the Plaza fountain across the way, the equestrian statue nearby, Bergdorf Goodman's down the street, the thirty-five cents in his pocket, the liver sausage sandwich he has ordered, and the impending Christmas season with its giant trees on Park Avenue, colored lights, and long shopping hours.
But the real strategy of the poem is to remove objects from what Viktor Shklovsky has called “the automatism of perception,”13 by adapting the techniques of film and action painting to a verbal medium. For one thing, the poem is framed as a series of cuts and dissolves, whether spatial, temporal, or referential. Thus in line 3, the highly concrete setting—the Mayflower Shoppe on the Plaza—dissolves into a comic fantasy scene, created by the optical illusion of staring into the Plaza fountain on a rainy day: “that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf's.” Or again, the poem suddenly cuts from Fifth Avenue to Park, where the giant Christmas trees are being put up, and one's “daydreams,” whoever they are, emerge with their “dogs in blankets.”
Temporal dissolves work the same way. The “real” time of the poem is “early afternoon! in the foggy autumn” (line 16), a rainy day in that in-between time of the year after the leaves have fallen and before the Christmas lights come on, a time of half-light and shadow in “this season / of distress and clarity.” Yet in line 13, the poet says “and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter's / lightly falling snow over the newspapers,” and the end of the poem presents the Christmas season itself: “But no more fountains and no more rain, / and the stores stay open terribly late.”
Time shifts are not, of course, anything new in poetry, but it is one of O'Hara's trademarks to maintain the present tense (or conditional present as in “If I rest …”) regardless, and to supply no adverbial pointers (e.g., “when,” “after,” “before,” “during”) that signal a shift. The concept of person is similarly fluid. The “I”—a very familiar, intimate, open “I”—is omnipresent but whom is he addressing? If the first “you” (line 8) is a close friend or lover, the second, to whom the poet says rapturously, “Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet / of early afternoon!” is clearly a larger “you”—perhaps the Manhattan traffic, the rising moon, the sky, or indeed the whole universe as if to say, “You out there!” While the poet's self thus remains a constant center, anything or anyone that comes within its field of vision can be addressed or called by name. The repetition of definite articles and demonstratives reinforces this sense of intimate conversation and invites the reader's participation: “The Equestrian” (note the ellipsis of the noun here), “the Mayflower Shoppe,” “that angel,” “the Christmas trees on Park Avenue”—all these references suggest that the reader is familiar with the scene, indeed that he is part of it.
The syntax of “Music” may be described as a system of non-sequiturs. “If I rest for a moment …” the poet begins, but no “then” clause ever follows, and the conditional clause dissolves into the parenthesis of line 3. The second “If I seem to you” clause in line 8 is completed by “I must tighten my belt,” a clause that follows grammatically but makes no sense. Appositives and parallel nouns similarly turn out to be pseudo-appositives and pseudo-parallels: “It's like a locomotive on the march, the season / of distress and clarity”; or “the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.” In what sense is a “season” a “locomotive on the march”? And why “distress and clarity,” or “the fear of war and the stars”? The use of “and” to introduce coordinate clauses is similarly illogical: “That angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf's / and I am naked as a table cloth,” or “it's so meaningless to eat! / and gusts of water spray …” and so on.
The syntactic dislocations of “Music” are by no means as radical as those found in such earlier poems as “Second Avenue,” with its all but impenetrable verbal surface, its total ambiguity of reference. But the repeated nonsequiturs act to undercut the documentary realism of the poem's scene and introduce the opposing note: an element of fantasy, of imaginative transformation. Not “I rest,” but “If I rest”; not “I have lavender lips,” but “If I seem to you to have lavender lips.” Or again, “I must tighten my belt,” and “It's like a locomotive on the march.” Nothing really happens to the poet; it is all potential, conditional, projected into a possible future (“I shall see my daydreams”). And individual images and metaphors are often comically or grotesquely far-fetched, reinforcing the fantasy note: “and I am naked as a table cloth”; “Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear / trumpet of early afternoon!”; “If I seem to you to have lavender lips”; “I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets.”
How do all these elements work together? Again, the title gives us a clue, for the poem is like a melodic graph of the poet's perceptions. The varied sound images—some documentary and realistic, some fanciful and surreal—fuse to create a pattern that brings to mind modern dance (another favorite O'Hara art form) rather than a “poem” in the traditional sense of the word. “Music” begins on a note of suspended animation: the poet rests “for a moment near The Equestrian / pausing” for his sandwich. But immediately his imagination begins to transform the external scene: “that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf's,” and “gusts of water spray over the basin of leaves / like hammers of a glass pianoforte.” The tempo now accelerates as the poet's self increasingly opens to experience. It merges with the landscape of the coffee shop, becoming as “naked as a table cloth,” and his door is “open to the evenings of … snow over the newspapers.” A sense of anticipation, of excitement, of brinkmanship pervades the poem: nerves hum, the speaker is “Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared,” he finds it “so meaningless to eat!” The leaves in the Plaza fountain become, in a truly filmlike dissolve, “the leaves of the world,” and underneath them, the poet's lips, with a hint of impending doom, turn lavender. The initial “pause” gives way, precisely at the midpoint of the poem, to the urgency of the “locomotive on the march,” the mood of yearning and ecstasy coming to a head with the imperative “Clasp me … !” But the vision of the pre-Christmas season with its “dogs in blankets” doesn't last. The moment gives way to stasis: “no more fountains and no more rain.”
“Music” thus captures the sense of magic, urgency, and confusion of the modern cityscape in its “season of distress and clarity.” It presents an impression of total fluidity, conveyed by the repeated use of present participles: “pausing,” “leading,” “humming,” “falling,” “putting,” “walking.” And the deliberate indeterminacy of the long verse lines is offset and heightened by repetitive internal sound patterning: “rest” / “Equestrian”; “pausing” / “sausage”; “seems to be leading,” “lavender lips under the leaves of the world,” “Clasp me in your handkerchief,” and so on. The effect of all these devices is to create an aura of intense animation.
Like an action painting, “Music” presents the poet's act of coming to awareness rather than the results of that act. Accordingly, it traces the shift from calm to the crescendo of anticipation and excitement associated with “gusts of water” spraying over the leaves and the rapturous imperative, “Clasp me … !” After this crescendo, the mood gradually darkens as time, which has haunted the poet from the beginning, freezes. He can, after all, rest only “for a moment,” “pausing” to take in a scene so animated (“my nerves humming”) that there is hardly time to eat lunch. And in the course of the poem, lunchtime imperceptibly modulates into the foggy “early afternoon” and finally into darkness, when the fountains and rain are no longer visible and “the stores stay open terribly late.” By the time the colored lights come on, the poet's “daydreams” will have vanished.
To recapitulate, let us consider “Music” in the broader context of O'Hara's poetry.
1. IMAGERY
“Music” fuses realism and surrealism, the literal and the fanciful. In so doing, it marks a clear-cut rejection of the Symbolist mode that had dominated American poetry for the first half of the century. Unlike Prufrock's “sawdust restaurants with oyster shells,” with their symbolic connotations of aridity, sterility, and decay, O'Hara's Mayflower Shoppe points to nothing beyond itself; it has no underlying significance that demands interpretation. The name “Mayflower,” for example, does not, in this context, call to mind our Founding Fathers or the innocence of an Early America; the coffee shop is simply there, an authentic presence we can all locate and recognize. Or again, whereas Prufrock's fear of eating a peach reflects his fear of ripeness and fertility, O'Hara's “liver sausage sandwich” has no particular symbolic properties; it could, for that matter, be a salami or cheese sandwich just as easily.
Like the landscapes of Williams, of Reverdy, or of Apollinaire, O'Hara's is thus what Charles Altieri has called a “landscape without depth,”14 a presence stripped of its “ontological vestments.” Aerial perspective, three-dimensionality give way to a world of surfaces. In poem after poem of this period, what looks like a flat literalism predominates:
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
(CP, 325)
It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola. …
(CP, 257)
I cough a lot (sinus?) so I
get up and have some tea with cognac
it is dawn
the light flows evenly along the lawn
in chilly Southampton and I smoke
and hours and hours go by I read
Van Vechten's Spider Boy then a short
story by Patsy Southgate and a poem
by myself. …
(CP, 341)
The matter-of-fact realism of these passages has been widely imitated: “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday” (the first line of “The Day Lady Died”) has become a kind of formula for New York poets. But whereas any number of minor poets can offer us such a catalogue raisonné,15 O'Hara's empiricism is deceptive for it modulates easily and surprisingly into fantasy and artifice. The lessons of Dada and Surrealism have, after all, been learned; even the most casual personal poems retain the witty modulations and sudden polarization of images found in the poetry of Tzara, Péret, and Breton, or, for that matter, in the poetry of Apollinaire, which is one of the dominant influences on O'Hara's poetry of this period. Take the following passage from “Rhapsody”:
I am getting into a cab at 9th Street and 1st Avenue
and the Negro driver tells me about a ＄120 apartment
“where you can't walk across the floor after 10 at night
not even to pee, cause it keeps them awake downstairs”
no I don't like that “well I didn't take it”
(CP, 326)
This bit of “supper-club conversation for the mill of the gods” strikes the poet as “perfect in the hot humid morning on my way to work,” and he realizes that
it isn't enough to smile when you run the gauntlet
you've got to spit like Niagara Falls on everybody or
Victoria Falls or at least the beautiful urban fountains of Madrid
as the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the Menemsha Bar. …
By the time we come to this last line, the real New York scene has dissolved, the Menemsha Bar becoming part of an exotic tropical landscape, an imaginary “jungle of impossible eagerness.”
