Frank O’Hara<\/p>\n
Primary Sources:<\/p>\n
O\u2019Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O\u2019Hara<\/em>. Ed. Donald Allen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Print.<\/strong> This comprehensive collection of O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry and literary essays includes an introduction by John Ashbery. Ashbery explains that all of O\u2019Hara\u2019s, barring \u201cMeditations in an Emergency\u201d and those previously published in Lunch Poems<\/em>, were found scattered around O\u2019Hara\u2019s office and apartment after his death\u2014he did not intend for others to read them (vii). Ashbery also writes that the poetry grows out of O\u2019Hara\u2019s life; O\u2019Hara becomes the poetic speaker of his own poetry \u201cbecause it is he who happens to be writing the poem\u201d (x). Ashbery explores the complexity of O\u2019Hara\u2019s artistic inspirations and his attention to other art while dispelling a reading of O\u2019Hara that places too much significance on any given thing. Collected Poems<\/em> also includes O\u2019Hara\u2019s manifesto, \u201cPersonism,\u201d which outlines a poetic style which \u201cputs the poem squarely between the poet and the person\u201d reading it (499). This manifesto articulates O\u2019Hara\u2019s philosophy that poetry is a dialogue between poet and reader, much like a phone call. Because the collection houses all of O\u2019Hara\u2019s work, it reflects the scattered nature of his oeuvre, and is not for a reader who would like an editor\u2019s guidance in reading O\u2019Hara.<\/p>\n O\u2019Hara, Frank. Lunch Poems<\/em>. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964. Print.<\/strong> This collection of thirty-seven poems, as well as facsimiles of O\u2019Hara\u2019s written correspondence with Laurence Ferlinghetti (City Lights\u2019 co-founder) and a preface by John Ashbery, presents itself as a book of short, easy to digest poems. Ashbery\u2019s preface points to Lunch Poems<\/em>\u2019 contrast to the \u201cconservative\u201d poetry other poets wrote around the same time, and elucidates some of O\u2019Hara\u2019s obscure references while reassuring the reader that if we do not understand some references, it does not matter; the experience of O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cdisabused enthusiasm\u201d \u201cbefore heading back to the office, like all of us,\u201d matters more. The collection includes some of O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cI do this, I do that\u201d poems (\u201cThe Day Lady Died,\u201d \u201cPoem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)\u201d) which are forthcoming and open, as well as \u201cA Step Away From Them,\u201d a poem which uses openness as a cover for a more reserved reticence. This collection asks for a reader who would like to have a midday chat with O\u2019Hara via reading his poetry.<\/p>\n Secondary Sources:<\/p>\n Berkson, Bill. \u201cFrank O\u2019Hara and His Poems.\u201d Frank O\u2019Hara: To Be True to a City<\/em>. Ed. Jim Elledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Print.<\/strong> In this essay, included in a scholarly collection, poet Bill Berkson writes about O\u2019Hara\u2019s conviction that ideas were \u201cinseparable from the people who had them.\u201d Though his poems are scattered\u2014both literally, since most of those that ended up in Donald Allen\u2019s Collected Poems<\/em> were found on scraps of paper in drawers, and in content\u2014O\u2019Hara\u2019s belief in the personality of an idea unifies his poetics (227). Berkson writes in a personal style, recalling the instances in which he first encountered certain O\u2019Hara poems, and decides that his success as a poet \u201csprang from an agility at matching real verbal beauty with basic personal verity\u201d (230). Berkson\u2019s project is not only to explain the ways in which O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry is personal, but to personalize his own reading of it by making himself and O\u2019Hara into characters in the piece. His attentive readings of poems hail an academic audience, but one who seeks a poet\u2019s perspective on poetry, rather than an academic\u2019s.<\/p>\n Chiasson, Dan. \u201cFast Company.\u201d The New Yorker<\/em>, 7 Apr. 2008. Web.<\/strong> Critic Dan Chiasson begins his essay by differentiating O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry from anyone else\u2019s: \u201cIf you write ninety poems in the course of a few months, you probably mean something different by the word \u2018poem\u2019 from what most people mean.