The Voice of O’Hara’s “Personal Poem”
Prompt 2: Close read a poem/poems: Is O’Hara a personal poet? Does he create intimacy with the reader? Respond to the self who writes the poems.
From my limited experience with Frank O’Hara’s work, his poetry strikes me as more sincere than I expected. True, his work is full of humor, both light and satirical (the mock concern and hyperbole of “Lana Turner has collapsed!” comes to mind), but I find O’Hara’s poetry adopting a charitable, slight ironic distance, as opposed to the Dadaesque voice of sardonic mockery present in the work of much of the historical avant-garde. The difference in styles of humor may be what makes O’Hara’s personal charm so appealing to me, and the take-no-prisoners approach of the Dadaists so heavy-handed and unnatural in comparison. At the heart of this difference is O’Hara’s effort to craft the character of a convincing, human speaker who has personal rapport with the reader.
With a title like “Personal Poem,” this work from O’Hara’s Lunch Poems seems as appropriate a subject as any to illustrate how the poet achieves linguistic closeness to the reader. The speaker begins with a rambling anecdote about two lucky charms he carries in his pocket, immediately involving the reader in his personal life. These references to the speaker’s friends and his exploits abroad provide a sense of worldbuilding giving O’Hara’s speaker a palpable inner life. His stories from the past coupled with immediate sight and sound perceptions during his lunchtime walk invite the reader to take a role other than that of passive observer. “I’m happy for a time and interested,” O’Hara’s speaker concludes the first stanza, offering emotional transparency that indicates an effort to close the distance between him and his audience.
The next stanza of “Personal Poem” widens the poem’s focus from the inner life of the speaker and expands the range of his interactions. We leave the confines of the speaker’s thoughts as he imagines life as a construction worker while he waits for his friend LeRoi. LeRoi arrives with news of police violence against jazz musician Miles Davis. The message is delivered with no editorializing, without the reactions or impressions of the speaker or LeRoi. Yet the stark blankness of this moment does not detract from the speaker’s rapport with the reader, rather it expands the scope of the poem to events beyond the speaker’s perspective. The entrance of LeRoi brings evidence of moral complication and tragedy within the poem’s world, rendering it more realistic. In a similar twist of moral ambiguity, the two friends refuse the woman who “asks us for a nickel for a terrible disease,” delivering a punchline commenting on the ambiguous wording of the request rather than respecting the request’s meaning. While there is something innocently playful about their grounds for refusal, their cavalier attitude at ignoring and possibly silencing others in need communicates the speaker and LeRoi’s agency as lifelike characters with prejudices, priorities, and moral failings.
While their distance from the woman suggests the speaker and LeRoi are detached from their surroundings somewhat, the final stanza demonstrates both characters are active participants in the world, rather than solely passive observers. They share a meal and discuss literature, dreaming fantasies of wealth blended with the blue-collar excitement of working on a skyscraper. Once more, the poem’s focus becomes the mind of the speaker, with its dreams, projections, and imaginings, but even these are in the context of his relation to the world. In this final section, the speaker questions his place in the world and his connections with other people, both those that he knows (his physical relationship/handshake with LeRoi) and those of which he may not even be aware (“I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is thinking of me…”). Without O’Hara’s personable, scattered, but lifelike voice, maybe the reader wouldn’t consider the poem’ s world immersive enough to consider themself to be that “one person.”
The speaker of “Personal Poem” is not compelling merely because he has a rich inner life, a close friend, and hopes and dreams about his place in the world. These characteristics are basic elements for any literary figure an author intends to imbue with an illusionistic spirit of reality. It is O’Hara’s weaving of these character-building blocks with a charismatic speaker who is at once keenly aware of his presence in the world, yet also maintains a wry distance from his surroundings. “Personal Poem” occupies a space somewhere between intimacy and selective obscurity.
