a Tr i b u t e t o
F R A N K
O’H A R A
Homage
Poets Discuss
Th e i r Favo r i t e
Fr a n k O ’ H a r a
Poems
Memorial Day 1950
looked out on a courtyard of trees and was practically bare
except for an army cot and blanket and a frying pan on the
—John Ashbery
floor, used as an ashtray, an idea he got from George
Montgomery, a sort of arbiter of Spartan chic who had been
I
’ve always felt a special connection to Frank’s “Memorial
at Harvard with us. Hence, no doubt, the line: “How many
.Day 1950.” For one thing, I rescued it from oblivion. It
trees and frying pans I’ve loved and lost.” There were
wasn’t in his papers when he died. Then I remembered I had
probably reproductions from MOMA and maybe a clay
once typed it out in a letter to Kenneth Koch when he was in
candelabra, but I don’t remember them.
France on a Fulbright. I had been trying to persuade
Kenneth, who at that time was insisting that he and I were
The poem’s aggressively modernist tone may seem a little
the only important young American poets, to include Frank
dated today, but at the time such figures as Max Ernst,
in our mini-cenacle, and sent him Frank’s poems in an effort
Gertrude Stein, Boris Pasternak, Paul Klee, Auden and
to convince him. I was successful since Kenneth returned
Rimbaud were far from being accepted cultural icons, at least
persuaded and kept the letter in his files.
in the world of Boston-Cambridge. (The year before, Frank
and I had attended a concert that featured the premier of
I first read the poem in the summer of 1950 (I assume it had
Schoenberg’s String Trio. We both loved it, but I remember
been written on Memorial Day of that year), on a trip to visit
Frank getting into an argument with a young member of the
Frank in Boston. He was staying in a house on the back of
Harvard music faculty who insisted that Schoenberg was
Beacon Hill that belonged to his friend Cervin (“Cerv”)
literally crazy, and that Frank was too for liking him.)
Robinson’s family, who were away. I had graduated from
Harvard in 1949 and was living in New York. Frank, though
If his truculent modernist stance, through no fault of his,
a year older than I, graduated in 1950 since he had spent two
inevitably seems old-fashioned today, his political
years in the Navy during the war. I was missing him and
incorrectness, as illustrated in the passage about the sewage
Boston, and I remember our going to lots of movies (“Panic
singing under his bright white toilet seat, was decades ahead
in the Streets” and Olivier’s “Hamlet” among them) and
of its time.
drinking zombies (a newly invented drink, I think) at a bar
near the State House. I too stayed at the Robinsons’ and
To paraphrase his Lana Turner poem: “oh Frank O’Hara we
remember admiring Frank’s room for the kind of Spartan
love you get up.”
chic he always managed to create around him. The room
4
A TRIBUTE
TO
FRANK O’HARA
from Memorial Day 1950 1
For the most part, “negative” emotions such as greed, envy,
cruelty or pettiness are rarely allowed in poetry except as bad
guys to be killed off, then transcended. Occasionally, a poet
Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world;
just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down
outside my window by a crew of creators.
Once he got his axe going everyone was upset
enough to fight for the last ditch and heap
of rubbish.
Through all that surgery I thought
I had a lot to say, and named several last things
Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for; but then
the war was over, those things had survived
and even when you’re scared art is no dictionary.
Max Ernst told us that.
How many trees and frying pans
I loved and lost! Guernica hollered look out!
but we were all busy hoping our eyes were talking
to Paul Klee. My mother and father asked me and
I told them from my tight blue pants we should
love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures.
Wasted child! I’ll club you on the shins! I
wasn’t surprised when the older people entered
my cheap hotel room and broke my guitar and my can
of blue paint.
At that time all of us began to think
with our bare hands and even with blood all over
them, we knew vertical from horizontal, we never
smeared anything except to find out how it lived.
Fathers of Dada! You carried shining erector sets
in your rough bony pockets, you were generous
and they were lovely as chewing gum or flowers!
Thank you! […]
(particularly a confessional poet) will confess to them, but
always with a sense that he or she has sinned. Unfortunately
even lust, with its blatant objectification of the other, no
longer seems quite acceptable.
Of course, not all poetry makes human emotion the focal
point of its content. But even in more abstract and
experimental styles, poets often assume the moral
high-ground of being set apart from the world of industry,
ambition and back-stabbing aggression.
Perhaps that is why, when looking over all of Frank O’Hara’s
most impressive body of work, I keep returning to the two
following rather modest lyrics on “dirt” and “hate.” First of
all, consider how amazing it is to even find “dirt” in a poem.
Easily, nonchalantly, it locates us within the urban experience. In poems extolling nature, one finds “earth.” In the
country, there is rich “loam.” But in Frank O’Hara (and in
New York City) one finds simple and unpretentious dirt. Dirt
is pollution, the inevitable by-product of commerce. And in
poetry, commerce (as we know) is a dirty word. Yet here
there is no need to separate the two worlds. In fact, it
would be impossible to do so. “You don’t refuse to
breathe do you”?
