Frank O’Hara<\/p>\n
Literature Review:<\/p>\n
O\u2019Hara\u2019s critics are intrigued not merely by O\u2019Hara the poet, but by O\u2019Hara the man, who worked at MoMA by day, was the chatty, affable, beloved party guest by night, and died in a freak accident (hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island) in 1966. David Lehman, Terrell Scott Herring, Anne Hartman, and Lytle Shaw each begin their criticism of O\u2019Hara with anecdotes; Marjorie Perloff, in Frank O\u2019Hara: Poet Among Painters<\/em> (1977) which still looms large in O\u2019Hara criticism, occasionally \u201crelate[s] the poetry to the life\u201d (xxxii). Perloff\u2019s influential book both demarcates and participates in the trend of interest in O\u2019Hara\u2019s personality alongside his poetry. The aforementioned four critics of the late 90s and early 2000s pull strands from Perloff\u2019s original work, discussing to what extent O\u2019Hara is a personal or an impersonal poet. This chorus of voices, rather than a discordant melee, seems to agree that he is both, even if some agree that he is more heavily personal, whereas others agree he is more heavily impersonal.<\/p>\n In this review, I move chronologically. I first discuss Perloff\u2019s caution against reductive readings of O\u2019Hara in her 1997 introduction to her 1977 book. David Lehman, in 1999, reads O\u2019Hara personally but takes up a similar problem of reductive criticism in the mythologizing of O\u2019Hara in which Brad Gooch\u2019s biography, City Poet <\/em>(1993), is complicit. I next discuss Herring, who views purely personal readings of O\u2019Hara as reductive in their negligence of O\u2019Hara\u2019s use of public, commoditized language. Herring posits an opposition between O\u2019Hara and Confessional poets, which Anne Hartman questions. Hartman poses O\u2019Hara as a personal poet, focusing on the inclusive intimacy he creates rather than his exclusive coterie. I finish with Shaw, who considers the simultaneously personal and impersonal nature of O\u2019Hara\u2019s coterie.<\/p>\n In her 1997 introduction to Frank O\u2019Hara: Poet Among Painters<\/em>, Perloff notes that from the 50s to the 70s, O\u2019Hara was \u201ca coterie figure.\u201d In the 70s, his obscurity led Perloff and her contemporaries to miss coded signs of his sexual preference, neglecting the presence of his homosexuality in his work altogether (xi-xii). Perloff\u2019s new introduction cautions against reducing O\u2019Hara to anything in particular: to a poet to whom sexuality doesn\u2019t matter, to a distinctly gay poet, or to a quotidian poet who resembles a \u201cgenteel\u201d lady (xvii). Perloff\u2019s corrective pushes us to read O\u2019Hara not merely personally, as a gay poet, but as a poet who innovates with language to create poetry that is the verbal form of Abstract Expressionist painting (xx). Perloff\u2019s seminal 1977 edition mixes a focus on this language-play with a focus on the personal aspects of O\u2019Hara\u2019s work, when it intersects with his life (xxxii). But her 1997 introduction invites a focus on both the man and the work.<\/p>\n Lehman, in The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets<\/em> (1999) moves closer to the personal strand of O\u2019Hara criticism than Perloff does, while thinking about the ways in which O\u2019Hara was mythologized after his death, and how a reductive look at his life leads to reductive readings of his poetry. For Lehman, \u201cO\u2019Hara\u2019s distinctive tone\u2014two parts melancholy, three parts joy\u2014is necessarily absent from the myths that by monumentalizing O\u2019Hara\u2019s death obscure his life\u201d (170). Gooch\u2019s City Poet<\/em> is the main culprit of this myth-making; Lehman attempts to absolve personal readings of O\u2019Hara of this reductive trap, exploring the ways in which O\u2019Hara makes himself \u201cvulnerable\u201d in his poetry and does not withhold \u201cardor,\u201d but characterizes his poetry with it (175, 179). Lehman\u2019s half biographically narrative, half academically critical chapter on O\u2019Hara explores the possibility of reading O\u2019Hara as a personal poet without reading him reductively.<\/p>\n Herring\u2019s \u201cFrank O\u2019Hara\u2019s Open Closet\u201d (2002) avoids reductivity by considering O\u2019Hara\u2019s impersonality. Herring argues for a view of O\u2019Hara as both a personal and an impersonal poet, ascribing this paradox to the \u201cpre-Stonewall silencing of homosexuals\u201d in the 1950s and 60s and the rise of both New Criticism and Confessional poetry at the same time (414-15). O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry is \u201cpersonal in form but impersonal in content\u201d (417); using \u201cPoem (Lana Turner has collapsed!),\u201d Herring argues that O\u2019Hara uses his own voice to mimic the headline he reports to us, creating an \u201cimpersonal community of observers who gather over a fallen star\u201d (420). Personal intimacy is made into a farce by O\u2019Hara\u2019s use of \u201clanguage of the mass public sphere\u201d (423). O\u2019Hara\u2019s flirting with both the personal and the impersonal creates a poetic that weighs more heavily on the impersonal side. For Herring, O\u2019Hara\u2019s impersonality flouts Confessional poetics even though, as Hartman points out, the Confessionals had an impersonal mode of their own.