The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

[Again, I'm at a loss for material for this blog, but I did find this crappy scan of an essay I wrote on Frank O'Hara sometime in the early 90s. I would have been, say, 24. It was written on an Apple SE, printed on a dot-matrix very lightly -- I scanned it in several years ago but never corrected it. But it looks just fine to me now.]

The Collected Poems of Frank OHara
1995, University of California Press, Berkeley
588 pages, paper, $18

Frank O’hara was one of the last poets to possess the great idea of liberty, one port-able enough for the whole city, for all situations and inconveniences, but which also knew the dangers of indulgence and lax attention. It was the liberty of the French po-ets, of Apollinaire and Breton, which bore on its shoulders a philosophy that argued against the possibility of personal agency, but which could also win the day, given en-ergy and a sense of purpose. CYHara did win the cfry, which is why one wants to go outside and see these poems in action. Some of them are like an entire season; however, rather than the famous sai~v~ of his great predecessor Rimbaud, they are seasons in zen” (sorry), meaning that the openness and inclusiveness of John Cage is there, too, with all its wealth of non-noise, hanging aphorisms, and Thoreau-like confidence among the wilds.
          Ol-lara describes this cross of influ-ences with characteristic nonchalance in Tive Poems” (a poem that dldn’t appear in Donald Allens Se/ectedPoenis of Frank O7kra published in 1974, but which is included in this paperback reissue of Allens terrific collection from 1971):

~i invil*ion In lunch
H~i DOYOU LIKE THAI?
when Ionlyhwe l6centsand2
p~ka~s of yogurt
ttvjres a lesson in that, isnt there like in Chinese poetry when a leaf falls?

That lesson is contained in a number of OHaras best known poems, somewhere be-tween the construction workers, sandwiches, cheap copies of Genet and lonesco, in the voice of Billy Holiday or in a painting of Mike Goldberg~s. This excerpt contains the most famous elements of OHaras aesthetic in naked paradigm: the ubiquitous lunch, numbers (very Charles Demuth), the real concerns of a young poet in the city but also the victorious optimism. Trivial objects with a right all their own brush tq against “heavy” Chinese philosophy -- the vogue then, thanks to Pound, Rexroth and other surveyors of world culture.
          In fact, much of O1-taras poetry can be seen as an arglinent against the self-importance of much of the aesthetic posturing in poetry at that time; after all, it was Pount2rs didactic urge and ability to assimilate cultures that led to his adoption of fascism. Ol-laras casualness, his ability to approach but not be disturbed by the various programs of American poets (in a New York that was populated by Europes most talented exiles) can be seen as the necessary breaking free from these pressures to dictate -- though, in the long run, OHaras “Personism” became as influential as any American manifesto for the arts, especially in New York. Ol-lara had numerous heroes
-- Pollock, DeKooning, his friend Jane Freilicher, Picasso and Matisse -- but none of them were cast in the “hero and hero-worship” mold, demanding emulation. “Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world” 01-tat-a writes in an early poem, and he followed his heroes with a secret understanding (or an understanding of their secret), not with futile reverence. He could even disarm with one line a theory that threatened to replace the personal with abstraction (in this case Charles Olsons) as when he writes (in “Hotel Transylvanie”) “Where will you find me, projective verse, since I will be goneT
Which means that you can be perfectly g1oon~y and read OHara, too; he knew how to move among and excite the tangle of constructs that are, generally, ones strength and burden: the personality. He was one of the few poets who could use moods as material for art, and his aim is to disturb you into self-possession, and into enjoying it if he can help it. “In the beginning there was YOU -- there will always be YOU, I guess,” reads one of his “Lines for Fortune Cookies”; it is when he combines this ability with his startling ear, his endless supply of new forms for poetry and his sure sense of languaqe that one is, well, floored:

                                                                                    hook
at you and I wouhi rather look at you than all the portraits of the worhi except p~sibly for the Polish Riih oc~osionaI ly mid anyway itS in the Frick which thank hesyans ytiu havsi t pine to yot so we can gu to~ther the first time mid the fm~t that yw move so bewatiful ly more or k~s tokes care of Futurbn just as at hmne I never think of the Nii~DexewikrgaStafrcase

frem “HavinqaCoke With You”

          Ol-tara looked at art and life through the same pair of eyes; if that sounds obvious, consider that this poem, which is basi-cally high caliber talk, is Surrealist in both its being “automatic” writing of sorts, and in its use of montage techniques to trace weird, geometric narrative patterns -- going from “you” to the Polish ft’kkf, then zooming into the Frick and back out again in two lines, ending up at home thinking of Duchamps painting (itself about lay-ered time) which has, however, already been annihilated by 01-tat-as, what, hyperbole? He is sure of where art stands in his relationship with the world; it is tense but easy. A sketch of an entire relationship --who lives with whom, what they have seen, etc.-- at-tentive to both its trivialities and granch.ier is expressed in these lines, in what is gen-erally not a “psychological” poem; John Berrymnan should be so skillful. The poem seems to have been written for two people very successfully -- which is one more than usual -- 01-tat-as special brand of postmodern “transgression”, taking the poem into the personal (and the person to whom it is written) so much that it. is nearly transparent.

Posted by Brian Stefans at March 24, 2003 10:43 PM