Dirt is also slang for gossip, dish, the juicy lowdown. Dirt,
like talk, is cheap. This connotation of the word seems
exceedingly appropriate in helping to characterize O’Hara’s
style and contribution to contemporary poetry. In his work,
he gossiped about everything from artists and parties to the
weather, creating an aura of intimacy, excitement and expectation around whatever he chose to discuss. Today we have
the tabloids to satisfy our prodigious appetite for dirt. But
The Dirty Poems
of Frank O’Hara
perhaps, if we were less threatened by our own ambiguity,
the need to vilify others wouldn’t be quite so strong.
—Elaine Equi
In “Song” the literal and figurative qualities of dirt morph
have always found the idea that poetry should be uplifting
into a single character familiar to all of us: the bad influence
.a depressing one. Our ideal self is our most boring self,
(“attractive as his character is bad”). It is typical of O’Hara
I
except perhaps as a study in how far we will go to maintain
that the poem, in its way, celebrates the whole idea of bad
clean hands, a clear conscience and an unequivocal
influences, finding them to be both seductive and necessary—
demarcation between our nobler (or at least our more
even educational (“is the character less bad. no. it improves
politically correct) instincts and our baser ones.
constantly”). Obviously, Frank is ready and willing to avail
himself of this and, we may assume, many other bad
influences. True, he was writing in the ’50s and ’60s when
All citations from Collected Poems by Frank O’Hara. Copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith,
Administratix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of
Random House, Inc.
1
smoking, drinking and promiscuity all seemed more sensible
5
A TRIBUTE
TO
FRANK O’HARA
modes of behavior, but the underlying message of finding
In addition to the great pleasure his work gives, it also
nothing pure or uncompromised has wider applications.
teaches a valuable lesson. Thanks to him, when art becomes
While hinting at a sexual encounter, the poem itself is about
religion (whether of the traditional or avant-garde variety), I
those things.
know what to do. I light a candle to dirt.
In “Poem” on the other hand, Frank assumes the role of bad
Poem
influence by encouraging the person he’s addressing, as well
as the reader, to experience (actually, enjoy) darker emotions
Hate is only one of many responses
true, hurt and hate go hand in hand
but why be afraid of hate, it is only there
think of filth, is it really awesome
neither is hate
don’t be shy of unkindness, either
it’s cleansing and allows you to be direct
like an arrow that feels something
such as hate, unkindness and selfishness. Surprisingly, it turns
out to be a sweet and gentle poem of assurance that one need
not always be good in order to be loved.
I must admit that this has always been a favorite poem. Poets
look to other, more well-known poets for permission—and
for me, this permission feels retroactively custom made. To a
woman who is tired of being passive and nurturing, and to a
out and out meanness, too, lets love breathe
you don’t have to fight off getting in too deep
you can always get out if you’re not too scared
poet who is tired of being sensitive, and finally to someone
who is just plain tired, living in our relentlessly competitive
and upbeat times, it offers relief. “Don’t be shy of unkindness, either/ it’s cleansing and allows you to be direct.”
an ounce of prevention’s
enough to poison the heart
don’t think of others
until you have thought of yourself, are true
O’Hara is also a great one for mocking the heroic notion
that artists feel more deeply than your average individual
and suffer more because of it. “Think of filth, is it really
all of these things, if you feel them
will be graced by a certain reluctance
and turn into gold
awesome/ Neither is hate.” Absurd as the idea of “poet
as Designated Empath” sounds, variations of it continue
to live in the public imagination of what a poet is and
if felt by me, will be smilingly deflected
by your mysterious concern
does. That’s why refusing to take such notions seriously
is still a radical step.
Art stays art by maintaining strict borders between itself and
Song
the rest of life. Like Duchamp who came before him, and
Andy Warhol who came after him, Frank O’Hara, whether
Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that’s what you think of in the city
intentionally or not, is one of the figures who questioned and
minimized borders. In the sacred temple of fifties art,
O’Hara’s work was like a window that let in, not only fresh
air, but also dirt.
does it just seem dirty
that’s what you think of in the city
you don’t refuse to breathe do you
Maybe if the battle between high and low culture had ended
back then, Frank’s poems might be merely interesting or just
someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very
he’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes
terribly entertaining to us today. They would have served
their purpose. Instead, when I reread them, they strike me
with a now-more-than-ever vitality.
that’s what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that’s not a thought that’s soot
Art is not so easily democratized. It continues to seek new
ways to reclaim its privileged status and frighten worshippers
into hushed subservience. But if there is a way to be both an
and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don’t refuse to breathe do you
aesthete and a populist, Frank O’Hara found it.
