Introduction
biographical study
4
, coupled with several critical volumes on his poetry
5
. However,
the tendency to dismiss his work as minor or as just a mere representative of fifties’
queer sensibility in Cold War politics is hard to die
6
.
Starting from this unsettled critical panorama, which informs much of what
has been written on O’Hara until now, this thesis provides an analysis of his poetics
from a particular perspective. The focus is on the relevance of relationships — both
of love and friendship — within O’Hara’s overall production. In his wonderful
review of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara
7
, Kenneth Koch writes that
O’Hara “had an unusual gift for friendship and for love, for identifying himself with,
and for transforming other people and their concerns.”
8
The number of elegies and
works of art devoted to O’Hara after his death
9
bears evidence of his popularity and
of the depth of his many friendships. He had a wide circle of friends, lovers, and
acolytes, enamoured of his great personal charm, his witty humor, perceptive
intelligence and extraordinary generosity. A tireless partygoer and heavy drinker, he
devoted much of his work as an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art to
secure the career and success of other artists. At his funeral, Larry Rivers delivered a
speech which sums up quite well these peculiar characteristics:
Frank O’Hara was my best friend. There are at least sixty people in
New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend.
Without a doubt he was the most impossible man I knew. He never
let me off the hook. He never allowed me to be lazy. His talk, his
4
See O’Hara’s biography: Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. New York:
Harper Perennial, 1993.
5
See, for instance, the collection of reviews and essays on O’Hara collected in Frank O’Hara, To Be
True to a City ed. by Jim Elledge, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990.
6
See, for example, Caleb Crain, “Frank O’Hara’s ‘Fired’ Self”, in American Literary History, 9, No.
2, Summer 1997, pp. 287-308.
7
Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Edited by Donald Allen. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.
8
Kenneth Koch, “All the Imagination Can Hold” in Frank O’Hara, To Be True to a City ed. by Jim
Elledge, p. 34.
9
Immediately after O’Hara’s death, elegies started to appear in little magazines, and soon there were
so many that for Perloff “[A] whole anthology could be compiled of poems written for Frank O’Hara
in the five years or so following his death.” In Frank O’Hara, Poet among painters, p. 183. Among
them, for instance, is Allen Ginsberg’s “City Midnight Junk Strains”.
viii
Introduction
interests, his poetry, his life was a theatre in which I saw what
human beings are really like. He was a dream of contradictions. At
one time or another, he was everyone’s greatest and most loyal
audience. His friendships were so strong he forced me to reassess
men and women I would normally not have bothered to know. He
was a professional hand-holder. His fee was love. It is easy to deify
in the presence of death but Frank was an extraordinary man—
everyone here knows it.
10
Restless, eclectic, energetic, and strenuously committed to art, O’Hara
influenced many involved in the post-war avant-garde scene in New York. For many
artists, he played the role of a New York Apollinaire, lavishing advice and support
and, thanks to his personal magnetism and professional life, promoting his artist
friends. However, what really matters here is not so much his role at the center of
the New York artistic avant-garde scene, but his poetic achievements. In other
words, Rivers was right in arguing that O’Hara was an extraordinary man, but what
is of greatest interest to us is his quality as an extraordinary poet. O’Hara challenged
the limits of American poetry at large and managed to articulate in his verse what
Ashbery perceptively calls “a vernacular corresponding to the creatively messy New
York environment”
11
, a vernacular that slowly took over:
shaping [O’Hara’s] already considerable gifts toward a remarkable
new poetry—both modest and monumental, with something
basically usable about it—not only for poets in search of a voice of
their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in
trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into
something like a livable space.
12
The “livable space” of his poems, is indeed the urban space of New York and
of its social milieu. “O’Hara is certainly a New York poet. The life of the city and of
the millions of relationships that go to make it up hum through his poetry”
13
. Friends,
10
Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993,
p. 10.