“Naphtha” (CP, 337-38) displays a similar development:
Ah Jean Dubuffet
when you think of him
doing his military service in the Eiffel Tower
as a meteorologist
in 1922
you know how wonderful the 20th Century
can be
and the gaited Iroquois on the girders
fierce and unflinching-footed
nude as they should be
slightly empty
like a Sonia Delaunay
there is a parable of speed
somewhere behind the Indians' eyes
they invented the century with their horses
and their fragile backs
which are dark
Lines 1-7 are perfectly straightforward, but the “and” at the beginning of line 8 is a false connective, for who are these “gaited Iroquois” who appear “on the girders”? Construction workers who are not afraid of heights? Statues? The Indian as primitive life source? Or what? And then the whole tableau turns into a Sonia Delaunay painting which is “slightly empty.” Emptiness, and the concomitant need to maintain one's “fragile,” precarious balance is the keynote here, and so we can forget all about the Eiffel Tower and shift to the intimate conversation of the third verse paragraph:
how are you feeling in ancient September
I am feeling like a truck on a wet highway. …
apart from love (don't say it)
I am ashamed of my century
for being so entertaining
but I have to smile
Such surprising conjunctions of literal reference and comic fantasy are typical of O'Hara; he shifts from real to surreal and back again with astonishing speed. And this is why his poetry is ultimately so difficult to imitate. It is easy enough to begin a poem with “It is 12:23 in New York, a rainy Monday,” or “I am walking up Broadway and I meet Ernie,” but without O'Hara's Dada or fantasy context, such empiricism (the literalism of simple Pop Art) becomes monotonous.
2. PROPER NAMES
O'Hara's poetry is, as everyone has remarked, one of constant name-dropping. Interestingly, proper names are not used very frequently in the early work. “Easter,” with its “razzle-dazzle maggots,” “glassy towns,” and “yaks,” is a poem of wholly imaginary landscapes, but “Music” refers to “The Equestrian,” “the Mayflower Shoppe,” “Bergdorf's,” “Park Avenue”—authentic New York settings. By the late fifties, O'Hara had established an elaborate network of cross-references to close personal friends, artists, film stars, city streets, bars, exotic places, titles of books, movies, operas, and ballets—in short, the name of anyone or anything that happens to come across the poet's path. The following are typical:
Richard Barthelmess as the “tol'able” boy barefoot and in pants,
Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck,
Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car
and smiles, Ginger Rogers, with her pageboy bob like a sausage
on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet,
Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers' gasping spouses. …
(CP, 232)
Where is Mike Goldberg? I don't know
he may be in the Village, far below
or lounging on Tenth Street with the gang. …
(CP, 301)
Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb
and Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher (I think!)
and Irving Sandler continues to be the balayeur des artistes
and so do I (sometimes I think I'm “in love” with painting)
and surely the Piscine Deligny continues to have water in it
and the Flore continues to have tables and newspapers and people under them
and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy
we shall be happy
but we shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be possible
René Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn't it
I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don't believe it
(CP, 329)
One's first response to these endless allusions is that they are part of a tiresome in-joke. Why should we know who Shirley Goldfarb is, or whether Jane Hazan has retained her married name (Freilicher) or where Mike Goldberg is “lounging”? And don't these very private allusions make excessive demands on readers, especially future readers who will need extensive annotation in order to understand a given O'Hara poem?
Perhaps we can answer these questions by looking at some possible sources for this naming technique. Paul Carroll suggests that O'Hara may have been influenced by the Dada poems of Pierre Albert-Birot,16 translations of which appear in Motherwell's Dada Painters and Poets (1951), one of the central source books for the New York poets. “At the Paul Guillaume Gallery,” for example, begins:
The 13th day of November this year of 1917
We were at Paul Guillaume the negrophile's place
108 Faubourg St. Honoré at 8 o'clock
A short time after we were there
Along came Apollinaire
He sat down on a leather chair
And spoke first of a new art that one day he had implied
To be a sort of “technepheism”
To use a very simple term. …
Another Albert-Birot poem, “Openings,” begins:
The 1st of March 1919 I was
at Rosenberg's where Herbin the painter
Was showing his pictures
Rue de la Beaume
It's a street
Where one sees nothing but stone
And you ask yourself as you go in
Are there people there
You push the little half open door
And you find some
Here's Cendrars Hello
And Soupeault (you arrive)
How are you (I depart)
Fine Hello Severini
Good day my friend
Good day Max Jacob. … (17)
How important is it to recognize the names and addresses in these poems? The references to Severini, Apollinaire, and Jacob surely count for something because their conversations, gestures, and manners conjure up the artistic milieu of the time and give the poem an air of authenticity: this really happened at a real show! The day (1 March 1918) and place (Rosenberg's) are immortalized. But we cannot press much further, for the proper names in these Dada poems do not resonate with meaning. A similar process occurs in Pound's more personal Cantos. In Canto 80, we read:
which is what I suppose he, Fordie, wanted me to be able to picture
when he took me to Miss Braddon's
(I mean the setting) at Richmond
But that New York I have found at Périgeux
si com' ad Arli
in wake of the sarascen
As the “Surrender of Breda” (Velásquez)
was preceded in fresco at Avignon(18)
O'Hara is squarely in the Pound as well as in the Dada tradition. In the passage cited from “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” we do miss a lot of the fun if we aren't familiar with Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire movies or have never seen an Eric von Stroheim film, and the allusions to Reverdy, Char, and Beckett in “Adieu to Norman” serve to ground the poet's experience even as the reference to “Fordie” (Ford Madox Ford) and Velásquez's Surrender of Breda authenticate Pound's artistic world. But in most cases (as in “Where is Mike Goldberg?”), the referential quality of the names is purposely undercut. As Charles Altieri remarks:
His [O'Hara's] texture of proper names gives each person and detail an identity, but in no way do the names help the reader understand anything about what has been named. To know a lunch counter is called Juliet's Corner or a person O'Hara expects to meet is named Norman is rather a reminder for the reader that the specific details of another's life can appear only as momentary fragments, insisting through their particularity on his alienation from any inner reality they might possess.19
This seems to me precisely the point. To give another instance: when one says, “It is 12:20 in New York,” one is recognizing that numbers no longer have any mystical significance. In this respect, O'Hara goes one step further than Pound, who still uses historical, literary, and mythological figures as touchstones. In O'Hara's poetry, such touchstones have largely disappeared; only the arts continue to be endowed with a certain value. His poetic world is thus one of immanence rather than transcendence; persons and places, books and films are named because they are central to O'Hara's particular consciousness, but they have no “inner reality.” Compare O'Hara's treatment of, say, Jane Freilicher to Yeats's mythologizing portraits of Lionel Johnson or Lady Gregory, and the difference will become clear.
3. SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY
One of the central features of O'Hara's style is what Eric Sellin has called, with reference to Reverdy's poetry, “syntactic ambiguity.” As we have seen in the case of “Music,” O'Hara's poetic structure is a system of nonsequiturs, making use of false connectives and demonstratives, pronouns with shifting referents, dangling conditional clauses, incomplete declarative sentences, confusing temporal and spatial relationships, and so on. Sellin quite rightly calls such ambiguity “irreducible” (as distinguished from the semantic ambiguities discussed by William Empson and his followers), because its effect is “to render two or several contextual meanings simultaneously possible for a given passage.”20 Or, as Ernst Gombrich puts it in a brilliant short discussion of Cubism, “If illusion is due to the interaction of clues and the absence of contradictory evidence, the only way to fight its transforming influence is to make the clues contradict each other and to prevent a coherent image of reality from destroying the pattern in the plane.” A Cubist painting resists all our attempts to apply “the test of consistency.” “Try as we may to see the guitar or the jug suggested to us as a three-dimensional object and thereby to transform it, we will always come across a contradiction somewhere which compels us to start afresh.” By intentionally scrambling his representational clues, the Cubist painter thus forces us “to accept the flat surface with all its tensions.”21 The ambiguity cannot, in other words, be resolved.
This is precisely what happens in O'Hara's poetry which carries on what Sellin calls “the cubist-surrealist esthetic [of] simultaneity” (p. 112). Indeed, if the Surrealists taught O'Hara how to mix semantic spheres, moving from literal to hallucinatory, it is the Cubist or proto-Cubist poets who provide the model for his syntax. Take the following example from Apollinaire's “Zone”:
Today you walk through Paris the women are blood-stained
It was and I would prefer not to remember it was during beauty's decline
Surrounded by fervent flames Notre Dame looked at me in Chartres
The blood of your Sacred Heart flooded me in the Montmartre
I am ill from hearing happy words
The love from which I suffer is a shameful sickness
And the image which possesses you makes you survive
in sleeplessness and anguish
It is always near you this passing image(22)
In this nine-line passage, the present dissolves into the past and vice-versa without explanation. More important, the “you” of line 1 and “I” of line 2 both refer to the poet, a pattern repeated in lines 6-7. To further complicate things, the familiar you (“tu”) of the opening lines gives way, in line 4, to the formal “your Sacred Heart” (“votre Sacré-Coeur”), referring to Christ. Clausal relationships are also obscure: in the first line we have simple juxtaposition of two declarative sentences without punctuation (“Today you walk through Paris,” and “the women are blood-stained”). These present-tense observations are now followed by the gnomic “It was” (“Cétait”) and a confusing conjunction: “and I would prefer not to remember it.”
Reverdy's poetry, which O'Hara especially loved,23 furnishes similar examples. “Trace de Pas” has, as Sellin notes, an interesting example of a “bridge phrase” or, as I prefer to call it, a “floating modifier.”
Five branches have lit up
The trees hold back their tongues
By the window
A head still stuck out
A new star was going to appear
Above
The airplane competed
With the stars for quickness … (24)
Here lines 5-7 are syntactically ambiguous. Does “above” (“Là-haut”) belong with the line that precedes it (“A new star was going to appear above”) or the one that follows (“Above, the airplane competed with the stars”)? The syntax forces us to consider both possibilities.
O'Hara's poetry abounds in such “Cubist” syntax. A few examples must suffice here.