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A TRIBUTE
TO
FRANK O’HARA
But where these two seem like a couple of drinking buddies,
all bluster and conviviality, there’s something far subtler at
work in the visitation that same heavenly body makes to
Frank O’Hara, asleep in a summer house on Fire Island,
thirty-some years later. O’Hara unabashedly allows the sun
to come to him, and that big Russian roar is replaced by
something less ferocious than petulant, albeit steady and
warm. When he asks the barely awake Frank, “You may be/
wondering why I’ve come so close?” this sun’s character is
clinched—polite, conspiratorial, friendly albeit capable of
True Accounts
hauteur, and bearing a distinct message.
—Mark Doty
T
A message launched by a deliciously shameless pun: “Frankly
I wanted to tell you/ I like your poetry.” Imagine the poten-
here are moments in any artistic life when it seems
tial pitfalls facing a poem of self-praise, a poem intended to
validation will never come from without, and that all
cheer oneself up about one’s own artistic achievement!
one’s striving and laboring haven’t the least thing to do with
O’Hara’s brilliant solution is not only to put the praise in
whether anybody ever sees one’s work. When this crisis of
someone else’s mouth, but to make it funny from the first
belief becomes acute, it becomes necessary to minister to
word and then to keep it appealingly qualified through the
one’s own needs, to award oneself some form of recognition.
sun’s decided unwillingness to inflate the poet’s accomplish-
Nobody ever did so more good-humoredly and graciously
ment: “I see a lot/ on my rounds and you’re okay. You may/
than Frank O’Hara, the second poet ever to be directly
not be the greatest thing on earth….”
addressed by the sun.
Now the poem begins to swim into deeper waters, as the sun
The first writer that luminary chose “to speak to personally”
turns to increasingly lovely stanzas of advice, delivered in a
was Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1920’s “An Extraordinary
colloquial tone that keeps his principles, so to speak, down
Adventure Which Happened to Me, Vladimir Mayakovsky,
to earth. It’s here that the poet is given his highest
One Summer in the Country,” the Russian Modernist tells us
compliment: “And now that you/ are making your own days,
exactly where he is—“Pushkino, Mount Akula, Rumyantsev
so to speak,/ even if no one reads you but me/ you won’t be
Cottage, 20 miles down the Yaroslav Railway”—when he
depressed.” Even if a human gaze doesn’t fall on these
yells an invitation to a sun whose predictability he’s grown
poems, sunlight always will. But now the poet doesn’t even
weary of. Naturally, he doesn’t expect an answer when he
need that external light; he is “making his own days.” He’s
shouts (in Herbert Marshall’s translation):
become a source of illumination, one that warms and orders
the world. Mayakovsky says that both his motto and the
Listen, golden brightbrow,
instead of vainly
setting in the air,
have tea with me
right now!
sun’s is “always to shine,” and here O’Hara shares that
identification, poet and sun aligned in vocation.
Characteristically, the heightened nature of this moment is
undercut by O’Hara’s swooning exclamation, and the sun’s
But the sun, “of his own goodwill,” takes the poet up on his
comic response. But just as we’re imagining a talkative sun
invitation, comes into the garden, banking his fires, and then
fitting himself between Manhattan avenues, the sun bursts
right into the house, ready for tea and jam. Before long poet
forth with a rhetorical flight of startling gravity; it is a call
and fireball are clapping each other on the back, and the sun
for a kind of generous and detached tenderness towards the
is comparing their vocations:
world which one can’t quite imagine O’Hara having been
able to make without his gleaming solar mask in place.
Why, comrade, we’re a pair!
Come, poet,
let us dawn
and sing
away the drabness of the universe.
That tiny poem left in Frank’s brain might have been quite
enough to end “A True Account” on a note of graceful
charm, but there is a further distance to travel. If this poem
7
A TRIBUTE
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FRANK O’HARA
is O’Hara at his warmest, it is also finally as resonant and
And now that you
are making your own days, so to speak,
even if no one reads you but me
you won’t be depressed. Not
everyone can look up, even at me. It
hurts their eyes.”
strange as a good dream. Whoever calls the sun also calls the
poet; it as if the poem’s pointed to voices and forces beyond
its cosmic theater, raising its own stakes. Suddenly the sun
seems a kind of intermediary between poet and larger,
unknowable forces—unknowable at least for now. There is
more to be understood; there is meaning up ahead, to be
gathered and understood. Somewhere in the world, this poet
is called, is wanted, has a purpose, a destination. This
mystery prepares us for the final sentence, the poem’s most
resonant and memorable phrase: “Darkly he rose, and
then I slept.”