11
John Ashbery, “Introduction” to CP, p. x.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
ix
Introduction
in fact, were not only an essential part of O’Hara’s life, but soon became a major
source of inspiration for his poems. On many occasions, they were the dedicatees of
O’Hara’s poems, and he would often give them his poems as gifts. Besides, O’Hara
constantly makes reference to friends in his work, openly naming or alluding to
them. He transfused into his poems his affection but also the problematic nature of
human relationships, manifesting his love and expressing all kinds of emotions, from
expectation and excitement to disillusion and depression. As Russel Ferguson
pointed out, he articulated in his poems a real “dialectic of the heart”
14
.
Hence, relational space plays a major role in the development of O’Hara’s
poetic voice, becoming the privileged space of the poetic happening. Starting from
this central recognition, my thesis attempts to analyze how this space finds
expression in O’Hara’s verses, and focuses on a number of representative poems
where this aspect of O’Hara’s production is most manifest. Such an analysis, of
course, has to take into account the social and artistic context in which O’Hara’s
creative experience was grounded, and how his peculiar poetic voice developed in
relation to it.
In particular, chapter one begins with a consideration of O’Hara’s poetics as
a whole, and investigates the poet’s close relationship to the so-called New York
School. It also discusses the reliability of such a label and its supposed validity. If it
is true that all the poets belonging to the “school” — Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery,
Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler — start their poetic search from a set of common
ideas, each of them subsequently develops a very individual and distinct voice.
O’Hara’s poetics is particularly significant for its definite refusal of ideologies, and
its adherence to the principle of multiplicity. What is more, his strong refusal of a
14
Russel Ferguson, In Memory of My Feelings. Frank O’Hara and American Art. Los Angeles:
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999, p. 16.
x
Introduction
definite, pre-codified pattern, expressed both in his poems and critical writings,
leaves place for the development of a play of voices. This chapter also introduces the
theme of relationships by proposing a discussion of O’Hara’s pseudo-manifesto,
“Personism” (CP, 498-499), where he theorizes, in his typical tongue-in-cheek style,
a conception of poetry seen as the encountering of another person, proposing a
poetic domain of the personal. Chapter two proceeds to illustrate the diverse
influences O’Hara incorporated in his work, along with his rejection of the New
Critical tradition. In particular, I give an outline of the social context of the fifties in
New York and stress the relevance of painting for the New York School of poets and
O’Hara’s strong link with this environment. The revolution brought about by the
abstract expressionists in the visual arts had a strong influence on poetry, although
the relationship between the two fields is characterized by fracture as well as
affiliation.
Given the importance of the relational space between the “I” and the “you”
in O’Hara, chapter three seeks to give a definition of his poetic subject. Such a
subject is far from being a definite given because O’Hara problematizes the self by
fragmenting it and multiplying the possible levels of meaning in the text. In the end,
it is impossible for the reader to fix on a stable unity. The self is in fact continuously
captured between the opposed poles of continuity and disorientation, and the poems
live in this tension, which is also the tension between the desire to love versus the
desire to change. Change and movement, in this sense, are at the heart of O’Hara’s
creative process as much as love is.
Chapter four tries to delineate a possible philosophical framework for
O’Hara’s poiesis. In particular, the spirit of jouissance which informs his poetic
stance, together with his appreciation of difference and pluralism, seems to
anticipate many philosophical speculations that emerged in the decades following his
xi
Introduction
death. Jacques Derrida’s conception of différance, Gilles Deleuze’s nomadic subject,
and Roland Barthes’ sense of play propose an ontology that seems in line with
O’Hara’s poetic world. Furthermore, O’Hara’s questioning of a philosophy of the
subject and his treatment of personal relationships may be seen as a poetic prelude to
Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of the singular plural, based on the ontological notion
of being-with (esse cum). Following this discussion of an appropriate theory of the
subject, the remaining part of the thesis explores how the previously defined
relational space is articulated in some representative poems. In the course of my
analysis, along with the recognition of the centrality O’Hara attributed to relational
space, I have discussed still other aspects of his poetic language, highlighting the
revolutionary use O’Hara makes of traditional poetic devices.