SHIFTING FORMS OF PRONOUNS
From First to Second Person:
yet I always loved Baltimore
the porches which hurt your ass
no, they were the steps
well, you have a wet ass anyway
if they'd only stop scrubbing
(CP, 402)
From First to Third Person:
I stop for a cheeseburger at juliet's
corner. …
and one has eaten and one walks
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for bullfight and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.
(CP, 258)
Second-Person Shifts:
How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left
here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it.
(CP, 370)
AMBIGUOUS REFERENCE
There I could never be a boy,
though I rode like a god when the horse reared
At a cry from mother I fell to my knees!
there I fell, clumsy and sick and good. …
(CP, 216)
PSEUDO-CONNECTIVES
this country
has everything but politesse, a Puerto Rican cab driver says
and five different girls I see
look like Piedie Gimbel
with her blonde hair tossing too
(CP, 340)
so the weight
of the rain drifting amiably is like a sentimental breeze
and seems to have been invented by a collapsed Kim Novak balloon
yet Janice is helping Kenneth appeal to The Ford Foundation. …
(CP, 346)
considering
my growingly more perpetual state and how
can one say that angel in the Frick's wings
are “attached” if it's a real angel?
(CP, 393)
FLOATING MODIFIERS
the warm walking night
wandering
amusement of darkness. …
(CP, 269)
First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess.
(CP, 257)
normally I don't think of sounds as colored unless I'm feeling corrupt
concrete Rimbaud obscurity of emotion which is simple and very definite
even lasting. …
(CP, 331)
Someone else's Leica sitting on the table
the black kitchen table I am painting
the floor yellow, Bill is painting it. …
(CP, 393)
SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL DISSOLVES
now it is dark on 2d Street near the abbatoir
and a smell as of hair comes up the dovecotes
as the gentleman poles a pounce of pigeons
in the lower East Sideness rippling river
where have you gone, Ashes, and up and out
where the Sorbonne commissions frigidaires
from Butor and Buffet and Alechinsky storages
Beauty! said Vera Prentiss-Simpson to Pal Joe
and the hideaway was made secure against the hares
(CP, 324)
ELLIPSIS, ABSENCE OF PUNCTUATION, QUIRKY LINE BREAKS
I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a construction worker
I'd like to have a silver hat please
(CP, 335)
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 and 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.
4. THE ENGAGED SELF: PERSONISM IN ACTION
“Personism … does not have anything to do with personality or intimacy, far from it.” What does O'Hara mean by this enigmatic statement in the Manifesto? And what is the meaning of his frequent slurs on confessional poetry?25 Let us try to sort out these distinctions.
In O'Hara's major poems, as is surely apparent to even the most casual reader, the first person is ubiquitous. In “Music,” the pronoun “I” and its cognates appear ten times in the space of twenty-one lines. Yet, unlike the typical autobiographical poem with its circular structure (present-past-return to the present with renewed insight), “Music” does not explore the speaker's past so as to determine what has made him the person he is; it does not, for that matter, “confess” or “reveal” anything about his inner psychic life. The role of the “I” is to respond rather than to confess—to observe, to watch, to be attentive to things. The poet's ruminations are “Meditations in an Emergency” not “on an Emergency”—an important distinction for it suggests that the self, no longer able to detach itself from the objects it perceives, dissolves and becomes part of the external landscape. As in Pasternak's Safe Conduct, one of O'Hara's favorite books,26 the “I” fragments into the surfaces it contemplates. Hence the poet can only tell us what he does (what books he buys, what he eats, where he is walking, what he is saying and to whom); how he responds to external stimuli, whether traffic jams, headlines, nasty remarks made by friends, or a visit to an art gallery; and what he recalls (fragments from the past in the form of sharply visualized scenes float up into his conscious mind). But he makes no attempt to reflect upon the larger human condition, to derive meaning from a series of past incidents, or to make judgments upon his former self, as Robert Lowell does in the Life Studies poems. Indeed, the past is often so immediate that it becomes the present, as we shall see when we consider some of O'Hara's great memory poems. In this connection, it is interesting to note that O'Hara substitutes titles like “In Memory of My Feelings” for Yeats's “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” or Lowell's “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow.” It is a matter of reifying a feeling rather than remembering another person or a particular event; in so doing, that feeling becomes part of the poet's present.
Here the shift in pronouns, discussed in the preceding section, is relevant. When O'Hara switches from “I” to “one” in “A Step Away From Them,” he enlarges the poem's horizons, making the seemingly personal situation (going for a walk during lunch hour) fictive, theatrical. Rimbaud's “Je est un autre” (“I is somebody else”) provides a key to O'Hara's Personism. The poet's “I” is distanced by various devices: self-deprecatory humor, long-angle shots, fantasy—“If I seem to you / to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world. …” Again, the confusing second-person references extend the range of the poem, drawing the reader into the situation. “Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear!” the poet exclaims, and immediately we are drawn into the magic circle. We are there.
Kenneth Koch has called the Collected Poems “a collection of created moments that illuminate a whole life,” and many readers have agreed that the volume is in essence one long poem, that once they began to read O'Hara, they could not put the book down.27 This suggests to me that “Personism” works in a special way. In the course of the Collected Poems, we come to know the speaker very much as we know a friend; we see him in all his moods—exuberant, sensual, ecstatic, playful, interested, attentive, remote, bored, depressed, despairing, alternately loving and bitchy. The more one reads the poems, the more one longs to know how “Frank” will react to a particular event, whether it is a headline, a lovers' quarrel, or a traffic jam. The “aesthetic of attention” invites our response so that ultimately the poet's experience becomes ours.
Perhaps the closest model I can find for O'Hara's lyric voice is that of Mayakovsky, whose poetry O'Hara had been reading avidly since the early fifties.28 Here is a section from the famous “I Love” of 1922 in the George Reavy translation:
Adults have much to do.
Their pockets are stuffed with rubles.
Love?
Certainly!
For about a hundred rubles.
But I,
homeless,
thrust
my hands
into my torn pockets
and slouch about, goggle-eyed.
Night.
You put on your best dress.
You relax with wives and widows.
Moscow,
with the ring of its endless Sadovayas
choked me in its embraces.
The hearts
of amorous women
go tic-toc.
On a bed of love the partners feel ecstatic.
Stretched out like Passion Square
I caught the wild heartbeat of capital cities.(29)
Despite Mayakovsky's straightforward syntax and short lines, his tone looks ahead to O'Hara's. Thus he shifts from flat statement (“Adults have much to do”) to an unexpected question and answer (“Love? / Certainly!”), from first person (“But I, / homeless”) to second (“You put on your best dress. / You relax with wives and widows”), from present tense (lines 1-14) to past (lines 15-17) and back to the present. The last three lines juxtapose third-person observation (it is not clear whether the poet is himself one of the partners “On a bed of love”) to personal recollection, as “Stretched out like Passion Square / I caught the wild heartbeat of capital cities.”
The mood of the poem is buoyant, exclamatory, highly emotional. Gradually, Mayakovsky draws the reader into his personal circle so that we too catch “the wild heartbeat of capital cities.” And yet “I Love” skirts sentimentality because the poet knows how foolish he is; in the second stanza, we read, “I know where lodges the heart in others. / In the breast—as everyone knows! / But with me / anatomy has gone mad: / nothing but heart / roaring everywhere” (p. 161).
Such rapid transitions from lyricism to buffoonery characterize many of O'Hara's best poems, for example: “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul,” “Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!),” “Mary Desti's Ass,” and especially “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” which is O'Hara's adaptation of Mayakovsky's “An Extraordinary Adventure which befell Vladimir Mayakovsky in a Summer Cottage.”30
To recapitulate: O'Hara's poetry is characterized by a remarkable confluence of styles. Aside from the influence of painting …, and the close bonds between O'Hara's lyric and the arts of film and music, the poems reflect an unusual combination of literary influences. Dada and Surrealism continue to stand behind O'Hara's distinctive imagery—an imagery inclining toward artifice and the landscape of dream. The colloquialism and celebration of ordinary experience recall Williams and, to a lesser extent, the later Auden; but the use of proper names and documentary “evidence” seems to derive from Pound rather than Williams. I have also noted that O'Hara's syntactic structures were influenced by Apollinaire and Reverdy, while his peculiar brand of Personism can be traced back to Mayakovsky, Pasternak, and Rimbaud.31
The Collected Poems is, in short, a very learned (detractors would say, an eclectic) book. O'Hara's reputation as casual improvisator, unschooled doodler, could hardly miss the mark more completely. Indeed, he used to call aspiring poets who wanted to “tell it like it is,” to throw convention to the winds, the “Campfire Boys.”32 His own sense of poetic form was very different. As he once wrote to Bill Berkson with reference to musical composition, “you don't know whether it's a piece or not unless some convention is at least referred to.” “There is,” he adds, “about as much freedom in the composition of music as there is in a prison recreation yard.”33 Surely “freedom” in poetry has similar limitations.
RESHAPING THE GENRES
One of the special pleasures of reading O'Hara's poetry is to see how the poet reanimates traditional genres. Ode, elegy, pastoral, autobiographical poem, occasional verse, love song, litany—all these turn up in O'Hara's poetry, although his tendency is to parody the model or at least to subvert its “normal” conventions. Let us look at some of the poet's most interesting generic transformations.
1. THE “SURREAL-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL” POEM
This group, which includes such poems as “There I Could Never Be a Boy,” “In Memory of My Feelings,” “Ode to Michael Goldberg ('s Birth and Other Births),” “Crow Hill,” and “A Short History of Bill Berkson” has its source in the Romantic tradition. “There I Could Never Be a Boy,” for example, with its allusions to Keats's “Endymion” and its echoes of Dylan Thomas's “Fern Hill,” is a kind of Wordsworthian portrait of the poet as imaginative child, whose heightened sensibility can create its own worlds (“I rode like a god when the horse reared”; “in the billowing air I was fleet and green / riding blackly through the ethereal night / toward men's words which I gracefully understood”), but who suffers from the terrible repression of adults: “At a cry from mother I fell to my knees!” and “All things are tragic / when a mother watches!” (CP, 216-17). This last note is Rimbaldian, recalling “Les poètes de sept ans,” and gives a slightly ironic edge to the poet's Romantic vision.