And so what begins as a comical act of self-blessing—something a poet as out-of-the-mainstream as O’Hara was in his
own day could certainly have used—becomes a statement of
a deeper sense of vocation, of connection to mystery. We all
know that “true” in a title is intended to signal exactly the
Essay on Style
opposite, and yet O’Hara’s poem arrives, through the vigor
—W.S. Merwin
of its lies, at something entirely credible. Endearingly funny,
marvelously knowing in its self-regard, his poem becomes a
F
or Frank O’Hara, writing poetry was tightrope walking.
kind of touchstone for makers everywhere: both a slyly ironic
What he balanced on that swaying, impossible, all-but-
blessing and an evocation of the mystery of a life of art.
nonexistent surface up in the vastnesses of mid-air is part of
what those of us who love his poetry keep recognizing, step
from A True Account of Talking
to the Sun at Fire Island
by step, as we read his poems. All of it, apparently, is there at
“…Frankly I wanted to tell you
I like your poetry. I see a lot
on my rounds and you’re okay. You may
not be the greatest thing on earth, but
you’re different. Now I’ve heard some
say you’re crazy, they being excessively
calm themselves to my mind and other
crazy poets think that you’re a boring
reactionary. Not me.
Just keep on
like I do and pay no attention. You’ll
find that people always will complain
about the atmosphere, either too hot
or too cold too bright or too dark, days
too short or too long.
If you don’t appear
at all one day they think you’re lazy
or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.
perennial risk of once-only art. For all their singularity, their
once: the totally serious and the utterly goofy, high camp and
startling plainness, the dailiness of existence and the
tone and stance and daring, their difference from those of
anyone else at all, his poems often seem luminously transparent, and it becomes clear that for Frank O’Hara life itself was
tightrope walking. Excitement and terror, the naked-new and
the fondly clung-to, were balanced in each moment without
particular regard for probability. And the hilarity, at every
move. He is one of the funniest of poets, and his seriousness
was never in danger of falling into earnestness. “You just go
on your nerve,” he says in that other great essay on style, his
“Personism: A Manifesto.” But you don’t just go on that.
There had to be the talent. And it had to be his own.
So “Essay on Style” is scarcely an essay in any ready-made
sense, but a run-through. And style is a way of moving,
appearing, performing, presenting. One of its elements is the
unexpected, but that in turn has subtle laws of its own. It
And don’t worry about your lineage
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on
the jungle, you know, on the tundra
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were
I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting
for you to get to work.
cannot just be any old unexpected thing, there has to be an
authenticity to it that is part of its surprise, becoming the
astonishing leaps and turns that we recognize as O’Hara’s
“personally.” And the voice, of course, is part of that: the
8
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FRANK O’HARA
phrases that seem to have been picked out of his everyday
that makes the poems complete when he ends them, and
chatter and flung back with a new resonance, amplified, as
makes them work, as they do, again and again. When he
though he were his own parrot:
talks of treating the typewriter as an intimate organ because
“nothing else is (intimate)” he is describing, more or less,
I am painting
the floor yellow, Bill is painting it
wouldn’t you know my mother would call
up
and complain?
what he has done. The poems work because their intimacy or
their play at intimacy, their closeness and their performance
convey something of O’Hara, naked, postured, made, and
immediately unquestionable, recognizable and pure. And
after “Essay on Style” we are on to Mary Desti’s Ass, which
we never do get news of.
and then it’s the play-back, and himself imitating himself
imitating his mother:
from Essay on Style
well if Mayor Wagner won’t allow private
cars on Manhattan because of the snow, I
will probably never see her again
[…] drinking a cognac while Edwin
read my new poem it occurred to me how impossible
it is to fool Edwin not that I don’t know as
much as the next about obscurity in modern verse
but he
always knows what it’s about as well
as what it is do you think we can ever
strike as and but, too, out of the language
then we can attack well since it has no
application whatsoever neither as a state
of being or a rest for the mind no such
things available
where do you think I’ve
got to? the spectacle of a grown man
decorating
a Christmas tree disgusts me that’s
where
that’s one of the places yetbutaswell
I’m glad I went to that party for Ed Dorn
last night though he didn’t show up do you think
,Bill, we can get rid of though also, and also?
maybe your
lettrism is the only answer treating
the typewriter as an intimate organ why not?
nothing else is (intimate)
no I am not going
to have you “in“ for dinner nor am I going “out”
I am going to eat alone for the rest of my life
and rapid though the flutter-stop is, situations, circumstances,
troubles, irritations, crises one after the other threaten to
enter
my growingly more perpetual state
and then with a reflection on the reality of an angel in the
Frick we are sitting in Jack Delaney’s thinking of what Edwin
is thinking about a new poem of Frank’s, and Frank begins
eliminating words from the language. Not only is the wish to
do without words (logical connectors, as and but, to start
with—after all, as he has said in the “Manifesto,” logic,
which pain “always produces,” is “very bad for you”) is
part of the style; the way he has arrived at that and the
way he pursues it are also manifestations of it, and where
it has got him:
where do you think I’ve
got to? The spectacle of a grown man
decorating
a Christmas tree disgusts me that’s
where
more words are banished from the language, and then:
treating
the typewriter as an intimate organ why not?
By the time the poem rises to its final flounce:
I am going to eat alone for the rest of my life
it is clear that the style is an essay, in the old run-through
sense. Trying it on and wearing it, going with it. It is his style
9
A TRIBUTE
TO
FRANK O’HARA
their dubious origin and employment suggests a
Hôtel Transylvanie
—Barbara Guest
sublime moment of dishonest hope….