With this work, I hope to have contributed to clarify some undertheorized
aspects of O’Hara’s poetics. My aim was to propose a different perspective from
which it would then be possible to interpret and better understand the production of
an author too often dismissed as a culture hero, rather than as a major poet. A
reading of his production, however, proves the opposite because, as O’Hara wrote of
Pasternak’s Zhivago, “[H]is writings make him a poet, not his acting the role” (CP,
502). Thus my continuous reference to O’Hara’s multifarious writings and the
attempt to derive my conclusions from them. In this sense, relationships emerged as
one of the major motifs of O’Hara’s whole production, and his way of dealing with
this subject provided an occasion for appreciating his innovative poetry, unique in its
full appreciation of the here and now. As a matter of fact, O’Hara’s poems are like
instants of his life that are captured and then freely given to his friends, but
ultimately also to us, his readers. So the poems ask for our response and
paradoxically explore at the same time the personal domain of their author and the
reader, making us feel more intensely every single moment and requiring that we
xii
Introduction
live it to the full. Indeed, we can borrow O’Hara’s own words about Larry Rivers
and apply them to his own poems: “What his work has always had to say to me, I
guess, is to be more keenly interested while I’m still alive. And perhaps this is the
most important thing art can say” (CP, 515).
xiii
O’Hara’s Poetics
Chapter 1.
O’HARA’S POETICS WITHIN AND WITHOUT
THE “NEW YORK SCHOOL” LABEL.
1.1 FRANK O’HARA: JUST ONE OF THE NEW YORK SCHOOL?
The main focus of this thesis will be the relevance of relationships — in
particular those of love and friendship — within O’Hara’s poetry. This thematic is
central to O’Hara’s production and the way he dealt with it was highly innovative.
Before going into O’Hara’s poetics and its emergence in his Collected Poems,
however, it is essential to place the poet within his times and among his coterie of
literary and artistic friends. Most notably, O’Hara belonged to and helped to create
the so-called New York School of poets, regardless of the putative usefulness of such
a label.
1
As a matter of fact, Frank O’Hara’s name is invariably linked, in poetry
anthologies and criticism, to the names of three of his friends: John Ashbery,
Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler
2
. These poets have traditionally been grouped
together under the common definition of the New York School of poets. Moreover,
O’Hara is still occasionally thought of as little more than a key figure of this school
— an example of a particular kind of poetry. And, to make things worse, he is still
1
The New York School label has been fully discussed into three major works: Geoff Ward, Statues of
Liberty: The New York School of Poets, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993; David Lehman, The Last
Avant-Garde. The Making of the New York School of Poets. New York: Anchor Books Edition, 1999;
William Watkin, In the Process of Poetry. The New York School and the Avant-Garde. Lewisburg:
Bucknell U. P. and London: Associated U. P., 2001.
2
The names of the four poets have been associated in a number of anthologies. Among the first: Ron
Padgett and David Shapiro, eds. Anthology of New York Poets, New York: Random House, 1960;
John Bernard Myers, The Poets of the New York School, Philadelphia: Falcon Press, 1969.
1
Chapter 1
often seen more as a culture hero than as a serious poet. Marjorie Perloff was the
first, in 1977, to consider the poet in the light of his association with the art world,
and the first to seriously analyze his work within a clearly delineated poetic lineage
3
.
After her, O’Hara’s poetry underwent a process of critical reconsideration and close
scrutiny
4
. Now, more than thirty years after his death, O’Hara seems to have finally
“come of age”
5
. Still, critical opinion about the merit of his work is by no means
unanimous and much more needs to be done to clarify his achievement. There is still
the tendency to dismiss him as a significant but minor member of the New York
School, one of those belonging to the post-war avant-garde movement. On the other
hand, O’Hara’s Collected Poems was first published in 1971; until then, little of his
work was available
6
. In addition, the New York School as a whole is still considered
less important than such movements as the Beats or the Black Mountain poets,
perhaps because of the peculiar qualities of its adherents.