<\/p>\n Hartman\u2019s project in \u201cConfessional Counterpublics in Frank O\u2019Hara and Allen Ginsberg\u201d (2005) builds on Herring\u2019s look at O\u2019Hara\u2019s counter-relationship to New Criticism and traditional Confessional poetics; however, Hartman argues that rather than rejecting the Confessional mode altogether, gay poets O\u2019Hara and Ginsberg \u201crestyled\u201d it, \u201cinterpellat[ing]\u201d an audience of only their friends so as to maintain the degree of privacy that traditional Confessionals do not have (41). O\u2019Hara and Ginsberg reformed Confessional poetics by moving away from an isolated \u201cI,\u201d which the two gay poets cannot assert as strongly as the quintessential Confessional Robert Lowell can for fear of violent discrimination (48). Instead, O\u2019Hara and Ginsberg form friendly audiences of only their friends, maintaining privacy in a public sphere (42). Hartman does not use the word \u201ccoterie\u201d to describe either O\u2019Hara\u2019s or Ginsberg\u2019s audiences; she focuses on the intimacy and inclusion (personality) that a poet\u2019s address to his friends creates rather than the potential exclusion (impersonality) of the reader by a coterie (49, 53).<\/p>\n Lytle Shaw picks up the problem of O\u2019Hara\u2019s coterie (first introduced by Perloff) in Frank O\u2019Hara: The Poetics of Coterie <\/em>(2006). Shaw explains that O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry was inaccessible to many of its first readers because he uses his \u201cthen-unknown friends as explicit reference points\u201d (19). While O\u2019Hara\u2019s use of references that an in-group will recognize and that will confuse anyone else classifies O\u2019Hara as a coterie poet, Shaw rejects the ease with which we can dismiss O\u2019Hara as an inscrutable member of a clique if we stop at calling him a coterie poet (20). Shaw delineates a typical use of coterie: to stop time, to keep one\u2019s friends and world alive (21). O\u2019Hara creates a coterie to resist falling on either side of the personality\/impersonality debate; his intimate address to his friends sounds at once like an \u201canimated interlocutor laughing between sentences and facing us\u201d and like a poet who \u201cpresents his back to us while addressing someone else in a phone conversation\u201d (24). According to Shaw, even O\u2019Hara\u2019s coterie\u2014a \u201cpejorative\u201d term with an exclusive connotation (20)\u2014falls in between personal and impersonal.<\/p>\n O\u2019Hara wants to have it all: to be able to share everything while also keeping some things for himself. In this thread of criticism, a distinction between those who read O\u2019Hara as a personal poet and those who read him as an impersonal poet is not a necessarily helpful one. The distinction between these five critics becomes whether they explore the way O\u2019Hara writes more than the way we read O\u2019Hara; I move by association in this review because the questions they pick up from each other animates the conversation. Herring falls closest to the impersonal extreme because he considers the reader\u2019s position in O\u2019Hara\u2019s public discourse. Lehman and Hartman, on the other hand, best represent the personal extreme because they do not consider the reader. Perloff and Shaw most clearly occupy the middle position among critics who also settle somewhere in between the two poles.<\/p>\n Works Cited<\/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.<\/p>\n Herring, Terrell Scott. \u201cFrank O\u2019Hara’s Open Closet.\u201d\u00a0PMLA<\/em>, vol. 117, no. 3, 2002, pp. 414\u201327. Web.<\/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.<\/p>\n Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O\u2019Hara: Poet Among Painters<\/em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Print.<\/p>\n Shaw, Lytle. Frank O\u2019Hara: The Poetics of Coterie<\/em>. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. Print.<\/p>\n SSR 1:<\/p>\n I.<\/strong> Herring, Terrell Scott. \u201cFrank O\u2019Hara’s Open Closet.\u201d\u00a0PMLA<\/em>, vol. 117, no. 3, 2002, pp. 414\u201327. Web.<\/p>\n II.<\/strong> \u201cThe more visible the poet becomes, the greater his invisibility; the greater this invisibility, the closer we get to the essential O\u2019Hara\u201d (414).<\/p>\n In other words, Herring argues that O\u2019Hara flirts with both personal and impersonal poetics; O\u2019Hara, though he makes himself available to us, is inaccessible to us, and this paradox is truer to the poet than placing him squarely on either the personal or impersonal side.<\/p>\n III.