\u201d O\u2019Hara was not introspective, but observant (2). Chiasson cites Brad Gooch\u2019s 1993 biography, which demonstrates that O\u2019Hara\u2019s personality was as much a work of art as any of his poems were\u2014the poems become a \u201csecondary\u201d record of that personality (3-4). The life of the poet features significantly in the poetry, then, too; O\u2019Hara wishes to both move quickly and stop time (6, 8). Chiasson reads \u201cA Step Away From Them\u201d for the time lag in O\u2019Hara\u2019s elegies\u2014the people who the poem mourns appear late in the poem (10). But O\u2019Hara\u2019s sense of time allows him to \u201c[swerve] toward autobiography, then away\u201d (14). Chiasson uses O\u2019Hara\u2019s treatment of time to argue that he is an autobiographical poet, but one who gets away with revealing little about himself. This essay addresses appreciators of literature who are not necessarily academics. Since Chiasson offers background on O\u2019Hara\u2019s life and contextualizes the poetry in this way, he writes for a wide audience.<\/p>\n Epstein, Andrew. \u201c\u2018My Force is in Mobility\u2019: Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O\u2019Hara\u2019s Poetry.\u201d Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry<\/em>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.<\/strong> Critic Andrew Epstein begins a chapter of his scholarly monograph with Larry Rivers\u2019 remarks at O\u2019Hara\u2019s funeral: \u201cFrank O\u2019Hara was my best friend. There are at least sixty people in New York who thought Frank O\u2019Hara was their best friend.\u201d Epstein uses this anecdote to discuss O\u2019Hara as the \u201cquintessential coterie poet\u201d for whom friendship mattered to his poetry as much as it mattered to his life (86). Epstein challenges David Lehman\u2019s claim that O\u2019Hara celebrated friendship on the grounds that it is too simple, arguing that for O\u2019Hara, friendship \u201cbecomes a source of both joy and angst,\u201d acting as a center from which various kinds of poetry emerged. Epstein links O\u2019Hara\u2019s penchant for motion with his connections to and separations from people in his poetry: he creates a community while also distinguishing himself from it (87). Epstein discusses O\u2019Hara\u2019s personal relationships in the first section of this chapter, and close reads O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry of friendship in the next section. This chapter addresses an academic audience who is familiar with Marjorie Perloff and Lehman\u2019s arguments for O\u2019Hara\u2019s celebration of friendship.<\/p>\n Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O\u2019Hara<\/em>. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Print.<\/strong> Biographer Brad Gooch traces O\u2019Hara\u2019s early life, his time at Harvard and the University of Michigan, his work in the New York art world and as a poet, through to his death in 1966. Gooch begins with the story of O\u2019Hara\u2019s untimely death by a freak accident, which illustrates the \u201cexcessiveness and sheer hubris [that] had always seemed striking to some of his more concerned friends\u201d; the crux of Gooch\u2019s narrative is that O\u2019Hara lived a carefree lifestyle with little regard to the consequences of his actions (4). Gooch includes the story of O\u2019Hara\u2019s heavily attended funeral, which places O\u2019Hara as a popular member of a large group of other artists (11). When Gooch reaches the story of O\u2019Hara\u2019s career in New York, he situates O\u2019Hara as the agitator of the New York School of poets, mixing O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry with party scenes and a portrait of a highly social poet (196, 208, 210). Gooch writes for a literary-minded audience when he includes O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry in the story of O\u2019Hara\u2019s life, suggesting that O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201clive fast, die young\u201d shaped the course of his life and of his poetry.<\/p>\n Hartman, Anne. \u201cConfessional Counterpublics in Frank O\u2019Hara and Allen Ginsberg.\u201d\u00a0Journal of Modern Literature<\/em>, vol. 28, no. 4, 2005, pp. 40\u201356. Web.