Royce Lit Review
Royce Chen
Dr. Churchill
English 394
3 November 2017
Frank O’Hara Literature Review
Critics seem unequivocally unsure what to make of Frank O’Hara; he was a man of great complexity and depth, an enigma to most. Readings of his poems vary from heartfelt and poignant to satirical and tongue-in-cheek; thus, his casual and cavalier “lunch poetry” has delighted some and frustrated others. One issue of particular contention, though, is just how much of himself O’Hara really puts forth: is O’Hara a personal poet or an impersonal poet? Many critics point to O’Hara’s most personal tools–his tone of voice and his casual and intimate allusions–as the very creators of distance between O’Hara and his readers, but the consensus is never black or white.
In his article “The Contradictions Of Frank O’Hara,” once again as evidenced by the title, James Breslin attacks some of O’Hara’s dichotomies head-on. He prefaces by warning readers that there may be no clear answer to their questions: “O’Hara’s poems are filled with signals that . . . interpretive procedures are not appropriate to them,” writes Breslin (Breslin 8). He utilizes O’Hara’s “Personal Poem” as one example, writing, “[T]he reader may be tempted to stop and to metaphorize the ‘old Roman coin’ and the ‘bolt-head’–the one rare and the other plain–but he is not given enough clues to justify such a procedure” (8). While he describes O’Hara’s style of Personism as a “personal poem . . . that is spoken in a casual, intimate tone,” Breslin also notes, “Many of the same features that make the poems seem so direct and immediate–absence of connections and depth–also estrange and conceal the speaker from us” (9). One prime example is O’Hara’s use of personal names in his poetry. Breslin writes, “[The] use of the names of his friends, as if they were just as familiar to us as to him (“First/Bunny died, then John La touche”), creates a tone of intimacy while pressing upon us the reality of O’Hara’s difference and distance from us. It is this sense of estrangement that makes these light, casual poems quietly unnerving and adds another voice to their rich, contradictory play of tones” (9).
Ira Sadoff would likewise say that he gives off the impression of being personal, while remaining distant. In Sadoff’s article “Frank O’Hara’s Intimate Fictions,” Sadoff particularly notes the close names the O’Hara references in his poems. The first line of her article starts with the first line of O’Hara’s “For Grace I after a Party”: “You do not always know what I am feeling.” Sadoff writes, “Implied in the richness of that rhetoric: a long-term closeness between the speaker and Grace, his peevishness about being misunderstood, [but] at the same time his implied disappointment that he can usually be ‘read’ so easily” (Sadoff 49). Like Breslin, Sadoff points to the nickname “Bunny” in Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away From Them” as one of the interesting tools of intimacy. Sadoff also acknowledges that it reveals “the speaker’s intimate connections,” but conversely declares that the lines immediately following retreat back into the “impersonal and absurd” (50). To this, Breslin might respond, nodding, “The self in O’Hara is . . . at once transparent and opaque–perhaps his deepest contradiction” (Breslin 9).
Elaine Equi takes perhaps the most intimate stance with O’Hara. She warmly reflects, “With Frank, there is always a feeling that he’s encouraging you, the reader – and that the poems were, in a very real way, written to have you write back and respond” (146). As justification, she adds one caveat: “His poems ask to be read as genuine, even as they retreat into [distance]” (Equi 149). Why? “In depth, as in life, a poet’s reputation is not dependent simply on the quality of the work, but rather on its relevance to the historical moment,” writes Equi (151). Drawing upon the climate of the 1950s, she notes that at the time, “[T]he autobiographical ‘I’ was celebrated (by groups like the confessional poets) and also . . . was beginning to unravel and become aware of its artifice” (149). Thus, she contends, “For many of the more conservative critics of his era, the high degree of self-consciousness and irony in O’Hara’s poems made it hard to take him seriously”; a periodic interpretation that she does not believe we should necessarily inherit today (149). She declares that the “shift from the ‘age of the artist’ to the age of the cultural critic — and a rather somber culture it is[–]” is largely responsible for this (151).
Still, Breslin perhaps said it best: “O’Hara . . . complicates the relation between poet and reader; the gap between the two becomes a space in which familiarity, awkwardness, estrangement, delight, and hostility all coexist” (Breslin 9). Thus, O’Hara is full of contradictions. Any argument that can be made for intimacy becomes a counterargument, and then a rebuttal. He is “always bursting forth” in his poetry, and “[w]e see things through his eyes but we can never step back, surround, [or] frame him” (9). He is a poet of intimate fictions, but always full of contradictions and with nothing personal about him.
Works Cited
Breslin, James. “The Contradictions Of Frank O’Hara.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 12, no. 6, 1983, pp. 7–16, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27777276.
Equi, Elaine. “Frank O’Hara: Nothing Personal.” Conjunctions, no. 29, 1997, pp. 145–55, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24515725.
Sadoff, Ira. “Frank O’Hara’s Intimate Fictions.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 35, no. 6, 2006, pp. 49–52, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20683351.
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Royce Chen
Dr. Churchill
English 394
3 November 2017
“Frank O’Hara’s Intimate Fictions” by Ira Sadoff (SSR)
- Citation: Sadoff, Ira. “Frank O’Hara’s Intimate Fictions.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 35, no. 6, 2006, pp. 49–52, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20683351.