\u00a0<\/strong>Herring opens with the story of Elaine de Kooning\u2019s portrait of O\u2019Hara, in which the painter obscured O\u2019Hara\u2019s face at the last minute: \u201cwhen the face was gone, it was more Frank than when the face was there\u201d (414). Herring uses this anecdote to pivot to his own project of ascribing O\u2019Hara\u2019s simultaneous open and closed personality to three cultural and historical developments in the 1950s and 60s: the \u201cpre-Stonewall silencing of homosexuals,\u201d the rise of New Criticism (mainly Wimsatt and Beardsley\u2019s \u201cThe Intentional Fallacy\u201d), and the appearance of Confessional poetry (414-15). In the latter half of his introductory section, Herring traces how these three developments contributed to \u201csharper distinctions between public and private life.\u201d The attitude toward homosexuals at the time of O\u2019Hara\u2019s writing encouraged gay men to stay in the closet; New Critical theory recreated the poem as \u201cpublic property\u201d; the Confessionals wrote private selves into those poems, the selves then becoming public property, too (415-16). Herring argues that within this context, O\u2019Hara saw opportunities to lose privacy and a need to maintain it wherever possible; he reverses the Confessional mode by writing poetry in which \u201cpublic individuals paradoxically meet as private persons\u201d (416).<\/p>\n To support his claim of O\u2019Hara as a personally impersonal poet, Herring first turns to \u201cPersonism,\u201d \u201ca novel form of public abstraction.\u201d Herring opposes O\u2019Hara to T.S. Eliot, the traditionally impersonal poet; though Eliot\u2019s impersonality \u201cspoke an alternative language to the masses,\u201d O\u2019Hara collapses the distinction to the language poetry uses and the language we use in our everyday lives. O\u2019Hara\u2019s form takes on a personal style, but his content remains impersonal (417). The obscuring of the personal self occurs when O\u2019Hara places that personal self \u201cinto the public sphere\u201d\u2014in other words, once O\u2019Hara uses language that the masses understand, the personal subject is always already depersonalized (417-18).<\/p>\n In his second section, Herring moves from his discussion of language of the public sphere to reading \u201cPoem (Lana Turner has collapsed!).\u201d In this poem, O\u2019Hara invites his readers into his own mind as he stumbles upon and responds to a tabloid headline while also recreating that headline for us in an impersonal fashion; though O\u2019Hara\u2019s is the voice we read, he \u201cdeploys\u201d the same \u201ctabloid techniques\u201d he reads to \u201ccreate a community of impersonal observers who gather over a fallen star\u201d (420). Herring next explores \u201cPersonal Poem\u201d for similar effects of \u201cimpersonal intimacy\u201d via \u201cthe language of the mass public sphere,\u201d but with the caveat that \u201cPersonal Poem\u201d tries to fool readers into thinking it conveys \u201cO\u2019Hara\u2019s particular experience\u201d (423, 425). Like \u201cPoem (Lana Turner has collapsed!),\u201d though, \u201cPersonal Poem\u201d describes a communal experience (425).<\/p>\n Herring finishes the article by posing O\u2019Hara as more impersonal than personal because of his use of the \u201clanguage of the public sphere,\u201d though his voice does tease personality. In the New Critical terms of O\u2019Hara\u2019s day, \u201cwhat is superficially public is also private.\u201d O\u2019Hara, like a proper anti-Confessional, \u201creveals all, only to reveal nothing about himself\u201d (425-26).<\/p>\n IV.<\/strong> I admire Herring\u2019s use of the story of Elaine de Kooning\u2019s portrait to frame his argument; the story was not purely anecdotal, but provided a microcosm of the trend Herring points to in O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry.<\/p>\n I appreciate Herring\u2019s inclusion of New Criticism with Confessional poetry as two literary movements O\u2019Hara ran counter to; several critics oppose O\u2019Hara and Robert Lowell, but I think the distinction between O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetics and the New Critical style is a smart one.<\/p>\n \u201cO\u2019Hara\u2019s personism is personal in form but impersonal in content\u201d (417). I love this form\/content divide built into the personal\/impersonal or private\/public divide.<\/p>\n SSR 2:<\/p>\n I.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n II.<\/strong> \u201cI suggest that rather than being \u2018anti-Confessional,\u2019 both O\u2019Hara and [Allen] Ginsberg wrote poems that had affinities with the confessional mode, but which overtly reject the impersonal, solitary form of confession advocated by [Robert] Lowell. They used the mode to interpellate a homosexual counter-public, while exploiting confession\u2019s ability to unsettle normative categories\u201d (41).<\/p>\n In other words, Hartman unconventionally places O\u2019Hara alongside Ginsberg to pose the two as poets who restyled, rather than rejected, confessional poetics; their reformed poetics drop the impersonality of the confessional mode (which neither could afford to join because they were gay) by creating and hailing a small audience of insiders.<\/p>\n III.