“Ode to Michael Goldberg” similarly presents Wordsworthian moments of vision, but its structure offers a more complex network of variations and oppositions. The mood is alternately somber and light-hearted; events are viewed seriously only to be parodied a moment later. Thus the mowing scene, during which the boy has his first glimpse of sex:
Yellow morning
silent, wet
blackness under the trees over stone walls
hay smelling faintly of semen. …
(CP, 291)
is juxtaposed to short, staccato quatrains, comically recalling Frank's first experiences at the movies:
Karen Morley got shot
in the back by an arrow
I think she was an heiress
it came through her bathroom door. …
This scene now modulates into a momentary return to a realistic present: “I'd like to stay / in this field forever / and think of nothing / but these sounds, / these smells and the tickling grasses / “up your ass, Sport,” and then dissolves, in turn, into the touching account of the poet's first intimations of his future vocation:
Up on the mountainous hill
behind the confusing house
where I lived, I went each
day after school and some nights
with my various dogs. …
the wind sounded exactly like
Stravinsky
I first recognized art
as wildness, and it seemed right,
I mean rite, to me
climbing the water tower I'd
look out for hours in wind
and the world seemed rounder
and fiercer and I was happier
because I wasn't scared of falling off
nor off the horses, the horses!
to hell with the horses, bay and black
(CP, 292)
Here the wind is very much a Romantic image, and lines 12-13 recall Wallace Stevens's “The World is Larger in Summer.” Yet the punning (a slightly coy device) on “right” (Rites of Spring) parodies the Romantic theme as does the final “to hell with the horses.” And the next passage moves away from Romantic heightened consciousness to a Rimbaldian scatological vision of adolescent masturbation:
what one must do is done in a red twilight
on colossally old and dirty furniture with knobs,
and on Sunday afternoons you meet in a high place
watching the Sunday drivers and the symphonic sadness
stopped, a man in a convertible put his hand up a girl's skirt
and again the twitching odor of hay, like a minor irritation
that gives you a hardon, and again the roundness of horse noises
(CP, 292)
The poem continues to shift ground in this way, passages that detail concrete particulars being foregrounded against a backdrop of more abstract ruminations. The overall structure is reminiscent of Me II, Larry Rivers's “painted autobiography,” which is, according to Sam Hunter, “composed of small, scattered vignettes of family life from babyhood to full maturity. First family snapshots and then special aspects of illustrated journalism offered Rivers a sense of continuity with the movement of life, while putting the necessary distance between him and events.”34 So too O'Hara absorbs the family snapshot into the larger movement of life so as to create a dynamic composition.
“Ode to Michael Goldberg” is a charming poem, but I myself prefer the enigmatic, elliptical “In Memory of My Feelings” (1956)—in my opinion not only O'Hara's best autobiographical poem, but one of the great poems of our time. Its central theme, the fragmentation and reintegration of the inner self—a self that threatens continually to dissipate under the assault of outer forces—is a familiar Romantic topos, but O'Hara turns the autobiographical convention inside out, fusing fantasy and realism in a painterly collage-poem, whose form is at one with its meaning. Grace Hartigan, to whom “In Memory” is dedicated, suggests that O'Hara's aim in this poem is to define “inner containment”—“how to be open but not violated, how not to panic.”35 The structure of the poem embodies this theme; it is an extremely “open” lyric sequence that nevertheless never gives way to formlessness, never “panics.”
O'Hara's actual biography plays a part in the poem, but it is subordinated to a series of hallucinatory visions and memories. The implication all along is that what matters is not what happened but how one felt or feels about it; the poet writes, after all, in memory of his “feelings.” And evanescent as these feelings are, O'Hara unifies his kaleidoscopic visions by repeating certain key images: the hunt (a hunt for what or for whom?), nautical references (from the gondola of the opening to the “German prisoners on the Prinz Eugen” of Part 4), and a procession of circus animals, exotic locales (Borneo, Ramadan, Venice's Grand Canal, the sands of Arabia, Persia, the mountains of Greece), and Romantic characters (Manfred, the gondolier, Lord Nelson, Shanghai Lil, a Hittite, an African prince, a “Chinaman climbing a mountain,” “an Indian / sleeping on a scalp.”) In the “midst” of all “these ruses” is the serpent, who stands here for the poet's true self—the self that must triumph if he is to become an artist.
Part 1 begins:
My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.
(CP, 252)
This enigmatic passage is best understood in terms of Rimbaud's concept of the “dédoublement du moi,” the split between the ordinary, empirical ego and the poet's created self. Rimbaud, for that matter, stands squarely behind the poem, Part 4 echoing the catalogue of assumed selves in Part IV of “Enfance.”36 Another probable source is Apollinaire's “Cortège,” in which the self is painfully assembled from bits and pieces of the poet's past identities. At the outset, then, Frank O'Hara the “poet” is still dominated by Frank O'Hara the man who carries him “quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.” He has not yet articulated poetic speech; it is only a “quietness,” containing “a number of naked selves,” longing to emerge but kept in check by “so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves / from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons / and have murder in their heart!”
The “I” thus regards himself as victim but of whom or of what? The would-be murderers are especially frightening because they are wholly disguised: “in winter / they are warm as roses, in the desert / taste of chilled anisette.” When the poet tries to escape his condition by assuming the role of Byron's Manfred, climbing to the mountain top “into the cool skies,” he is attacked from all sides:
An elephant takes up his trumpet
money flutters from the windows of cries, silk stretching its mirror
across shoulder blades. A gun is “fired.”
(CP, 253)
And now, in a passage reminiscent of the “Circe” episode in Ulysses, the poet remembers moments of unspecified but terrible humiliation:
One of me rushes
to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me
flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes
and underneath their hooves as they round the last turn my lips
are scarred and brown, brushed by tails, masked in dirt's lust,
definition, open mouths gasping for the cries of the bettors for the lungs
of earth.
So many of my transparencies could not resist the race!
After this nightmare scene, with its strong overtones of sexual fear, there is only emptiness, a self in fragments: “dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets, / a flaking moon drifting across the muddied teeth.” The image of the serpent appears for the first time, and the “I” identifies with it, but this serpent does not yet have power. A victim of “the hunter,” its eyes “redden at sight of those thorny fingernails,” and “My transparent selves / flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing.” Finally, the “acquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa.” Part 1 ends on a note of death; the poet's old self must die if it is to be reborn.
In the poem's opening movement, memory thus appears in the guise of surrealistic fantasy, frightening in its very indeterminacy. The perspective of Part 2 is, by contrast, that of more straightforward autobiography, the connecting link between the two occurring in the opening lines: “The dead hunting / and the alive, ahunted.”
My father, my uncle,
my grand-uncle and the several aunts. My
grand-aunt dying for me, like a talisman, in the war,
before I had even gone to Borneo. …
(CP, 253)
The irony, of course, is that these relatives did not die “for” the poet at all, but that their death was supposed to pain and trouble him whereas his recollection of the group merely resembles “the coolness of a mind / like a shuttered suite in the Grand Hotel / where mail arrives for my incognito.” “Trying desperately to count them as they die” becomes a meaningless exercise: this is the way memory does not, indeed cannot operate.
But how to transcend “these numbers”? In Part 3, the speaker chooses one option: he assumes the role of hero. Like the “moi” of Rimbaud's Saison en enfer, he reappears as noble savage in the deserts of Arabia (“The most arid stretch is often the richest”), swallows “the stench of the camel's spit,” and then reappears in a series of guises: French Revolutionary, Napoleonic platoon leader, and finally as “meek subaltern … violating an insane mistress.” These various roles merge in a hallucinatory sequence, the mistress now following the poet “across the desert / like a goat, towards a mirage … and lying in an oasis one day, / playing catch with coconuts, they suddenly smell oil.”
Absorption in history is one way of escaping the empirical self: “Beneath these lives / the ardent lover of history hides.” But the moment doesn't last and in Part 4, we switch, once again, to the real Frank O'Hara visiting Chicago with Jane Freilicher (“the fountains! the Art Institute, the Y / for both sexes, absent Christianity”), a Frank who is enchanted by an early morning vision (before Jane is up) of a Norwegian freighter on the “copper lake,” “on the deck a few dirty men … Beards growing, and the constant anxiety over looks.” Remembering Grace Hartigan's portraits of himself,37 he now merges his identity with that of the seamen. And out of this fusion, the poet achieves the breakthrough he has longed for all along:
Grace
to be born and live as variously as possible. The conception
of the masque barely suggests the sordid identifications.
I am a Hittite in love with a horse I don't know what blood's
in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs
in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall
I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist
in which a face appears
and it is another face of blonde I am a baboon eating a banana
I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child
and the child's mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain
I am a child smelling his father's underwear I am an Indian
sleeping on a scalp
and my pony is stamping in the birches,
and I've just caught sight of the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.
What land is this, so free?
(CP, 256)
In the first version (1955) of this passage, O'Hara arranged these images in four 4-line stanzas, each having the refrain “What land is this, so free?” which appears only once in the final draft. The first stanza, for instance, went like this:
I don't know what blood's in me
I feel like an African prince
I am a girl walking downstairs
in a red pleated dress with heels
what land is this, so free?
(See Notes to the CP, 538)
By running together two clauses in one line on the one hand, and breaking a clause in half at a line-end, on the other, O'Hara stresses the multiplicity of selves, the chaos and plenitude of life which cannot be presented in the orderly little ballad stanzas of the original. In a moment of heightened consciousness, the poet is able to assume all roles: he turns Indian, catching sight of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, and watching the white men arrive (again an echo of Rimbaud's “Les blancs débarquent” [“the white men are landing!”] in the Saison). And these white men bring him, not a real horse (no more camels, goats, or elephants!) but “the horse I fell in love with on the frieze”—in short, a work of art.