T
he first clue to the meaning of the poem is the title, a
This is a moment of melodrama, and one asks why, but the
nineteenth-century title. Transylvania belonged once to
poet is leading us through his own sense of the dramatic, or
the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It belonged once to Romania.
melodramatic. He is aware that he will write something any
It is in the Carpathian Mountains where Dracula comes
minute that will both puzzle and frighten the reader. It will
from. Although we note O’Hara does not mention this
not be about the hotel, but about his own life. O’Hara has
blood-thirsty Count.
been readying himself for this explosion about himself, the
mask he wears. He chooses now to take off his mask and
In our times the Carpathians have been a refuge for those
addresses himself:
fleeing the Communist regimes of Romania and Hungary.
It is just possible that this hotel with the haunted name may
you will continue to sing on trying to cheer everyone up
and they will know as they listen with excessive pleasure that you’re dead
and they will not mind that they have let you entertain
at the expense of the only thing you want in the world
have been noted by O’Hara on his walks in Paris, and that
his imagination lent to it a sinister aspect and an accord
with a rumored place of political refuge, as much as with
Count Dracula.
This is a Shelleyan moment in O’Hara’s writing, the admitted
If the Hôtel Transylvanie were staged, and the poem is
loss of poetic power. His time has been spent trying “to cheer
theatrical as are many of O’Hara’s poems, the hotel guests
everyone up.” It is not that this poem is one of his triumphs.
would wear masks. Disguise is a theme of the poem. Another
In this poem he achieves what he has always attempted.
is chance. Chance has a role in gambling and poetry. In a
Poetry has presented him with fictions and too much reliance
place like the Hôtel Transylvanie they may speak of political
on his genius. He has betrayed his abilities through pleasure
duels; there is even a mention by the poet of “rigging the
and power. It has eluded him until now, the icy experience of
deck” (of cards). These guests have escaped from a sinister
the fleetingness of poetry, the possible loss, even when
regime; they may be in disguise, in order to live.
addressed. Of the poetic moment. Now he confronts himself
in a moment of testing, and knows he has experienced the
it will take them a long time to know
who I am/ why I came there/ what and why I am and made to happen…
loss he writes about, the loss of poetic power, and through
The residents of the Hôtel believe in chance, which may help
We realize his continued addressing of the hotel is due to an
them to survive while gambling with cards and with life.
identification with it in all its disguises, and the final disguise
this moment of recognition regains it.
is the hotel as the personification of himself when he urges:
oh hôtel, you should be merely a bed
surrounded by walls where two souls meet […]
but not as cheaters at card have something to win….
oh hôtel […] you have only to be
as you are being, as you must be, as you always are […]
no matter what fate deals you or the imagination discards like a tyrant….
O’Hara is wishing there were not the false note, that the
poem would not be forced to obey the omens, the music of
from Hôtel Transylvanie
the poem be less forbidding. In this sort of hotel faces wear a
mask. O’Hara puts on his mask as the poem gradually edges
Shall we win at love or shall we lose
can it be
that hurting and being hurt is a trick forcing the love
we want to appear, that the hurt is a card
and is it black? Is it red? Is it a paper, dry of tears
chevalier, change your expression! The wind is sweeping over
the gaming tables ruffling the cards/ they are black and red
like a Futurist torture and how do you know it isn’t always there
waiting while doubt is the father that has you kidnapped by friends
toward the zones of danger. The poem is now about surface
disequillibrium. The setting of the poem begins to wobble as
the inhabitants of the hotel hide in their dominos, hissing
Shall we win at love or shall we lose […]
but not as cheaters at cards have something to win…
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A TRIBUTE
TO
FRANK O’HARA
yet you will always live in a jealous society of accident
you will never know how beautiful you are or how beautiful
the other is, you will continue to refuse to die for yourself
you will continue to sing on trying to cheer everyone up
and they will know as they listen with excessive pleasure that you’re dead
and they will not mind that they have let you entertain
at the expense of the only thing you want in the world/ you are amusing
as a game is amusing when someone is forced to lose as in a game I must
[…]
After the sun has started sinking, the poem is able to accommodate even the offer of his will to the Harbormaster. But who
is the Harbormaster? Before I read Brad Gooch’s book, I
couldn’t make out if the poem was addressed to a lover or to
God. Gooch tells us it is to the painter Larry Rivers, but that
still does not eliminate the presence of other possibilities: it is
spoken, after all, to one who is in charge, or seems to be, the
lover with whom he can find no repose, lover as god, rather
like the addressee of Rochester’s poem “Absent from Thee”
(his wife, perhaps, spoken in terms of a God from whom he
has estranged himself through his vanity).