In reality, even the label of a New York School of poets has limited value
when it comes to appreciating O’Hara’s work poem by poem. As John Bernard
3
Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara, Poet among Painters, Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1977.
4
Cf. Marjorie Perloff, “Introduction, 1997” to Frank O’Hara, Poet among Painters, p. xiii-xiv: “The
new respectability of Queer Theory, coupled with the breakdown of the High Culture / Popular
Culture divide, and the tolerance, even in the Academy, for open forms and improvisatory discourse—
these have given O’Hara a new place in the canon.” Perloff then names some of the most important
anthologies where O’Hara has been included: from the Norton Anthology of American Literature
(1989), to Helen Vendler’s Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985), to the more
recent avant-garde anthologies: Eliot Weinberger’s American Poetry since 1950 (Marsilio, 1993);
Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry (Norton, 1994); Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side
of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 (Sun & Moon, 1994).
5
Marjorie Perloff, “Introduction, 1997” to Frank O’Hara, Poet among Painters, p. xiv.
6
Marjorie Perloff reports that “The first edition (Alfred A. Knopf, 1971) supposedly remained in
print, but prospective readers had a hard time locating copies, and it never came out in paperback. The
California Press edition of 1995 has accordingly filled a real need”. Cf. “Introduction, 1997” to Frank
O’Hara, Poet among Painters, p. xxix.
2
O’Hara’s Poetics
Myers, the first to group the four poets together under a common umbrella
7
, stated in
the introduction to his 1969 anthology The Poets of the New York School:
I have not called these writers “The New York School of
Poets”, but have deliberately refrained from so defining them
because, properly speaking, they do not constitute a “school
of poets” in the old-fashioned sense. Perhaps, despite the
pejorative flavour of the word, it might be more accurate to
call them a “coterie”, –if we define as coterie a group of
writers rejected by the literary establishment who found
strength to continue with their work by what anarchists used
to call “mutual aid”. The term “The Poets of the New York
School” implies more than a coterie…because what is
referred to is a small group in a definite world.
8
In the introduction to another early anthology
9
, poets David Shapiro and Ron
Padgett remarked that it would be “facile as well as misleading to see these poets as
forming a ‘School’ but that, in fact, this is how they are usually still categorised by
people who cannot live without patterns”
10
. What is certainly true, is that concepts
such as “schools” or “movements” rarely do justice to individual artists, especially if
they are “major”. On the other hand, it is undeniable that these four poets were not
only close friends, but they shared many ideas and often worked side by side,
correcting and revising each other’s poems, and collaborating on different projects
11
.
And yet, such elements hardly add up to a New York School, since the four poets
never produced joint statements regarding poetics or any kind of officially shared
manifesto. Precisely because of this, John Ashbery
12
overtly resented the “New York
7
Lehman reports that Myers was the first to apply to the four friends the label “New York School of
poets”, in an article which appeared in a Californian magazine called Nomad, in 1961. In David
Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde, p. 27.
8
John Bernard Myers, The Poets of the New York School, Philadelphia: Falcon Press, 1969, pp. 7-8.
9
Ron Padgett and David Shapiro, eds. Anthology of New York Poets, New York: Random House,
1960, p. 2.
10
The quotation is in Alan Feldman, Frank O’Hara, Boston: Twayne Publishers, a division of G. K.
Hall & Co., 1979, p. 40.
11
Just to name the longest project involving the two of them, Ashbery and Schuyler worked for ten
years on the only novel the “school” was ever to write: A Nest of Ninnies. Calais, Vermont: Z Press,
1976.
12
John Ashbery, “National Book Award Symposium Speech, 1968” Houghton Library ms. AM6.
Harvard, Cambridge Mass. Part of the speech is quoted in William Watkin, In the Process of Poetry.
3
Chapter 1
School” label, and admitted to being part of a group merely on the basis of
friendship. Along with Koch, he played down the role New York has in his poetry,
and considered the city “an anti-place, an abstract climate”
13
, having, in Koch’s
words, relatively little importance:
We were all in the same place, whatever the place was. I
don’t think we would have been very happy in a smaller
town, given our voracious appetites for culture, conversation,
excitement, and other people. I don’t know whether it was
specifically New York; it is hard for me to say anything that
would really be true about the city at that time. The important
thing for me was that we were together in a city that could
sustain us.