In this moment of ecstasy, the fragmented self, victimized by nameless attackers, is reborn: “And now it is the serpent's turn. / I am not quite you, but almost, the opposite of visionary.” So begins Part 5. The “visionary” is no longer needed, for what the poet has learned is that to be an artist is to come to terms with life itself: “When you turn your head / can you feel your heels, undulating? that's what it is / to be a serpent.” Now “the heart … bubbles with red ghosts, since to move is to love.” The poet can now reject the hero figure of Part 3: “The hero, trying to unhitch his parachute, / stumbles over me. It is our last embrace.” Out of the body comes the “cancerous statue” which is the poet's real self, which “against my will / against my love” has “become art.” And the poem concludes triumphantly:
and I have lost what is always and everywhere
present, the scene of my selves, the occasion of these ruses,
which I myself and singly must now kill
and save the serpent in their midst.
(CP, 257)
Few poets of our time, I would posit, could manage the difficult structural and textual modulations of this poem, its swift and sudden transitions from long flowing line to short choppy one, from romantic melody to jazz syncopation, from fact to fantasy, past to present, self to other, nightmare landscape to the direct presentation of things. The French influence is as important as ever, but it is now thoroughly domesticated, absorbed into the fabric of colloquial American idiom: “My / 12 years since they all died, philosophically speaking” or “I'm looking for my Shanghai Lil.” And on every rereading, some new marvelous detail strikes our attention. Notice how the “barrage balloon” of Part One's hunting scene reappears, quite unexpectedly, as the hero's parachute in Part 5. The poem ends on what Grace Hartigan has called a note of “inner containment”; the “serpent self” triumphs over “the occasion of these ruses.”
2. POEMS FOR EMERGENT OCCASIONS: THE “I DO THIS, I DO THAT” POEM
What are probably O'Hara's best known poems—“Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul,” “A Step Away from Them,” “Personal Poem,” “Lana Turner has Collapsed!”—all belong to the genre of the occasional poem, although with rare exception, the occasion is not an important public one (or even a pivotal private event like a wedding or a bon voyage party), but an ordinary incident like a luncheon date or a weekend beach party.
Such occasional poetry gave O'Hara a chance to display his wonderful sense of humor. “Khrushchev is coming on the right day!”, for example, explores the essential absurdity of our responses to the latest news. The poem is not really about Khrushchev at all; rather, it pokes fun at the American desire to make foreign dignitaries, especially from an alien country like Russia, feel “at home” in the United States. Even a dour leader like Khrushchev, a person who probably mistrusts all things American, the poem implies, will have to be pleased with New York on such a marvelous September day, a day on which “the cool graced light / is pushed off the enormous glass piers by hard wind / and everything is tossing, hurrying on up” (CP, 340). The irony, of course, is that Khrushchev himself couldn't care less; he has hardly come to America in order to savor the fall weather. But the poet's own mood is one of such buoyancy, such joie de vivre, that he wants even Khrushchev to enjoy his visit, and so, when the Puerto Rican cab driver complains to him that “this country / has everything but politesse,” the poet thinks, in a marvelously silly nonsequitur, that “Khrushchev was probably being carped at / in Washington, no politesse.” Ultimately, the poem implies, none of it matters; what matters is that it is one of those rare New York mornings when one actually loves walking to work because “the light seems to be eternal / and joy seems to be inexorable.” And so the train that “bears Khrushchev on to Pennsylvania Station” becomes part of the “tossing,” “blowing” life of the city, ultimately merging with the “hard wind.”
Yet O'Hara's own attitude to his improvisatory occasional poems is curiously equivocal. In a letter to Fairfield Porter, he contrasts his own work to John Ashbery's with reference to the two sons (the “bad” one played by Frank's idol, James Dean) in the film East of Eden:
I think one of the things about East of Eden is that I am very materialistic and John is very spiritual, in our work especially. As an example, the one boy gives the father ＄5000 he has earned by war-profiteering in beans for a birthday present, but the good boy gives him the announcement of his engagement which symbolizes the good life the father wants for both sons. John's work is full of dreams and a kind of moral excellence and kind sentiments. Mine is full of objects for their own sake, spleen and ironically intimate observation which may be truthfulness (in the lyrical sense) but is more likely to be egotistical cynicism masquerading as honesty.38
This is unnecessarily harsh self-criticism, although the distinction O'Hara makes between his own mode and Ashbery's is not entirely beside the point. … In any case, although some of O'Hara's lesser poems may suffer from what he calls “egotistical cynicism masquerading as honesty,” his “ironically intimate observation” usually transforms life into art, preventing “objects” from being treated merely “for their own sake.” Certainly this is the case in the witty Khrushchev poem.
My personal favorite among O'Hara's occasional poems is “Joe's Jacket,” which was published in Big Table in 1960 but was not included in Lunch Poems. This poem was written during the summer of 1959 when Frank lived with Joe LeSueur at 441 East 9th Street. It was the summer he met and fell in love with Vincent Warren. This is the background of the poem which is “about” a weekend houseparty in Southampton and alludes obliquely to the complex set of relationships between Frank, Vincent, and Joe, as well as to Frank's long-standing literary friendship with Kenneth Koch and his wife Janice.
On the surface, “Joe's Jacket” is like a Scott Fitzgerald short story in miniature: the summer weekend parlor-car ride to Southampton, the drunken party, the morning after the night before, the return to the hot city, the Monday morning hangover. But these incidents are presented in a series of separate “shots,” reminiscent less of Fitzgerald than of a film like Godard's Weekend. In this connection, the poem's metrics are especially ingenious. The whole “story” is told as if in one long breath. The poem's long (13-20-syllable) lines are almost wholly unpunctuated and almost all run-on; there is not a single full stop in the space of fifty-two lines. Once we have “entrained” with Frank, Jap, and Vincent, therefore, we cannot really stop until the whirlwind weekend is over. Yet this “action poem” simulates speed and acceleration by careful structural means; it is a good example of the “push and pull” technique O'Hara alludes to in his letter to Larry Rivers.
The poem opens on a note of pleasurable anticipation:
Entraining to Southampton in the parlor car with Jap and Vincent, I
see life as a penetrable landscape lit from above
like it was in my Barbizonian kiddy days when automobiles
were owned by the same people for years and the Alfa Romeo
was only a rumor under the leaves beside the viaduct and I
pretending to be adult felt the blue within me and the light up there
no central figure me, I was some sort of cloud or a gust of wind
at the station a crowd of drunken fishermen on a picnic Kenneth
is hard to find but we find, through all the singing, Kenneth smiling
it is off to Janice's bluefish and the incessant talk of affection
expressed as excitability and spleen to be recent and strong
and not unbearably right in attitude, full of confidences
now I will say it, thank god, I knew you would
(CP, 329)
En route in the train with Jap (Jasper Johns) and Vincent, the poet feels euphoric and light-hearted; his is, at least for the moment, a stable and secure world. Like a painting of the Barbizon school, whose source of light comes from a definite point, his “landscape” seems “penetrable” as he recalls the orderly days of his childhood “when automobiles / were owned by the same people for years,” and he “felt the blue” within himself. Blue is O'Hara's favorite color; a whole essay could be devoted to its appearances and uses in the Collected Poems. To feel “the blue within” oneself is to be free, happy, imaginative; to become, further, “some sort of cloud or gust of wind” is again a Romantic image of creative fulfillment. And even the dinner Janice has prepared is “bluefish.”
It is interesting to note how different this whole passage is from the poems of O'Hara's mentors and contemporaries. The phrase “life as penetrable landscape” immediately recalls “Life changed to landscape” in Robert Lowell's “Beyond the Alps,” but Frank's train ride is not a symbolic journey from the old world to the new; it is merely a trip on the Long Island Railroad. Again; “Joe's Jacket” marks a certain withdrawal from the Williams mode of O'Hara's earlier poems; for, whereas Williams would have captured the sense of the permanent moment in all its perceptual immediacy, O'Hara rapidly shifts from the present to the past and, later in the poem, to the future, absorbing both past and future into what happens now. And finally, despite its air of documentary realism, the opening scene of “Joe's Jacket” is somehow fantastic, with its dreamlike image of the Alfa Romeo, “only a rumor under the leaves beside the viaduct,” and its condensed, amusingly devious account of the dinner conversation, where it is never clear who says what, the whole tone of the exchange being captured by the running together of verbal snatches: “now I will say it, thank god, I knew you would.”
The “excitability and spleen” which begin to surface toward the end of this section come into the foreground in Part 2, which depicts “an enormous party mesmerizing comers in the disgathering light.” Notice that the “light,” previously coming from a known source, is now “disgathering.” And Frank's memories of his “Barbizonian kiddy days” now give way to a drinking marathon:
I drink to smother my sensitivity for a while so I won't stare away
I drink to kill the fear of boredom, the mounting panic of it
I drink to reduce my seriousness so a certain spurious charm
can appear and win its flickering little victory over noise
I drink to die a little and increase the contrast of this questionable moment
and then I am going home, purged of everything except anxiety and selfdistrust
now I will say it, thank god, I knew you would
When this last line is repeated, it no longer sounds good-humored or light-hearted. Something nasty and unexplained has happened, but we never learn what it is. A lovers' quarrel? An insult? A misunderstanding? A general feeling of malaise, of being unloved? In any case, it appropriately begins to rain.