All of which sets us up for the admirable stoicism of the
ending—sturdy, brave and truthful:
Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
The Sanity of Frank O’Hara
—Thom Gunn
Waves are the medium for a ship as the air is the medium for
A
t first I found it difficult relating “To the Harbormaster”
a human being. They exist in an eternity different from
with what I had already read by Frank O’Hara. I knew,
God’s, and different again from the life-span of the ship or
I suppose, mainly the Lunch Poems, written in a relaxed free
the man, and opposed to both, in a sense. That is the way
verse with a gentle jokey tone, full of the trivia of his lunch-
things are, and O’Hara had better trust in the sanity of his
hour, which is somehow never boring. He enjoys himself in
body. “Sanity”—what a great word! It appears that both the
those poems, and we enjoy ourselves too, his style being
light-hearted hedonism of other poems and the stoicism of
immensely seductive (it’s the rhetoric of pretending to
this are equally based on this common sense, this steady
have no rhetoric).
health of mind.
But “To the Harbormaster” is so sad! This one does not seem
improvised but is written, like late Shakespeare, in iambic lines
To The Harbormaster
moving irregularly between tetrameter and pentameter, which
gives the poem a solemn and deliberate sound. “I am always
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
tying up/ and then deciding to depart.” Such an undecorated
statement may sound like the bemused self- deprecation of the
Lunch Poems, but it has more disastrous consequences. The
mastering image of the poem is of the body as boat— O’Hara
is both boat and captain of the boat: “with the metallic coils of
the tide/ around my fathomless arms” (the arms as ship’s
screws? He sounds a little like Inspector Gadget), “or I am hard
alee with my Polish rudder/ in my hand and the sun sinking“ he
is comically at a loss, with his penis useless in his hand: it is too
late, too late for anything, he is unable to understand the forms
of his vanity, and by that word he does not mean self-conceit,
but the essential triviality of human affairs, vanitas vanitatem.
The rhetoric of this poetry subsumes the jokes and the slightly
grotesque images in a quiet yearning despair.
—
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A TRIBUTE
TO
FRANK O’HARA
By assigning written imitations of Rimbaud, Pound, Stevens,
and Williams, Koch freely spilled to us all the secret
ingredients of his and O’Hara’s poetry. He talked of the
grand permission O’Hara gave to include your own most
trivial daily thoughts and experiences in poetry—the “I do
this, I do that” aesthetic. He made a few dark comments
about O’Hara’s life at which my antennae shot up. “Avoid
masochistic love affairs,” he counseled us. “They interfere
with your poetry.” (I’m still not so sure about that one.)
Kenneth was indeed the toggle switch between the poetry and
the life. At a loft party for Allen Ginsberg, he said to me,
The Transparent Man
1
“Who do you want to meet?” “John Ashbery,” I answered
ambitiously, and soon John and I were talking. Then one
THE LASTING APPEAL
OF FRANK O’HARA
night at The Ninth Circle, an innocuous dance bar in the
West Village that attracted college students, Ashbery
—Brad Gooch
introduced me to J.J. Mitchell, a boyfriend of O’Hara’s,
who’d been with him the night of his fatal accident.
W
hen I was an aspiring teenage poet skulking in my
bedroom in sixties suburban America—Wilkes-Barre,
The line between life and art was
Pa.—there was only Bob Dylan and T. S. Eliot. Then all of a
sudden there was Frank O'Hara. His admission into the little
more dotted by him than by any
pantheon I kept on my shelf was accomplished by The New
poet. All information was at once
American Poetry, an anthology of post-war, anti-academic
poets edited by Donald Allen—re-issued a few years ago with
gossip and aesthetic illumination.
the less shiny title, The Postmoderns. Of all the poets
represented—including such innovators as Charles Olson,
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer—O’Hara puzzled me the most.
Still a student, I was soon attending parties at the poet
From that puzzlement grew fascination and eventually,
Kenward Elmslie’s townhouse. These were Frank O’Hara
full-blown, adolescent literary love.
parties—just without O’Hara, who’d been dead for five years
by then. I could hear snippets of that “voice” I’d first heard
Being a teenager, I was selfish. I didn’t read anything twice
on the page in “The Day Lady Died” or “Poem (Lana Turner
that didn’t speak somehow to my cornered existence. I’d been
Has Collapsed!)” emerge ventriloquially from the mouths of
perfectly happy to sit at the diner with Dylan and Ginsberg,
Alex Katz, or Joan Mitchell, or Joe LeSueur, or Patsy
ordering up frothy milkshakes of poetic prose and wolfing
Southgate. All I could bring to the table was the accidental
down hamburgers spiced with the ketchup of radical politics.
distinction of being one of the first of a generation who
But with O’Hara I felt as if I’d been invited to a more adult
hadn’t known O’Hara personally, yet was steeped enough in
restaurant—French?—where the cuisine wasn’t immediately
the poems to be able to identify LeSueur as the owner of the
recognizable, but was invitingly complex, beautiful even. I
seersucker jacket of “Joe’s Jacket,” or Freilicher as the Jane
heard a poetic voice I couldn’t quite identify, but which in
of “Chez Jane.” (The revelatory Collected Poems didn’t
retrospect was filled with ingredients I craved—Manhattan
appear until the end of 1971.) One night at a dinner party at
slang, delinquent liberty, French surrealism, gay romance. I
LeSueur’s my ears burned as dishy tales were told of O’Hara
would roll the line “My quietness has a man in it, he is
over cognac and joints. I remember naively thinking, “I’d like
transparent” around in my head like a smooth, clear marble.