14
Right after, however, Koch lists some crucial qualities of the New York
environment and gives a brief description of the elements he and his friends were
putting into verse: “that sort of dizzying anonymity, the feeling of freedom, the
‘availability of experience’, as Marianne Moore says in a poem about New York, the
feeling of excitement and nervousness.”
15
The city environment here is no longer
reduced to a mere meeting point, or an ideal place for the social life of artists. On the
contrary, it seems to harbor some qualities at the very heart of the creative process.
However, in Ashbery’s view, these qualities could stem from any other metropolis
and were not peculiar characteristics of New York. Indeed, Ashbery more than any
other member of the New York group tended to dismiss the importance of the city
The New York School and the Avant-Garde, p. 253. Cf. also John Ashbery, “Introduction” to CP,
where he writes: “The term ‘New York School’ applied to poetry isn’t helpful, in characterizing a
number of widely dissimilar poets whose work moreover has little to do with New York, which is, or
used to be, merely a convenient place to live and meet people, rather than a specific place whose local
color influences the literature produced there” (CP, x).
13
This is what Ashbery asserted in 1968 on receiving the National Book Award: “This is another
reason I dislike the New York School term–because it seems to designate a place, whereas New York
is really an anti-place, an abstract climate”. The quotation is in William Watkin, In the Process of
Poetry. The New York School and the Avant-Garde, p. 253.
14
“Frank O’Hara and His Poetry: An Interview with Kenneth Koch” in American Writing Today, vol.
1 edited by R. Kostelanetz, pp. 253.
15
Ibid.
4
O’Hara’s Poetics
per se, and has emphatically rejected the “New York School” label. Lehman reports
the poet as saying:
It was the value of the metropolis that once one was there one
didn’t have to think about where one was. One could think of
oneself as living in “the world” whereas in Key West, let’s
say, one is all too aware of being in Key West.
16
In fact, while the so-called School was supposedly being created, Ashbery
was in Paris, where he remained for ten years (although constantly in touch with his
friends).
While most critics agree that the poets had an ambiguous relationship with
New York, they all equally stress that the only poet of the New York group who
consciously acknowledged that the city had a prominent role in his poetry was Frank
O’Hara. In fact, many readers have linked O’Hara’s treatment and love for the city to
a renowned antecedent, Walt Whitman
17
, who was the first American poet to
celebrate the city and refuse to deal with it in terms of the old dichotomy of melting-
pot and den of sin. When Whitman looked at the urban world, he saw it as a work of
art in itself and a source of inspiration for his all-inclusive verses
18
. The city had to
wait for William Carlos Williams and O’Hara in order to find a set of poets
commensurate with this vision. As James Breslin observed, it is in O’Hara’s work
that New York finally moves beyond the idea of the city structured as a purgatorial
16
David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde, pp. 26-27.
17
For instance, Alan Feldman in his Frank O’Hara, p. 24; James Breslin in Elledge, ed., Frank
O’Hara, To Be True to a City. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990, p. 268; Lehman in
The Last Avant-Garde, p. 26.
18
In his famous self-portrait in section 24 of “Song of Myself”, the city of New York enters the realm
of poetry metonymically, as a mythic place that gave birth to the bard of the New World:
“Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding”
Malcolm Cowley argued that in these lines “...before creating his poems he [Whitman] has to create
the hypothetical author of the poems. (...)You might call it a mask, or, as Jung would say, a persona
that soon had a life of its own. (...) At the end one could hardly say that a 'real' Whitman existed
beneath the public figure; the man had become confused with his myth.” In the same way, Whitman
created a place for his poems, and that place was America with its metropolis, New York. Cf. Malcom
Cowley, “Introduction” to Walt Whitman, The Complete Poetry as prepared by him for the Deathbed
Edition. New York: Garden City Books, 1954, pp. 10-11.