Now this scene dissolves in its turn, giving way to the hour before dawn; the “enormous party” gives way to “an enormous window morning.” The wind returns but the poet now views its force with total despair: “the beautiful desperation of a tree / fighting off strangulation.” His bed has “an ugly calm”; the book he reaches for contains D. H. Lawrence's “The Ship of Death”; in the next line, ship and bed merge as the poet begins “slowly to drift and then to sink.” Just as he reaches this low point, “the car horn mysteriously starts to honk, no one is there / and Kenneth comes out and stops it in the soft green lightless stare.” This last phrase recalls Wallace Stevens's Green Night: it is the time of creativity and before we know it, Frank and Kenneth are working away on the latter's libretto, totally absorbed in their task. Frank's anxiety is temporarily dispelled: “I did not drift / away I did not die I am there with Haussmann and the rue de Rivoli / and the spirits of beauty, art and progress, pertinent and mobile / in their worldly way, and musical and strange the sun comes out.”
The beauty of “Joe's Jacket” is that the poem refuses to end on this high Romantic note. Sunrise is all very well, but “Entraining” invariably means “returning,” and so the fourth stanza begins:
returning by car the forceful histories of myself and Vincent loom
like the city hour after hour closer and closer to the future I am here
“I am here” counterpointed to the words “I am there,” four lines above, is especially poignant. The poet realizes that he is not part of the exciting Paris art world; he is here. There is no escape. But returning to Joe (nothing is said of Vincent's departure or subsequent movements) has its comforts: “Joe is still up and we talk / only of the immediate present.” At 4 a.m., the “sleeping city” is “bathed in an unobtrusive light which lends things / coherence and an absolute.” This “unobtrusive light” replaces the earlier extremes; it is the light of common day, of neutrality, of things as they are in our normal, everyday lives. As such, it does lend things a kind of “coherence.”
And so, in Part 5, the poet, now all alone after Joe has finally gone to bed, prepares “for the less than average” working day. The word “calm” is repeated three times within two lines, but this is not the pleasant tranquility of the parlor car; it is the calm of empty routine, dead ritual. Frank can only face the day by wearing Joe's seersucker jacket, a jacket he last wore on a European holiday:
there it was on my Spanish plaza back
and hid my shoulders from San Marco's pigeons was jostled on the /
Kurfürstendamm
and sat opposite Ashes in an enormous leather chair in the Continental
(CP, 330)
Rome, Venice, Berlin, Paris with John Ashbery—Joe's jacket has seen him through all these places:
it is all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here on
many occasions as a symbol does when the heart is full and risks no speech
a precaution I loathe as the pheasant loathes the season and is preserved
it will not be need, it will be just what it is and just what happens
Only now do we understand the title of the poem. “Joe's Jacket” is the talisman that protects Frank from daily misfortunes; as a synecdoche, it stands, of course, for Joe's love. But Frank also resents its protection (“a precaution I loathe”), and in a second, ironic sense, Joe's jacket is his straitjacket: “Entraining” with Vincent, he ultimately returns to Joe. The jacket is, then, an ordering principle which the poet alternately needs and resents.
“In Memory of My Feelings” explores the artist's need to protect his “naked selves” from external chaos. “Joe's Jacket” has a related theme: how to order one's life somehow, how to ward off anxiety in favor of some kind of coherence. But because this is a poem about the life of an artist, “order” is always to be distinguished from mere routine. The poet goes through the routine of “rising for the less than average day,” and having his coffee, but he must fight routine just as he previously fought “anxiety and self-distrust.” Happiness comes in those moments when life and art are one, when Frank and Kenneth work in harmony on the opera libretto while the rest of the household is asleep. Such moments of “soft green lightless[ness]” redeem life, but they are rare. Most of the time, one can only cope by accepting “just what it is and just what happens.” And “what happens” is that Frank pursues Vincent, quarrels with Kenneth and his friends, and returns, worn out, to Joe. The tension between just what is and what one yearns for (“I am here”—“I am there”) is beautifully dramatized in this most seemingly spontaneous but most carefully structured “I do this, I do that” poem.
3. ODES
In a reading given at Buffalo on 25 September 1964, O'Hara prefaced his rendition of “Ode on Lust” with the remark, “I wrote it because the ode is so formidable to write. I thought if I call it an ode it will work out.”39 This comment, facetious though it is, sheds some light on the group of long poems written in 1957-58 and published by the Tiber Press in 1960 under the title Odes. There are, of course, earlier as well as later odes scattered throughout the Collected Poems (and such long litanies as “To the Film Industry in Crisis” and “Ave Maria” also properly belong to this class); the term “ode,” moreover, is used fairly loosely. “Ode to Michael Goldberg” is, as I have argued, an autobiographical poem on the Wordsworthian model; “Ode (to Joseph LeSueur) on the Arrow that Flieth by Day” resembles such occasional poems as “A Step Away from Them” and “Adieu to Norman.” Nevertheless, most of the “odes” in the Tiber Press book do have certain common characteristics that merit discussion.
Such poems as “Ode to Joy,” “Ode on Lust,” and “Ode to Willem de Kooning” reveal a very different side of O'Hara from the one we have considered so far. Their tone is more oracular, impersonal, and exclamatory, their syntax insistently paratactic (the “and” clauses piling up to create an almost unbearable intensity), their prosody more formal and elaborate than is typical of O'Hara. “Ode to Joy” (CP, 281), for example, has traces of the Greater or Pindaric Ode. Not that its three stanzas resemble the Pindaric model (strophe—antistrophe—epode), but the subject is “elevated” (the triumph of love over time), the tone sublime, and the three “strophes” have an intricate and elaborate prosodic scheme. Each strophe has thirteen lines, longer lines alternating with somewhat shorter ones in a fixed pattern, with the final line invariably having only four or five syllables and two stresses. In each strophe, lines 2, 4, 7, 8, 12, and 13 are indented. The phrase “no more dying,” which appears in the opening line, becomes the refrain, reappearing after the first strophe and again at the end of the ode. Thus, although O'Hara's strophes contain neither rhyme nor meter, and although enjambment is used so consistently that the integrity of the individual line is somewhat obscured, the overall pattern is considerably more formal than that of, say, “The Arrow that Flieth by Day.” Certainly, its visual appearance on the page is very tidy, the three strophes looking exactly alike.
“Ode on Lust” (CP, 282) has a similarly structured visual pattern. Three boxlike stanzas whose lines have six to eight syllables are juxtaposed to two long, snakelike couplets, in which the lines range from seventeen to twenty-three syllables; the third “box” is followed by a kind of coda, made up of five such long lines. The effect is to create what looks like a composition for solo voice and chorus, the “long line” sections responding to the short, abrupt ones.
Thematically, these odes are curious for their avoidance of Personism; they are perhaps closer to such earlier long poems as “Second Avenue” and “Easter.” “Ode to Joy” is a celebration of erotic love, of sexual bliss as a way of defying death. This theme is insistently Romantic but O'Hara's imagery is often surrealistic:
and the streets will be filled with racing forms
and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars
will swell from the walls and books alive in steaming rooms
to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably
as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin
and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg
and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith
that's sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness
near the grave of love
No more dying
The “reclining monolith / that's sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness” is a sly sexual image reminiscent of a Miró painting; the poem contains many such comic-erotic images, thus undercutting its own high Romanticism:
in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds
to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbèd limbs
that weep a pearly perspiration on the sheets of brief attention
and the hairs dry out that summon anxious declaration of the organs
as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors
pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways
Yet despite this injection of parody, “Ode to Joy” is essentially quite serious about its theme: only the ecstasy of loving, the “lava flow[ing]” of sexual consummation has the power to make “Buildings … go up in the dizzy air,” to “ride … heroes through the dark to found / great cities where all life is possible to maintain as long as time,” to turn even “the grave of love” into “a lovely sight.” “No more dying.”
The finest of the 1957-58 odes is, I think, the “Ode on Causality” (CP, 302-03). This poem begins on an ironic note with the aphorism, “There is the sense of neurotic coherence,” and we soon learn that there is no sense of any kind of coherence, the notion of causality being comically deflated in the last strophe: “what goes up must / come down, what dooms must do, standing still and walking in New York.”
After the opening series of witty, seemingly unrelated aphorisms, there is an abrupt shift to a scene at the grave of Jackson Pollock. (In an earlier version, the poem was called “Ode at the Grave of Jackson Pollock,” and Donald Allen notes that lines 8-9, in which the little girl Maude shows the poet Pollock's grave, refer to its actual location at the Springs near Easthampton, Long Island [CP, 542]). The sight of the grave and the child's comment that “‘he isn't under there, he's out in the woods’” leads to a moment of transcendence as the poet prays for his own artistic powers:
and like that child at your grave make me be distant and imaginative
make my lines thin as ice, then swell like pythons
the color of Aurora when she first brought fire to the Arctic in a sled
a sexual bliss inscribe upon the page of whatever energy I burn for art
and do not watch over my life, but read and read through copper earth
not to fall at all, but disappear or burn! seizing a grave by throat
which is the look of earth, its ambiguity of light and sound. …
(CP, 302)
After rejecting the usual trappings of funeral rites (“for Old Romance was draping dolors on a scarlet mound”), O'Hara concludes by celebrating the great painter in terms of his own art:
let us walk in that nearby forest, staring into the growling trees
in which an era of pompous frivolity or two is dangling /
its knobby knees
and reaching for an audience
over the pillar of our deaths a cloud
heaves
pushed, steaming and blasted
love-propelled and tangled /
glitteringly
has earned himself the title Bird in Flight.
The oracular, exclamatory mode of “Ode on Causality” and “Ode to Joy” (“make me be distant and imaginative / make my lines thin as ice, then swell like pythons”) recalls neither Wordsworth nor Keats but the Shelley of “Ode to the West Wind” or perhaps the Collins of “Ode on the Poetical Character.” But to be perfectly accurate, we would have to say that O'Hara's model is Shelley-cum-Dada, for the “Ode on Causality,” like the “Ode to Joy,” frequently injects comic burlesque elements like the following:
sweet scripts to obfuscate the tender subjects of their future lays
to be layed at all! romanticized, elaborated, fucked, sung, put to “rest”
is worse than the mild apprehension of a Buddhist type caught halfway up
the tea-rose trellis with his sickle banging on the Monk's lead window. …
Here the pun on “lays,” the four-letter words, and the absurd image of the Buddhist and the Monk deflate the lyric intensity of the earlier passage. But in ending his ode with the rhapsodic reference to the painter's apotheosis (he becomes a work of art),40 the poet recaptures his original ecstasy.
