[In the following review, Meek gives a positive assessment of Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters.]

Marjorie Perloff's intention in this first book-length study of Frank O'Hara's poetry [Frank O'Hara] is to shift attention from the celebrity—curator at the Museum of Modern Art and friend and champion of many contemporary artists—to a serious consideration of his poetry, often dismissed as the merely charming trivia of a spare-time poet who wrote hastily and largely without revision on his lunch break or at parties. It is Perloff's conclusion that, to the contrary, O'Hara ranks as “one of the central poets of the postwar period.”

Self-deprecatory, undeniably charming, and impeccable in their comedic timing, O'Hara's poems were nonetheless a serious matter for him. Always behind his words lies the anxiety as of someone afraid to stop talking; he was amazingly prolific. From his occasional comments and practical criticism, Perloff has deduced his aesthetic as one of process, of presence (not transcendence), and above all of attention. His injunction was: “Don't be bored, don't be lazy, don't be trivial, and don't be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.” For him writing was an indispensable aspect of life lived with unremitting intensity. His poetry is a chronicle of “the world of process” as he experienced it, and of the poetic process (which for him were one and the same). In this emphasis on process, Perloff locates his essential tie with motion pictures, action painting, music, French Surrealism, and with New York City as “the very center of his being.”

From O'Hara's assimilation of these and other extraordinarily diverse influences on him, came, in Perloff's view, “the creation of a new kind of lyric poem,” antithetical to the dominant neo-Symbolist mode of the fifties. O'Hara maintained the “surface” of the poems against any suggestion of symbolic “depth”; there was nothing behind the surface for him. He won the brilliant immediacy of his poems, Perloff contends, when he adapted to poetry what Hans Hofmann called the “push and pull” of surface tensions in Cubist and abstract art. In O'Hara's poetry this became the “syntactic energy” of non sequitur, false connectives, dangling clauses, and confusing spatial and temporal relationships. His “signature” style is marked by such syntactic ambiguity and by shifts between mundane literalism and fancy, between the real and the surreal. He was at his best, she argues, when he learned to fuse Surrealist imagery with American idiom, as in the long “In Memory of My Feelings,” which Perloff considers “one of the great poems of our time.”

Perloff also looks at O'Hara's collaborations with painters, his art criticism, and his relationship to two other “New York poets,” John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg. With its useful notes and bibliography, the book efficiently makes the considerable dimensions of the subject visible for further study.