- Thesis: “[H]is best work is intricately structured and foreshadowed; even the digressions serve as metaphorical parallels and contrasts for the poems’ obsessions, which in poem after poem reveal O’Hara’s . . . romantic quest for both constancy and surprise” (49).
In short, O’Hara’s poetry deceives, bamboozles, and surprises with its propensity for paradox and contradiction. - Structure: Sadoff begins by giving his clear stance that O’Hara’s “best work is intricately structured and foreshadowed; even the digressions serve as metaphorical parallels and contrasts for the poems’ obsessions, which in poem after poem reveal O’Hara’s . . . romantic quest for both constancy and surprise” (49). He shares the legacy of O’Hara’s influence, from poets like Ashbery to Koch in order to interest of the reader and express thes cope of O’Hara’s importance. His primary means of evidence is a close reading of O’Hara’s poetry: going through almost stanza by stanza, Sadoff lists some of the most surprising twists and turns in O’Hara’s poetry. In “The Day Lady Died,” the central dichotomy is between the “experience [being] both communal and isolating” and the “counter desire of the poem[, as] the speaker’s attempts to thwart and and defer uncertainty and contingency keep him dislocated and alone” (49). “A Step Away From Them”–a faux-romantic poem that apparently bemoans the death of a close friend, nicknamed “Bunny”–O’Hara actually chooses some of his most distant and callous language. The poem itself is titled “A Step Away From Them,” implying a distance or barrier, and ends with “A glass of papaya juice / and back to work” (O’Hara). Sadoff states the effect of such a unique style of writing: “Few poets arouse such extreme responses as devotion or disdain as O’Hara. Attachment to O’Hara’s sensibility depends to some extent on a reader’s feelings about irony and tone” (52). Thus, Sadoff concludes that O’Hara is defined in his contradiction and utilizes it to reach a higher emotional plane: “Perhaps [O’Hara] wrote ‘you do not always know what I am feeling,’ not only because feeling is private and defended, but because the many poetic strategies of Frank O’Hara allowed him to feel many, often conflicting, feelings at once” (52).
- Rhetorical Strategies: I actually did not like the way that this article operated rhetorically at all. It was logically convoluted and full of complex ideas expressed in unnecessarily complex terms. It had no subsections or blocks, and was instead one long and painful wall of text to swim through.
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Royce Chen
Dr. Churchill
English 394
3 November 2017
“Frank O’Hara: Nothing Personal” by Elaine Equi (SSR)
- Citation: Equi, Elaine. “Frank O’Hara: Nothing Personal.” Conjunctions, no. 29, 1997, pp. 145–55, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24515725.
- Thesis: “O’Hara is an ideal figure on which to project our fantasies about the life of the artist, though . . . I can’t help feeling uneasy over the possibility that it’s the man and not the poems they’ve canonized” (155).
Equi contends that, in spite of all the personality that he puts into his poems, there is more to O’Hara poetry than immediately apparent, and his poems ought to be more respected as a part of his legacy. - Structure: Equi opens by discussing her interest and “overlap” in O’Hara with an interesting hook – a dream she had about seeing, but not having the chance to meet Frank O’Hara. In her dream, she watches the poet at a poetry event from a distance, but does not get to approach him personally. Here, she presents an allusion to the thesis: “[E]ven if the ghost of Frank O’Hara does ignore me, his poems and mine have been carrying on the most intimate of conversations for the last twenty years” (146). She continues to describe the sincerity of O’Hara’s poetry, but also acknowledges some of their distancing qualities. For example, her second section, “Meditations on an Exclamation Point” addresses O’Hara’s ironic, satirical punctuation as a tool of obvious excitement that seems to delve into the realm of ironic sarcasm. She acknowledges both sides of the arguments, stating, “The answer, of course, is always both. His poems ask to be read as genuine even as they retreat into irony” (149). She supports this dichotomy by providing historical context on the skepticism of “autobiographical ‘I’” and its the “1950s . . . becom[ing] aware of its artifice” (149), in addition to comparing the trains of thought from the “age of the artist” to a more New Critical view of O’Hara (151). She concludes by thoughtfully distinguishing O’Hara the man from his work, and declares: “[I]f O’Hara is to remain a vital influence, then his words must belong to everyone — and not just those who knew him best” (155).
- Rhetorical Strategies:
- Equi brought in historical context and different veins of criticism, for example noting how New Criticism neglected the influence of O’Hara’s life on his poetry, while the “age of the artist” likely overstate it (151). She herself paints the ballroom in her article, as she deals with different views of Frank O’Hara.
- Equi’s use of subsections (with creative titles–for examples, the “Meditations on an Exclamation Point,” which alludes to O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency”) made her argument logically digestible and clearly traceable from one step to another.
- I like that Equi used a readable, almost story-like form of writing while still progressing an argument and quietly weaving together strands of history and scholarship. Her opening hook, “I never met Frank O’Hara, and in a way, it’s a relief. Secretly, I’ve always suspected he wouldn’t be terribly impressed with me” reminded me of the start of a novel, and was actually what drew me to the article in the first place (145)!