<\/strong> In this scholarly article, critic Anne Hartman pairs O\u2019Hara and Allen Ginsberg as two poets who were both \u201cexcluded\u201d from the Confessional mode of poetry for their homosexuality; they could not afford to be so open. Though O\u2019Hara reveals personal matters in his poems, he directs these matters only to his friends, creating a shield for himself that a poet like Robert Lowell neither has nor needs (41). O\u2019Hara\u2019s distaste for Lowell\u2019s Confessional style led him to create his own subculture of public poetics. O\u2019Hara and Ginsberg, on the other hand, use a version of the Confessional mode to \u201cinterpellate\u201d or hail a small community of insider readers, a \u201chomosexual counter-public\u201d (42, 41). In pairing O\u2019Hara and Ginsberg, Hartman transgresses the divide between the New York School and the Beat Generation. She writes for an academic audience who will recognize the pairing as a transgression, and who has a previous understanding of Confessional poetry.<\/p>\n Herring, Terrell Scott. \u201cFrank O\u2019Hara’s Open Closet.\u201d\u00a0PMLA<\/em>, vol. 117, no. 3, 2002, pp. 414\u201327. Web.<\/strong> Herring\u2019s scholarly article considers O\u2019Hara\u2019s simultaneous \u201cvisibility\u201d and \u201cinvisibility\u201d in his poetry and his ability to \u201c[show] all but disclose nothing\u201d in a style that resembles the \u201cpre-Stonewall silencing of homosexuals\u201d (414, 416). Herring also links the rise of New Critical thought in the 1950s and 60s, and the resulting idea that a poet\u2019s work belongs to the public upon being published, to O\u2019Hara\u2019s style of public privacy: if the poet eventually shares ownership of the poem, he ought to maintain some privacy in writing (415). Herring argues that the intersection of the rises of New Critical theory and of Confessional poetry and the vilification of homosexuals contributed to the O\u2019Hara\u2019s paradoxical openness and \u201cdisdain for such personal exposure (416). Herring turns to O\u2019Hara\u2019s manifesto, \u201cPersonism,\u201d in the first section of his article for O\u2019Hara\u2019s own articulation of a privately public poetic sphere. Next Herring close reads \u201cPoem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)\u201d and \u201cPersonal Poem\u201d to explore the spaces O\u2019Hara creates in which \u201cpublic individuals paradoxically meet as private persons\u201d and how O\u2019Hara\u2019s attempts at impersonality both fail and succeed (416). Though Herring provides historical and biographical context for O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry, he writes for an academic audience.<\/p>\n Lehman, David. \u201cFrank O\u2019Hara: You Just Go on Your Nerve.\u201d The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets<\/em>. New York: Anchor Books, 1999. Print.<\/strong> Poet David Lehman chronicles O\u2019Hara\u2019s life and career, blending a narrative style with academic treatments of several O\u2019Hara poems. Lehman explores the \u201clegend\u201d of an artist who \u201cburns too intensely to last very long,\u201d evaluating the ways in which this mythology essentializes O\u2019Hara (168). Lehman censures O\u2019Hara\u2019s primary biographer, Brad Gooch, prolonging this legend (170). Lehman also treats O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry as \u201coccasional poetry,\u201d written quickly and without meditation, because O\u2019Hara himself enjoyed the concept (169). Through discussing the poems, Lehman points to O\u2019Hara as a poet for who place matters; New York and O\u2019Hara\u2019s own experience of it features heavily (174). O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry is personal in this way, and he is thus a vulnerable poet, \u201canimated by ardor rather than cool detachment\u201d (176, 179). The \u201csubtleties\u201d (that is, the quieter ways of expressing meaning) make an otherwise loud and forthcoming poet quiet and vulnerable (188). Lehman\u2019s mode of incorporating O\u2019Hara\u2019s life story into his discussion of the poetry serves to contextualize the coterie references that, at times, make the poetry inaccessible; Lehman writes for an academic audience as well as a member of the general public who is simply interested in O\u2019Hara.<\/p>\n Mattix, Micah. Frank O\u2019Hara and the Poetics of Saying \u201cI.\u201d <\/em>Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011. Web.