to write his biography,” never considering that I was a
I also read in a biographical note that Kenneth Koch, a friend
twenty-year-old poet who could barely string five pages of
of O’Hara’s, taught at Columbia College, so I resolved to
prose together for an academic essay.
make my way somehow into his class, which, in 1971, I did.
This article emerged from an interview with Rebecca Wolff, PSA’s Programs Associate.
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12
A TRIBUTE
TO
FRANK O’HARA
Fifteen years later my life had become more prosaic. I had a
modern poems. In that sense, O’Hara’s life was an inspira-
literary agent, and, soon enough, a publisher, and the kind
tion. He was just a bit more complicated than even I’d
permission of O’Hara’s sister, Maureen, to write an author-
imagined. But how could he have had, as Larry Rivers
ized biography. While I was sympathetic with W.H. Auden’s
tabulated in his eulogy, “at least sixty people in New York
famous distaste for the exposure of poets’ lives, I felt that
who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend,” and not
part of O’Hara’s exceptionalism was that his poetry was a
be complex?
teasing invitation to biography. While the footnotes—possum
prints or not—to Eliot’s The Waste Land sent the reader off
Now when that line rolls through my head occasionally—
in search of St. Augustine’s Confessions or the libretto of
“My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent”—I can’t
Wagner’s Tristan, O’Hara’s poems provoked the reader to
help but continue with the nuance of the ensuing three lines,
skim black-and-white snapshots of painters and poets clus-
which I didn’t understand so well before writing the biogra-
tered in the Cedar Tavern. The line between life and art was
phy: “and he carries me quietly, like a gondola through the
more dotted by him than by any poet. All information was at
streets./ He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like
once gossip and aesthetic illumination. O’Hara’s attitude on
numerals/ My quietness has a number of naked selves.”
the page made all traditional distinctions between minor and
major, life and art, seem hackneyed and fake—and so
emboldened a sympathetic biographer.
Writing a biography requires some method acting. You try to
imagine yourself in the head of the protagonist. (Having
worked my way through O’Hara’s childhood and the “letters
home” of his Navy years, I felt that I was perhaps coming at
his adult years differently from many of his contemporaries,
whose attitude about family and past, as Grace Hartigan
explained to me, tended to be, “You leave that!”) My own
social life picked up as I found myself attempting to channel
O’Hara’s buoyant, friendly, chatty demeanor at parties. I was
always memorizing one or another poem, running through it
on the subway. The words inevitably would ricochet with the
words of an O’Hara letter I was reading, or an interview, and
suddenly two dots would be connected. For instance, I read
how Daisy Alden discovered O’Hara crying at his own
thirtieth birthday party thrown at Grace Hartigan’s studio,
and saying, “Because today I am thirty years old and have so
little time left,” and I realized that this was the date he began
“In Memory Of My Feelings,” a poem written over four
days, which included the double-entendre, “Grace/to be born
and live as variously as possible.” Whatever mental light
bulbs were lit during the writing were switched on by
memorizing the poems, with the help as well of O’Hara’s
crammed date books.
One tired literary axiom is that biographers are inevitably
disillusioned by their subjects. O’Hara defied this rule as
well. For when I came to the end of City Poet: The Life and
Times of Frank O’Hara, I felt reassured that O’Hara had
pretty much been going on his nerve, just as I’d always imagined he had, creating a life that perfectly fit the writer of
those intensely, achingly lyrical, yet oh so smartly urbane and
13
A TRIBUTE
What’s With
Modern Art?
TO
FRANK O’HARA
One thinks of Keats’ revelatory maxim “Beauty is truth,
truth beauty” in this excerpt from “Salvador Dali”:
1
...the artist himself, nude, conducts you into a beautiful candy-dream
where your faithful dog is asleep at your feet and the sea purrs at
your fingertips. There are sweet vapors and the rich revelatory grain
of woods and the vastly impressive passivity of megalomania, but it
is not exactly a revolutionary’s dream. He calls forth the minor or
repressed admirations, sexual, tactile sybaritic, technical—the subject
is no longer of paranoiac importance—and makes a monument.
THE ART REVIEWS
OF FRANK O’HARA
—Michael Price
“What matters is not eternal life but eternal vivacity”
—Friederich Nietzsche
T he tradition of poet as art critic
I
t seems as though lately we can’t stop talking about
has rich company in the twentieth
.Frank O’Hara. How fortunate! For O’Hara’s genius is,
as Charles Olson once advocated, to make the private act
century: Stein, Yeats, Stevens,
public, and that private world we see in O’Hara’s varied
and spontaneous oeuvre is a public world of wonder.