“Ode on Causality” thus provides us with an interesting example of the fusion between disparate modes and conventions. The basic structure of the ode is the “free Pindaric” of Cowley as adapted by Collins and Shelley, but such imagistic passages as “Maude lays down her doll” derive from quite different sources—in this case, Rimbaud's “Enfance, Part II,” which begins: “That's she, the little dead girl, behind the rose bushes.” At the same time, the aphorisms (“suddenly everyone's supposed to be veined, like marble” or “the rock is the least living of the forms man has fucked”), as well as the passage punning on lays which I cited above, introduce a Dada note; they recall Tzara or Apollinaire. The total effect of the poem is that of a Brahms or Schumann lied, interrupted at certain junctures by “noise” passages in the vein of Satie or Cage. Such conjunctions are wholly characteristic of O'Hara's lyricism.
4. LOVE POEMS
Finally, I wish to say something about the remarkable series of love poems written for Vincent Warren between 1959 and 1961. O'Hara had been writing love poems ever since his Harvard days, but it was not until he fell in love with the beautiful dancer in 1959 that what he himself called “my delicate and caressing poems” (CP, 356) were perfected. These forty-odd erotic lyrics should be read in sequence, although they are not found that way in the chronologically arranged Collected Poems.41 The range of moods from sexual excitement, joy, and hope, to loneliness, delusion, despair, and cynicism, and finally to the stoical acceptance of the way things are is extraordinary. Even such seemingly trivial little songs as “Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs” (CP, 367) repay study. This particular short lyric, with its intricate repetition (“I was thinking of you”) and foreshortened last line—“and right now”—recalls Yeats's famed “A Deep-sworn Vow.”
The risk of the intimate erotic lyric is that the poet is too close to his own experience to objectify it; in O'Hara's words, “sentiment is always intruding on form” (CP, 276). And we do find cases in the Vincent Warren sequence where the sentiment is stated too flatly:
When I am feeling depressed or anxious sullen
all you have to do is take your clothes off
and all is wiped away revealing life's tenderness. …
when I am in your presence I feel life is strong
and will defeat all its enemies and all of mine
and all of yours and yours in you and mine in me. …
(CP, 349)
Or again, the poem may succumb to triviality:
I want some bourbon / you want some oranges / I love the leather
jacket Norman gave me
and the corduroy coat David
gave you, it is more mysterious than spring. …
(CP, 356)
And occasionally, there is an irritating note of campy cuteness:
everything
seems slow suddenly and boring except
for my insatiable thinking towards you
as you lie asleep completely plotzed and
gracious as a hillock in the mist. …
(CP, 354)
But for the most part, the Vincent Warren poems do work because O'Hara defines his sexual longing or sexual pleasure in terms of witty and fantastic hyperbole. He rarely resorts to that stock-in-trade of what I have elsewhere called “corn-porn” poetry42—that is, the elaborate metaphor in which the lover's penis is compared to a firehose on a burning deck, the vagina to a cave full of roses, and so on. Rather, his analogies are intentionally absurd; witness the following epigrammatic lyric:
Some days I feel that I exude a fine dust
like that attributed to Pylades in the famous
Chronica nera areopagitica when it was found
and it's because an excavationist has
reached the inner chamber of my heart
and rustled the paper bearing your name
I don't like that stranger sneezing over our love
(CP, 366)
Here the pseudo-learned reference to the recently excavated Greek statue, still “exud[ing] a fine dust,” provides the poet with a playful twist on a very familiar theme: the longing to keep one's love all to oneself.
Or again, “To You” (CP, 342), which begins as a very conventional love poem with the lines, “What is more beautiful than night / and someone in your arms,” shifts ground in the third line to an entirely different frame of reference, the poet now burlesquing his romantic overture:
that's what we love about art
it seems to prefer us and stays
if the moon or a gasping candle
sheds a little light or even dark
you become a landscape in a landscape
with rocks and craggy mountains
and valleys full of sweaty ferns
breathing and lifting into the clouds. …
So the landscape of love is defamiliarized, becoming a valley “full of sweaty ferns.”
The ability to transform ordinary experience in this way is nowhere more evident than in “You are Gorgeous and I'm Coming” (CP, 331), an acrostic poem in which the first letters of successive lines spell out the name Vincent Warren. Here is the first or “Vincent” half:
Vaguely I hear the purple roar of the torn-down Third Avenue El
it sways slightly but firmly like a hand or a golden-downed thigh
normally I don't think of sounds as colored unless I'm feeling corrupt
concrete Rimbaud obscurity of emotion which is simple and very definite
even lasting, yes it may be that dark and purifying wave, /
the death of boredom
nearing the heights themselves may destroy you in the pure air
to be further complicated, confused, empty but refilling, exposed to light
Here the love scene becomes a fantastic blend of real and imaginary objects, noises, colors, and movements; such images as “the purple roar of the torn-down Third Avenue El” which “sways lightly but firmly like a hand or a golden-downed thigh” have intensely erotic overtones, but the poet's orgasm is never described overtly. Rather, the long, unpunctuated, sinewy lines with their run-on clauses and condensed catalogues of nouns and adjectives (“corrupt / concrete Rimbaud obscurity of emotion”) convey the lover's passion (“empty but refilling,” “thundering and shaking”) as it moves toward a final crescendo in the poem's last line, which is distinguished by its eleven monosyllables, its repetition of words and sounds (especially voiceless stops), and its internal rhyme (stars, are, for, our), to create a stunning cadenza:
newly the heavens stars all out we are all for the captured time of our being
The same technique informs “Poem (Twin spheres full of fur and noise),” although this one begins with a graphic (and some would say, distasteful) description:
Twin spheres full of fur and noise
rolling softly up my belly beddening on my chest
and then my mouth is full of suns
that softness seems so anterior to that hardness. …
(CP, 405)
If the piece continued in this vein, it would be just another self-indulgent poem, elaborating unnecessarily on what the poet does in bed. But O'Hara rapidly transforms the “Twin spheres” into celestial bodies, and what began as a description of fellatio becomes a parody Sun God myth:
jetting I commit the immortal spark jetting
you give that form to my life the Ancients loved
those suns are smiling as they move across the sky
and as your chariot I soon become a myth
which heaven is it that we inhabit for so long a time
it must be discovered soon and disappear
(CP, 406)
The poet knows he is no Helios driving his golden chariot across the sky; he is not even the golden chariot. But it's nice to think that love confers immortality upon himself and Vincent, even if “the immortal spark” lasts only a moment.
The sense of tentativeness introduced in the poem's last line (“it must be discovered soon and disappear”) is found again and again in these love poems, the ecstatic tone of “You are Gorgeous and I'm Coming” giving way, more often than not, to a rueful, self-deprecatory one. “Present,” for example, is a kind of parody version of Donne's “The Good Morrow” or “The Extasie”; images of celestial spheres and heavenly bodies are again used as points of reference, but the poet knows he and Vincent are, at best, sublunary lovers, and even then, all too often their paths don't cross, although Frank likes to imagine that they can and do:
even now I can lean
forward across the square and see
your surprised grey look become greener
as I wipe the city's moisture from
your face
and you shake the snow
off onto my shoulder, light as a breath. …
(CP, 353)
The longing to be with the beloved affords “some peculiar insight,” but when the poet supplicates the heavens, he is greeted only by “the mixed-up air.”
Perhaps the most moving of the Vincent Warren poems is “St. Paul and All That” (CP, 406). It concerns the brief reunion of the lovers at a time when Frank already knows that their love is doomed, that his love is greater than Vincent's. The poem traces the graph of the poet's shifting emotions as he unexpectedly finds Vincent in his room:
Totally abashed and smiling
I walk in
sit down and
face the frigidaire
it's April
no May
it's May
such little things have to be established in morning
after the big things of night
do you want me to come?
“Totally abashed and smiling” (a phrase picked up later in the poem in the line “full of anxious pleasures and pleasurable anxiety”), Frank tries to act normal: “I walk in / sit down and / face the frigidaire” (the reception is evidently cold!), but he is so excited that he can't remember “little things” like whether it's April or May. He goes over in his mind all the meaningful statements he was going to make when this longed-for moment finally occurred, statements like “life in Birmingham is hell” or “you will miss me / but that's good,” or allusions to “this various dream of living,” but at the same time he understands the futility of it all. O'Hara successfully distances himself from the “Frank” who exists in the poem:
when the tears of a whole generation are assembled
they will only fill a coffee cup
just because they evaporate
doesn't mean life has heat. …
In the bittersweet passage that follows, the poet recognizes that his love is now met with some measure of indifference:
I am alive with you
full of anxious pleasures and pleasurable anxiety
hardness and softness
listening while you talk and talking while you read
I read what you read
you do not read what I read
which is right, I am the one with the curiosity. …
when you're not here someone walks in and says
“hey,
there's no dancer in that bed”
Recognition of the truth is one thing. But now the poet suddenly recalls the heyday of love, exclaiming with the rapt lyricism of his beloved Rachmaninoff:
O the Polish summers! those drafts!
those black and white teeth!
But this bravura passage is punctuated immediately by the clear-headed acceptance of the fact that “you never come when you say you'll come but on the other hand you do come.”
What role does the title of the poem play? Vincent Warren has noted that “St. Paul” is a play on his middle name.43 But it is also a nice irony to bring St. Paul into the picture, for the allusion points up Vincent's delinquency. No faithful apostle, responding to the Call and always “coming” when he is needed, this “St. Paul” fails to bring his disciple a New Dispensation. And yet, the Pauline doctrine of Reversal, of a love that will turn the world upside down and which redeems suffering, is central to the poem, for the “I” who speaks still believes in it. When he finds the dancer in his room, he experiences such a moment of reversal. But the reversal is, of course, temporary and illusory, and the poet is shown as accepting the inevitable: “the sun doesn't necessarily set, sometimes it just disappears.”