<\/strong> Critic Micah Mattix discusses Herbert Leibowitz, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Thomas Byrom: three critics who have described O\u2019Hara as a minor figure compared to his artist friends. Mattix also cites Marjorie Perloff\u2019s belief in O\u2019Hara as a major poet, even though he is often viewed as a minor one (9). Mattix furthers Perloff\u2019s argument that O\u2019Hara turned away from symbolism in his poetry in favor of creating not an effect of something, but the actual thing as it is. For Mattix, O\u2019Hara\u2019s turn away from symbolism first makes him a major poet, for none of his peers successfully replicated his style; second, it allows O\u2019Hara to use poetry as \u201ca testament to the self,\u201d but not the discovery of one (17, 22). O\u2019Hara\u2019s use of the first person pronoun \u201cI\u201d sets him apart from the people who populate his poems and creates a sense that the self who writes the poems is simply that, and nothing more (23). Mattix close reads O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cMemorial Day 1950\u201d and \u201cIn Memory of My Feelings\u201d while also broadly considering O\u2019Hara\u2019s treatment of quotidian things and love in his poetry. This monograph is written for an academic audience.<\/p>\n Mendelson, Edward. \u201cWhat We Love, Not Are.\u201d The New York Review of Books<\/em>, vol. 55, no. 14, 2008. Web.<\/strong> This review of O\u2019Hara\u2019s Selected Poems<\/em>, edited by Mark Ford, discusses O\u2019Hara\u2019s ability to write \u201cprivate conversations with individual readers, too quiet to be heard in a crowded room\u201d; Critic Edward Mendelson argues that the poems which create intimacy with noise all around are O\u2019Hara\u2019s best. Mendelson cites O\u2019Hara\u2019s manifesto, \u201cPersonism\u201d\u2014\u201cthe poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages\u201d\u2014to argue that though O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetic persona is public and sociable, he values one on one interactions (1). Mendelson reads \u201cPoetry\u201d and \u201cCantata,\u201d two poems in which O\u2019Hara writes about his relationships to words and his cat as though the two things are human, as evidence of his longing for a connection to a person (3). Exploring O\u2019Hara\u2019s moments of reticence allows Mendelson to remove O\u2019Hara from the coterie in which most critics place him; a poet who is always already in a group is necessarily a social poet, whereas Mendelson\u2019s illumination of O\u2019Hara\u2019s quiet moments of one-on-one communication allow him his own poetic space. Mendelson writes for an audience already interested in O\u2019Hara, but this review is not purely a scholarly source. Rather, it is a consideration of a poet and a selection of his poems for a wider audience.<\/p>\n Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O\u2019Hara: Poet Among Painters<\/em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Print.<\/strong> Critic Marjorie Perloff\u2019s monograph begins with the premise that O\u2019Hara is a \u201cradical,\u201d \u201cdifferent,\u201d and \u201cmajor\u201d poet alongside his contemporaries; though he is open and forthcoming, he flouts the Confessional mode of poetry used by Robert Lowell (xiii). Perloff, in her 1997 introduction, notes that when she began this project on O\u2019Hara, she did not consider his homosexuality as a reason for this difference. Perloff revises not to place homosexuality at the center of O\u2019Hara\u2019s difference, but to acknowledge its presence in his life and therefore in his work (xiv). Perloff argues that O\u2019Hara\u2019s relation to painters features loudly in his radical and different poetics. O\u2019Hara played with language and Abstract Expressionist painters played with paint and surfaces in similar ways (xxii). Perloff explores O\u2019Hara\u2019s career (at the time of his death, he was the curator of MoMA), which took time away from him that he could have spent writing poetry. But his involvement in visual arts \u201cprovided O\u2019Hara with one of his central subjects\u201d: painting (76-77). Perloff\u2019s exploration of O\u2019Hara\u2019s use of words as though they were paint is written for an academic audience who is both familiar with twentieth century poetry and visual arts.<\/p>\n Perloff, Marjorie. \u201c\u2018Transparent Selves\u2019: The Poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O\u2019Hara.\u201d\u00a0The Yearbook of English Studies<\/em>, vol. 8, 1978, pp. 171\u201396. Web.