O’Hara response for 10/30 – Meredith
3. Is O’Hara kitsch?
This is a hard question to answer since the line between the two is so thin — and our scholarly expert on the subject (Greenberg) didn’t have me altogether convinced of his argument. I think one way to distinguish art from kitsch is the treatment of time, the way a piece of art or writing is received long after its publication day. In that sense, the fact that we’re reading O’Hara in an academic setting points to the fact that it’s not. Still, though, some facets of O’Hara’s poems, especially their fascination with surfaces, certainly have something in common with kitsch. I’m thinking especially of “A Step Away from Them,” where the speaker’s eye bounces from surface to surface, cutting between colors and clothes and body parts in a montage that feels almost like a television commercial in its speed and superficiality. Cutting swiftly from “hum-colored” cabs to the image of disembodied construction workers “feed[ing] their dirty / glistening torsos sandwiches / and Coca-Cola,” the speaker’s view turns the city to a set of disparate, colorful surfaces. Even women walking by are reduced to a set of parts: the speaker describes an “avenue where skirts are flipping / above heels.” This metonymy dehumanizes the city’s inhabitants, putting them on a level with the wristwatches the speaker is shopping for or a sign in Times Square.
Although this pieced-up view of New York can be jarring as a reader, I look at it as a reflection of the speaker’s view — in a way that begins to answer prompt 2 (Is O’Hara a personal poet? Respond to the self that writes the poems). The self in “A Step Away” is responding to feelings of isolation in a busy environment by isolating each image and each person in the scene into specific colors and images. By the end of the poem, we get an almost-personal message from the poet: “…My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.” The speaker offers us a glimpse into the archetypal image of personal feeling and intimacy, the heart, only to push us back with the poem’s final words. The speaker’s heart is in poetry, not people. Though the speaker wears this heart externally (in a pocket), it is a work by someone else. It can reveal nothing more than identification on the speaker’s part, than an affinity for someone else’s words while keeping the speaker’s own thoughts hidden.
I see this kind of peekaboo effect throughout O’Hara’s poetry. In “Why I Am Not a Painter,” the speaker begins with an inward focus (“I am not a painter, I am a poet.”) Rather than continuing in this introspective vein, the speaker focuses back outward, toward the painter Mike Goldberg. The anecdote sets up a contrast, between a painter who can paint a piece of art with the word “SARDINES” without any sardines in it; the speaker, in contrast, wants their art to reflect the subject. Then the speaker has a change of heart, noting that in the poem about orange, “There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life.” We get glimpses of the speaker’s artistic aims and values. Then they are immediately cut down with the ironic line “It is even in / prose, I am a real poet.” Although the speakers in O’Hara’s poems offer glimpses of personal or artistic views, the self-effacing irony undercuts these revelations.