In the summer of 1961, the love poems to Vincent Warren come to an abrupt end, and the poetry written after this date is recognizably different. The center of O'Hara's world was shifting somewhat. As the Museum took up more of his energies, he spent more time uptown, away from Second Avenue. He was also meeting a whole group of younger poets, whose conversation and work influenced his style. The most notable of these was Bill Berkson (“Golden Bill,” as Frank called him in a letter to John Ashbery),44 who worked with O'Hara at the Museum and became an especially close friend. The letters to Bill Berkson are full of intellectual excitement and discussion, and the “Bill Berkson” poems, written in the early sixties, are correspondingly less emotional and more abstract than those written for, say, Grace Hartigan or Joe LeSueur or Vincent Warren. But surely age also played a part in the increasing detachment of the “I do this, I do that” poems written for various occasions. For in June of 1961, Frank O'Hara turned thirty-five. And that month he began a poem with the lines:
April is over is May too June
and thundershowers tomorrow
you wouldn't want those tears to
stick to your cheeks long. …
(CP, 408)
Notes
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Unpub. letter to Fairfield Porter, 7 July 1955.
-
The friendship with Grace Hartigan ended in 1960 when she left New York (see Chapter 3, Note 5). Patsy Southgate met O'Hara on Memorial Day 1958 when she gave a Bloody Mary party at Easthampton; Mike Kanemitsu, Donald Allen, and Mike Goldberg (later Patsy's husband) were also there. In an interview conducted in New York on 30 March 1976, Patsy Southgate told the author, “I was his closest woman friend during the last part of his life. We were in love.”
-
Unpub. letter to John Ashbery, 1 February 1961.
-
LeSueur Interview, 30 July 1975.
-
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, letter to Bruce Boone, 3 February 1973, in Panjandrum, 2 & 3 (1973), unpaginated.
-
Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964), back cover. Ferlinghetti estimates that seven years elapsed between his proposal that O'Hara “make a book” from the “poems he wrote on his lunch hour” and the publication of Lunch Poems (letter to Bruce Boone cited above). We know that the project was on O'Hara's mind in 1959, because when John Ashbery asked him for a group of poems possibly influenced by Reverdy, to be used in Ashbery's forthcoming essay on Reverdy's influence on American poets, O'Hara replied: “I had them [the poems] prepared to go into Lunch Poems which Ferlinghetti asked me for 2 years ago and has doubtless ceased to care about. But that's why I have copies to send,” unpub. letter to John Ashbery, 1 February 1961.
-
The others are “Now that I am in Madrid and Can Think,” “Song (Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs?),” “Cohasset,” “Beer for Breakfast,” “St. Paul and All That,” “Pistachio Tree at Château Noir,” “Adventures in Living,” and “Hôtel Particulier.”
-
Introduction to The Floating Bear, rpt. of the semimonthly newsletter 1961-69, eds. Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones (New York: 1970), pp. viii-ix. Diane di Prima was quite right, as O'Hara's Harvard Notebook and the forthcoming Poems Retrieved make clear.
-
Unpub. letter to Mike Goldberg, 16 February 1956. Courtesy Giorno Poetry Systems, The Archives, in which the letter is numbered 15,306. The story of the lost typewriter is told by Joe LeSueur in “Four Apartments,” p. 290.
-
In an interview conducted in New York on 30 March 1976, David Shapiro told the author that John Ashbery once expressed this feeling about using long lines. That O'Hara equated line length with strength and vitality is suggested by the prayer in “Ode on Causality”: “make my lines thin as ice, then swell like pythons” (CP, 302).
-
In the interview of 30 July 1975, Le Sueur told the author that he preferred O'Hara's realistic, documentary poems—the “I do this, I do that” poems—to all others.
-
Shapiro interview, 30 March 1976.
-
“Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism, Four Essays, trans. and ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 13.
-
“The Significance of Frank O'Hara,” Iowa Review, 4 (Winter 1973), 91.
-
The phrase is David Shapiro's; interview of 30 March 1976. For an excellent account of O'Hara's ability to transcend “pure facts” and empiricism, see Shapiro's article on O'Hara in Contemporary Poets, ed. James Vinson, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin's, 1975), pp. 1778-81.
-
The Poem in its Skin (Chicago: Big Table, 1968), p. 164.
-
The Dada Painters and Poets, An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951), pp. xxxv-vi. The translation is by Dollie Pierre Carreau. See also Carroll, The Poem in its Skin, pp. 164-68.
-
The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1971), pp. 508-09.
-
Iowa Review, 4 (Winter 1973), 93-94.
-
Eric Sellin, “The Esthetics of Ambiguity: Reverdy's Use of Syntactic Simultaneity,” in About French Poetry from DADA to “Tel Quel,” Text and Theory, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1974), p. 117.
-
Art and Illusion: A Study of the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956 (New York: Pantheon, Bollingen Series XXXV.5, 1960), pp. 281-86.
-
Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. and ed. Roger Shattuck (New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 121.
-
A whole essay could be written on O'Hara's allegiance to Reverdy, although the actual influence of the French poet is one of spirit rather than substance. In “A Step Away from Them,” O'Hara writes: “My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy” (CP, 258). When Ashbery asked O'Hara to contribute poems that might be influenced by Reverdy for the special Reverdy issue of Mercure de France, O'Hara responded, half-jokingly: “I just couldn't stand the amount of work it [the Reverdy project] would seem to take, since the minute you mentioned it I decided that everything I've written except In Memory of My Feelings and Dig my Grave with a Silver Spoon has been under his influence.” Later in the letter (1 Feb. 1961), he adds: “I think probably ‘the eyelid has its storms’ is somewhat influenced by Une vague solitaire” and then asks, “Do you think Naphtha is sort of Reverdian?” O’Hara did collaborate with Bill Berkson on a short prose-poem on Reverdy; see Mercure de France, 344 (1962), 97-98. Among other things, this piece contains the sentence: “In America there is only one other poet beside Reverdy: William Carlos Williams.” The prose poem is reprinted in The World, Special Translations Issue (4 April 1973), 91-92. See also John Ashbery, “Reverdy en Amérique,” Mercure de France, 344 (1962), 109-12.
-
Translation by Eric Sellin, in Caws, ed., About French Poetry, p. 119.
-
See Chapter 1. In the interview with Lucie-Smith, O’Hara says: “I think Lowell has … a confessional manner which lets him get away with things that are really just plain bad but you’re supposed to be interested because he’s so upset” (SS, 13).
-
See “About Zhivago and his Poems” (1950); rpt. CP, 501.
-
“All the Imagination Can Hold,” New Republic, January 1 & 8, 1972, 24; David Shapiro, in a letter to the author dated 20 July 1976, says: “The collected works is Frank O’Hara’s best work and should be thought of (like Stevens) as the lyric as it attempts epic scale.” Joe LeSueur, in a letter to the author dated 20 July 1976, mentions that James Merrill also read the CP cover to cover “as an autobiography.”
-
See James Schyler’s note to the poem “Mayakovsky” (1954) in CP, 532-33.
-
The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, ed. Patricia Blake and trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey (Bloomington, Ind.: Midland Books, 1975), p. 159.
-
The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, pp. 137-43.
-
Another influence frequently cited is that of Rilke. My own view (see Chapter 1) is that Rilke had more influence on O’Hara’s poetic than on his poetry, although O’Hara’s “Aus Einem April” (CP, 186) is an important example of “Making it New” via parody-translation. There are also important thematic links—the treatment of the dolls in “Memorial Day 1950” (see Chapter 2) is a case in point. But O’Hara’s style does not really resemble Rilke’s.
-
I owe this information to Patsy Southgate, interview of 30 March 1976.
-
Unpub. letter to Bill Berkson, 12 August 1962.
-
Larry Rivers (New York: Abrams, 1971), p. 24.
-
Grace Hartigan, letter to the author dated 14 March 1976.
-
Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1966), pp. 217-18.
I am the saint in prayer on the terrace like the peaceful animals that graze as far as the sea of Palestine.
I am the scholar in his dark armchair. Branches and rain beat against the library window.
I am the wanderer along the main road running through the dwarfish woods … I might be the child abandoned on the wharf. …
-
See Chapter 3, Note 7.
-
Unpub. letter to Fairfield Porter, 7 July 1955.
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Poetry Reading, Buffalo, New York, 25 September 1964, taped by Donald Allen.
-
I think O’Hara is referring to Pollock’s early painting Bird (1941; Collection Lee Krasner, New York: Crown, 1970), p. 20. The painting has a birdlike shape emerging from a white cloud near the top center of the canvas. Others have suggested that O’Hara was thinking of Brancusi’s famous sculpture Bird in Space in the Museum of Modern Art. In either case, the implication is that the dead artist is reborn as a work of art.
-
The fifteen poems in Love Poems (Tentative Title) (New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1965) are roughly equivalent to what I call the “Vincent Warren” poems although there are some exceptions like “Post the Lake Poets Ballad” and “Poem (Now the violets are all gone …).” In the Collected Poems, the Vincent Warren poems are found on the following pages: 331, 332, 338, 342, 345, 346, 349-56, 360-62, 366-69, 373-74, 376-78, 380, 382, 385, 387, 396, 400, 402, 405-06.
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“The Corn-Porn Lyric: Poetry 1972-73,” Contemporary Literature, 16 (Winter 1975), 84-125.
-
Vincent Warren, untitled memoir of Frank O’Hara (Montreal 1973) in Panjandrum, 2 & 3 (1973), unpaginated.
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Unpub. letter to John Ashbery, 1 February 1961.
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