<\/strong> In this scholarly article, Perloff pairs O\u2019Hara and John Ashbery, two poets who abandoned the American and English symbolist poetic traditions, turning toward the \u201ctransparente<\/em>\u201d instead. In other words, the things in O\u2019Hara\u2019s and Ashbery\u2019s poetry are not symbols for anything else (177). Perloff argues that O\u2019Hara\u2019s attention to things as they are invites his readers into a recognizable landscape and creates a poetic self as external as the things in the poem (188, 192). Pairing O\u2019Hara with Ashbery poses O\u2019Hara as the accessible poet, and Ashbery as the inscrutable one. But accessibility does not make O\u2019Hara a simple or easy poet: Perloff close reads O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cA Pleasant Thought From Whitehead,\u201d \u201cEaster,\u201d and \u201cAll That Gas\u201d to explore the ways O\u2019Hara experiments with meaning making even while writing formally straightforward and accessible poetry. Perloff\u2019s analysis of O\u2019Hara\u2019s use of language is intended for a scholarly audience.<\/p>\n Shaw, Lytle. Frank O\u2019Hara: The Poetics of Coterie<\/em>. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. Print.<\/strong> This monograph explores O\u2019Hara\u2019s relation to coterie both as a poet who was largely unknown outside of his adoring friend group, and whose poetry requires a familiarity with that friend group (1). Shaw takes this view of O\u2019Hara\u2019s relation to coterie as a \u201cbaseline\u201d one which Marjorie Perloff helped set in place in her book, Frank O\u2019Hara<\/em>, poet among painters (2-3). Shaw points to the ways in which calling O\u2019Hara a coterie poet first raises an interest in his biography, and second eliminates the possibility that the poetry is \u201cpublic\u201d (4-5). Shaw explores to what extent O\u2019Hara\u2019s life is important to and present in his work, the ways in which O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry is both accessible and \u201cpuzzling,\u201d and O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cparticipation in community\u201d that makes his poetry paradoxically inclusive and exclusive. He makes himself accessible to his reader while making references his friends will recognize (17, 82). Shaw writes for an academic audience with at least a familiarity with O\u2019Hara\u2019s contemporaries, especially the poets of the New York School with whom O\u2019Hara often collaborated. Shaw blends biographical narrative with close readings of poems to produce a work that treats the life and its presence in the poetry with academic rigor, while also familiarizing his reader with the members of O\u2019Hara\u2019s coterie.<\/p>\n Vendler, Helen. \u201cFrank O\u2019Hara: The Virtue of the Alterable.\u201d Frank O\u2019Hara: To Be True to a City<\/em>. Ed. Jim Elledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Print.<\/strong> In this essay, critic Helen Vendler points to two problems of O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry, if we read it as lyric poetry: his poems are never abstract, and his form is inconsistent\u2014sometimes his poems, or lines, are short, and other times they are long, for no obvious reason (234). But Vendler argues that O\u2019Hara creates a kind of poetry that does not need the same conventions or logic that other poets follow. O\u2019Hara writes about \u201ccolloquies\u201d: things he sees on the street, or his memories, which are things without clear beginnings or endings. His poems, then do not need to have clear reasons for beginning or ending either (235). O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry is external, not internal, because of his position as a spectator who did not witness the whole event; he does not assign symbolism or \u201csignificance\u201d to his poetry because he only wishes to record what happened, and nothing more (237-38). For Vendler, O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry is a \u201cdemonstration of what mind is by what mind does\u201d; in other words, his language illustrates what he sees without the \u201cmetaphysical baggage\u201d of any ideology (249). Vendler writes for an academic audience with an understanding of lyric poetry and the mode of writing what goes on in the poet\u2019s mind without adding meaning to what is already in the experience (234, 238).<\/p>\n Honor Pledge: EEP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Frank O’Hara Primary Sources: O\u2019Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O\u2019Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Print. This comprehensive collection of O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry and literary essays includes an introduction by John Ashbery. Ashbery… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ag-bib"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/118"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3444,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3443\/revisions\/3444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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