\u00a0<\/strong>Hartman begins her article with the story of O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cPoem (Lana Turner has collapsed!),\u201d which he claimed he wrote on the ferry on the way to a reading he did with Lowell; O\u2019Hara bragged about his ability to write on the fly, and Lowell disparaged him for it (40-41). This anecdote also brings to light O\u2019Hara\u2019s distaste for Lowell\u2019s brand of confessional poetry. But, as Hartman argues, O\u2019Hara reformed that brand rather than flouting it altogether. Hartman engages with Herring\u2019s argument for its elucidation of O\u2019Hara\u2019s simultaneous privacy and openness; however, Hartman distinguishes herself from Herring, arguing that O\u2019Hara disliked Lowell\u2019s confessionalism because it is too solitary. Hartman argues that O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry creates and hails an audience, which is how it escapes impersonality (41). But since the audiences O\u2019Hara and Ginsberg create are small, the two poets still \u201cengage the dialectic between privacy and publicity\u201d (42).<\/p>\n Hartman, in her close reading of \u201cPoem (Lana Turner has collapsed!),\u201d points to personality in O\u2019Hara\u2019s poetry by way of \u201can equivalence between the speaker of the poem and the poet\u201d (42). Hartman explores M.L. Rosenthal\u2019s claim that Lowell \u201cremoved the mask\u201d and displayed himself in his poetry in this way, too; but Hartman argues that O\u2019Hara was more cutting-edge in personal poetics than Lowell was (43). As the more avant-garde poet, O\u2019Hara advances Lowell\u2019s inscription of the poet\u2019s self into the poetry, but does so while rejecting \u201creflection on the inner self\u201d (44-45).<\/p>\n In her next section, Hartman traces the lyric roots of confessional poetry as a place in which the poet can express the individuality and solitariness of \u201cI\u201d (45). Hartman explores the popularity of Lowell\u2019s use of this solitary \u201cI\u201d in light of the anti-communist political climate (46). But in that same climate, Hartman reminds us that homosexuals were not allowed the same privilege of unrestrictedly celebrating \u201cI,\u201d for fear of violent discrimination. Hartman uses Perloff\u2019s warning against reductively reading O\u2019Hara as a homosexual poet representative of \u201cqueer sensibilities\u201d to argue, in turn, that O\u2019Hara\u2019s relationship to those sensibilities resulted in a complicated relationship with confession. Hartman sets up this historical scene to explain why gay poets like O\u2019Hara and Ginsberg had to create their own brand of confessional poetry (47).<\/p>\n Hartman argues that O\u2019Hara and Ginsberg maintained privacy in their confessional form by addressing a \u201ccounter-hegemonic homosexual public\u201d\u2014the two gay poets de-isolated themselves by speaking to their friends in their poetry (48). Without ascribing the term \u201ccoterie\u201d to either poet, she theorizes O\u2019Hara and Ginsberg\u2019s poetry as \u201caddressed to an intimate community,\u201d focusing on the inclusion (and personality) rather than the exclusion (and impersonality) that address creates (49, 53).<\/p>\n IV.<\/strong> \u201cIf Rosenthal had wished to find an innovative poet, he might more reasonably have turned to O\u2019Hara, who was at the center of a vibrant avant-garde milieu\u201d (43). I appreciate the phrasing of this statement as well as the opposition between O\u2019Hara and Lowell on the grounds of innovation, avant-garde poetics being more important to O\u2019Hara than to Lowell.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat you write about in the poem is what you would tell your friends\u201d (51). I admire the more talky way of saying this amidst some denser theoretical discussion.<\/p>\n I like the move of printing an entire poem\u2014in this case, O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cPoem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)\u201d\u2014before the article begins. I think it\u2019s a successful move largely because Hartman spends a good deal of time reading this poem, but I wonder if it would also be more effective to include a Ginsberg poem (or part of one) alongside the O\u2019Hara poem, to make O\u2019Hara seem less singular from the start.<\/p>\n Honor Pledge: EEP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Frank O’Hara Literature Review: O\u2019Hara\u2019s critics are intrigued not merely by O\u2019Hara the poet, but by O\u2019Hara the man, who worked at MoMA by day, was the chatty, affable, beloved party guest by night, and died in a… 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":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ag-lit-rev"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506","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=3506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3507,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506\/revisions\/3507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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