Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: Difference/Homosexuality/Topography

Yearbook of English Studies, Annual, 2004 by Mark Ford

Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: Difference/Homosexuality/Topography. By HAZEL SMITH. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2000. ix 230 pp. 32.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk 14.99 [pounds sterling]). ISBN: 0-8532-3994-0 (pbk 0-8532-3505-8).

In a short poem written in January 1951 Frank O'Hara delivered a mock address to all future interpreters of his poetry:

The Critic

   I cannot possibly think of you
   other than you are: the assassin

   of my orchards. You lurk there
   in the shadows, meting out

   conversation like Eve's first
   confusion between penises and

   snakes. Oh be droll, be jolly
   and be temperate! Do not

   frighten me more than you
   have to! I must live forever.

Beneath the poem's own quixotic drollery lurks O'Hara's instinctively hostile attitude to the very concept of criticism. Whereas the poetry of, say, John Ashbery lends itself relatively easily to the concerns of academic exegesis, and indeed often parodies the solemn rhetoric of the lit. crit. business, O'Hara frequently insists on the unbridgeable nature of the gulf between the poem and any language in which it might be discussed.

Nevertheless, in the decades since Marjorie Perloff's ground-breaking Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters was published in 1979 (reissued with a new preface in 1998), something of an O'Hara critical industry has developed: sophisticated readings of his work have been advanced by Charles Altieri, Andrew Ross, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, and Helen Vendler, for example, and his work now features prominently in most surveys of post-war American poetry.

Hazel Smith's Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara is the first critical monograph on his work since Perloff's, and the first academic assessment to take account of the new biographical material contained in Brad Gooch's controversial 1993 biography, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara and David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1998). She herself also conducted interviews with friends of O'Hara's such as Ashbery, Bill Berkson, and Joe LeSueur, an experience which led to an 'unexpected intensification of interest in the life', as she rather anxiously puts it. Her native critical bias reasserted itself, however, when it was suggested she make a pilgrimage to O'Hara's grave in Springs Cemetery on Long Island: she bridled, resisted, and the theoretically minded will be relieved to learn that her 'interest in the life lessened considerably' on her return to the groves of academe (she is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales). One is put in mind of nineteenth-century visitors to Rome, such as Hawthorne's Hilda in The Marble Faun, who deliberately exposed themselves to the lure of Papism to prove their powers of resistance.

Smith defines a hyperscape as 'a postmodern site characterised by difference' which 'breaks down unified concepts of text, city, subject and art, and remoulds them into new textual, subjective and political spaces'. She figures O'Hara as an exemplary and, on the whole, politically correct postmodernist whose work heroically resists the dominant cultural assumptions of his era, and anticipates the endless free play of signifiers that characterizes today's utopian hyperscape. His success in negotiating between what he calls in 'In Memory of My Feelings' his 'several likenesses', she attributes to his possession of 'hypergrace', which 'implies bodily and mental composure, mediation between emotional intensity and campy self-irony, and a feminised conception of movement which relates to O'Hara's own gay sexuality'. She accordingly explores his work in terms derived from a basket of critical perspectives--gender politics, deconconstruction, topography, orality (the poem as talkscape), and queer theory.

However, while she shows how his work can be interpreted as reflecting the concerns of each of these methodologies fully enough, one comes to feel that none of them, even when skilfully deployed, really helps to define the particular charm of poems such as 'A Step Away from Them', 'Why I Am Not a Painter', or 'The Day Lady Died'. O'Hara's seemingly scatty accounts of his everyday musings and activities (he called such pieces 'I do this, I do that poems') are compelling for reasons that are peculiarly hard to formulate. Certainly his culte de moi, as John Ashbery called it, never crystallizes into an earnest investigation of his own developing selfhood in the manner of contemporaries such as Lowell (much despised by the New York School) or Plath or Berryman. O'Hara's apparently throw-away manner led early reviewers to dismiss his work as fundamentally unserious--one, for instance, described it as so many 'streamers of crepe paper fluttering before an electric fan'. For Smith, O'Hara's inability, or rather refusal, to dominate and interpret the urban scenes he passes through, or which pass through him ('I was reflecting the other night,' begins 'Essay on Style', 'meaning | I was being reflected upon that Sheridan Square | is remarkably beautiful'), is symptomatic of his postmodern transformation of the role of flaneur: unlike Baudelaire or Whitman or Eliot, he neither expects nor desires 'the city to produce a sustainable social or transcendental unity'. Instead his poetry reveals a paradigmatically flexible means of 'interfac[ing] between mind, body and city in which each can mould the other because each is multiple, divisible and penetrable'.