5
Chapter 1
journey, an idea which is evident in such poets as Eliot, Crane and Ginsberg
19
.
Moreover, if he follows Whitman and Williams in re-writing the urban pastoral,
O’Hara goes even further than them in openly declaring his delight in the city.
Contrary to the great grey bard, he does not regret the countryside at all, let alone a
blade of grass. O’Hara spontaneously plunges into the traffic and the messy New
York streets, singing its “scent of garbage, patchouli and carbon monoxide”, and
translating that “lovely, corrupt, wholesome”
20
place into poetry:
Yes! yes! yes! I’ve decided, /
I’m letting my flock run around,
I’m dropping my pastoral pretensions!
…..
Let the houses fill up with dirt.
…..
I love this hairy city.
It’s wrinkled like a detective story
and noisy and getting fat and smudged
(“To the Mountains in New York”, CP, 198)
In another instance, he writes:
the country is no good for us
there’s nothing
to bump into
or fall apart glassily
there’s not enough
poured concrete
19
James Breslin, in Elledge, ed., Frank O’Hara, To Be True to a City, p. 263.
20
John Ashbery, “Introduction” to CP, p. x.
6
O’Hara’s Poetics
and brassy
reflections
…..
New York
greater than the Rocky Mountains
(“Walking”, CP, 476-477)
And again:
Alone at night
In the wet city
The country’s wit
Is not memorable.
(“1951”, CP, 73)
O’Hara’s poetry abounds with such declarations on behalf of the urban
setting. And as his personality was so central to the group, it goes a long way to
justifying the New York part of the label. Indeed, it is he who famously wrote “One
need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I
can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record
store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” (CP, 197). In order to
clarify O’Hara’s position and role in the “school”, it is necessary to consider whether
there was a set of common poetic beliefs that its members can be said to share.
In his well-informed cultural history, David Lehman calls the New York
School label a “misnomer” and proceeds to analyze the kinetic side of the School’s
aesthetic: schools, he concludes, tend to be “static and classical”, while the four poets
7
Chapter 1
were much more a movement, “dynamic and romantic”
21
. We may seem to be caught
up in a semantic quibble, but what the remark implies is that these four poets, no
matter how “dynamic and romantic”
22
their aesthetic may be, formed a group, and
can thus be treated collectively. Edwin Denby’s comments on the subject further
elucidate the vexed question of the “New York School”:
Met these four boys Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth
Koch and Jimmy Schuyler (who I had first met abroad) at the
Cedar bar in ’52 or ’53. Met them through Bill (de Kooning)
who was a friend of theirs and they admired Kline and all
those people. The painters who went to the Cedar had more
or less coined the phrase “New York School” in opposition to
the School of Paris (which also originated as a joke in
opposition to the School of Florence and the School of
Venice). (…) So the poets adopted the expression “New
York School” out of homage to the people who had de-
provincialized American painting. (…) It’s a complicated
double-joke…So the New York School was a cluster of poets
and it was through Frank O’Hara that the uptown poets and
the downtown poets got together and eventually the West
Coast too, plus the painters and Frank was at the centre and
joined them all together. After his death there was no center
for that group.
23
Here the focus is on the link between the “school” and New York vanguard
painting (a theme discussed in chapter 2) and on O’Hara’s centrality among the
cluster of poets, and among the painters as well. As Kenneth Koch remarked in his
review of the Collected Poems, O’Hara’s gift for friendship and love was unusual, as
was his ability to identify with and encourage other people
24
. Thus, there seems to be
some justification for considering the four poets together, particularly in terms of
their link with the painters and with each other.
Apart from the discussion of the “New York” part of the label, when
confronting “the school” in literary terms it is perhaps more interesting to identify
21
David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde, p. 25.
22
Ibid.
23
The quotation is in Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara, Poet among Painters, pp. 195-6.
24
Koch’s review is now in Jim Elledge, ed., Frank O’Hara, To Be True to a City, p. 34.
8
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