Pound, Moore and Auden to name a
few. O’Hara takes an important
How does this wonder figure into art reviews? With O’Hara,
it is the push magus. The poem meets the blurb meets
place in this lineage...
criticism. And what could be more earned and rewarding
than words from a poet who is so very much the movement
or impetus of the painter, of the gesture to make art, in his
There is, as well, much of O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that”
life and in his poems? So it can be said that O’Hara is not a
sensibility in the art writings. His charm lies in his ease at
critic. He is a poet first and also a great art mind. (Baudelaire
jumping from information (him telling you something you
used to say that the best criticism of a work of art would be
can use) to prescience (his leaps into the unknown). Perhaps
another work of art). Craft and technique as concepts have
the place this is most evident is in his comments titled David
no place in an O’Hara review. Instead, thinking of his
Smith: Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing, which ran on
famous quip from “Personism: A Manifesto,” O’Hara goes
WNDT-TV (November 18, 1964):
on his own crepuscular nerve. His art writings are checkered
with off-hand one-liners, beautiful word-play and bona-fide
It is the nature of sculpture to be there. If you don’t like it you wish
it would get out of the way, because it occupies space which your
body could occupy. Smith’s sculptures are, big or small, figurative or
abstract, very complete, very attentive to your presence, full of
interest in and for you. As an example, they have no boring views:
circle them as you may, they are never napping. They present a total
attention and they are telling you that that is the way to be. On
guard. In a sense they are benign, because they offer themselves for
your pleasure. But beneath that kindness is a warning: don’t be
bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial and be proud. The slightest loss
of attention leads to death. The primary passion in these sculptures is
cognitive leaps that are genius. Take for example this from
“Blanche Dombek”:
They wipe from one’s mind some of their more graceful
contemporaries in the way that a gust of wind obliterates a
phrase of music when it is played in a stadium.
What’s with Modern Art?, edited By Bill Berkson (Mike and Dale’s Press, 1999).
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14
A TRIBUTE
TO
FRANK O’HARA
to avert catastrophe, or to sink beneath it in a major way. So, as with
the Greeks, it is a tragic art.
this lineage, especially given that the shift of consciousness
that emerged within the Abstract Expressionist phenomena in
New York could be seen, from a Western historical
O’Hara would famously make poems in the midst of a party.
perspective, as the most substantial shift in the movement of
He could also convey deep insight on visual arts on cue,
visual art since cave etchings. And with our own dearth of
seemingly to anyone interested. His Q & A exposé in
synergy (I speak for myself and you) between the two genres
Ingenue (December, 1964) with a group of high-school
today (on the West Coast there isn’t a poet and a painter
students is at once a lesson on humor, particularity,
living within 400 miles of each other), O’Hara’s example
compassion, wit, and beauty. Take this exchange as example:
becomes particularly poignant. His is a historical model, and
my generation would do well to take heed and study it, say,
Q: Is it in poor taste to admire and like an artist who is still
alive and near to the art world, especially if what he paints
appeals to teen-agers in style and color? Jane Cee Salmy,
Morristown High School, New Jersey
like auto mechanics or method acting.
Of course, one could just leave off with any analysis of his
prowess as a critic and simply enjoy the particular wit and
confidence in the reviews that typify an O’Hara poem. One
A: It is never in poor taste to admire anyone, except possibly
someone like Hitler. It is especially important to admire an
artist while he is alive, so that he may have some pleasure
and comfort as a result of his efforts. If what he paints
appeals to teenagers, it should hardly be held against him
since teens are the future and an integral part of his
audience.
could just read the book. Or one could call up Bill Berkson
for a quick tutorial or the inside story, as his knowledge of
O’Hara’s life and writings is second to none. I’ve had the
luck of doing both.
The tradition of poet as art critic has rich company in the
twentieth century: Stein, Yeats, Stevens, Pound, Moore and
© John Jonas Gruen
Auden to name a few. O’Hara takes an important place in
Back row, left to right: Lisa de Kooning; film director Frank Perry and his wife, script writer Eleanor Perry; John Myers; Anne Porter; Fairfield Porter;
interior designer Angelo Torricini; pianist Arthur Gold; Jane Wilson; Kenward Elmslie; painter Paul Brach; Jerry Porter (behind Brach, Nancy Ward;
Katharine Porter). Second row, left to right: Joe Hazan; Clarice Rivers; Kenneth Koch; Larry Rivers. Seated on couch: Miriam Shapiro (Brach); pianist
Robert Fizdale; Jane Freilicher; Joan Ward; John Kacere; Sylvia Maizell. Kneeling on the right, back to front: Alvin Novak; Bill de Kooning; Jim Tommaney. Front
row: Stephen Rivers; Bill Berkson; Frank O’Hara; Herbert Machiz. Water Mill, Long Island, 1961.
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