Frank O'Hara's Intimate Fictions

American Poetry Review, The, Nov/Dec 2006 by Sadoff, Ira

"YOU DO NOT ALWAYS KNOW WHAT I AM feeling," begins Frank O'Hara's "For Grace After a Party." Implied in the richness of that rhetoric: a long-term closeness between the speaker and Grace, his peevishness about being misunderstood, at the same time his implied disappointment that he can usually be "read" so easily. Like most of O'Hara's best work, the seamlessness of the statement, the charged conversational tone, might lead even a careful reader to believe in the lyric fiction of present tense invention-the whimsical, spontaneous, even the random. But O'Hara's apparent spontaneity is a strategic fiction. I'm not speaking of O'Hara's intentions here, nor how many drafts his poems went through (Mozart held virtually entire scores inside his head), nor his writing methods (he was a notorious fictionalizer about his work: according to James Schuyler's letters, O'Hara never wrote his famous Lunch Poems during his lunch hour but rather when he came back to work after lunch). I 'm interested, rather, in the poem on the page, which in his best work is intricately structured and foreshadowed; even the digressions serve as metaphorical parallels and contrasts for the poems' obsessions, which in poem after poem reveal O'Hara's irresolvable romantic quest for both constancy and surprise.

Frank O'Hara's influence, even fifty years after he wrote his most adventurous poems, is still abundant: you find traces of it in the work of John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, in all of the second-generation New York School poets, in James Tate, Dean Young, Alice Notley, Arthur Vogelsang, David Lehman, many avant-garde younger poets, and a large cast of poets whose poems often seem so derivative that O'Hara's voice overwhelms theirs: the resulting work is often clever but slight: the poems lack individuation of voice (diction and tone), necessity and shapeliness. For it is not an unmediated O'Hara we get in his poems: we get the full thrust of the passionate romantic (lover of Rachmaninoff), entangled with the cultured intelligence of the curator of MOMA who loved the way work was constructed in a Modernist, often impersonal and certainly not representational way. He was a Modernist too in his faith in art's capacity to supplant the religious impulse, to create an internal aesthetic order that would offer its own self-enclosed harmonies. Art wasn't necessarily in itself redemptive: O'Hara's redemption came through Eros, the linguistic and the lusty, as an adaptive strategy for a chaotic and irrational universe. (After all, in "On Personism" he disdained the moral impulse of poetry, proclaiming, "improve them for what, for death?") His romance with the irrational, his love of the dark ("you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do"), served as a primary trigger for his subjects.

For an ironic imagination like O'Hara's (whose stance often walks the thin line between playfulness and cleverness, sentimentality and posturing, openness and repression), tone drives the poems, the way music and story drive the ironies of a more formal poet like Philip Larkin. But O'Hara's Modernism and his connection with abstract expressionist painters and pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein (Marjorie Perloff's important early study of O'Hara, A Poet Among Painters, explores this connection) gave him license to translate painterly problems into poetry: so action paintings became poems in perpetual motion (accomplished by enjambments and long breathless sentences); tonal issues (dramatized by color in painting) were pursued with a broad range of dictions; and, like many postmodern texts and paintings that would follow him, O'Hara made use of Lichtenstein's comic book studies and Rothko's somber abstractions, blurring the lines between high and low culture. One O'Hara poem can include hamburgers and malteds and Genet and Verlaine. As he demonstrated ironically in "Why I am Not a Painter," he painted with words the way Mike Goldberg made words with paint. He enacted in his verbs the principles of action painting: " I go," time "goes by"; he dramatized and distorted the temporal (all action takes place in the eternal present, the same kind of space occupied in Pollock's paintings). In the processes of coming and going, of foregoing intention and subject for associative freedoms, O'Hara found mirrors in modern poetry and modern art. Those critics who think of O'Hara as a poet of personality (if that term means anything it reflects the diction and syntax of what some critics call "voice") fall for his jejune self-mythologizing as a spontaneous poet (he makes clear in his letters the limits of surrealist techniques like automatic writing) who reports and types up whatever comes into his head.

In O'Hara's signature poem, "The Day Lady Died," the almost breathless last four lines give the illusion that the reader and writer arrive at the closure at the same time. The poem ends with a flashback, though, so the present tense, insisted on from the first line, just like time itself, is a willful fiction. The speaker's passionate connection with Billie Holiday is ecstatic, transforming time and space while altering the self and the speaker's sense of identity. Art leaves us breathless: its intimate connections prove to be simultaneously exciting and dangerous: they not only bring us closer to feeling but also expose us to the danger of contingency and loss, expressed in the poem in terms of destabilizing time, space, and identity: intimacy touches and breaks the heart. The experience is both communal and isolating (consciousness attenuates and abstracts). All of these matters are foreshadowed in the speaker's restlessness: he thrives because of his friendships, his feeling for art and other artists. But the world of feeling is at odds with the counter desire of the poem: the speaker's attempts to thwart and defer uncertainty and contingency keep him dislocated and existentially alone. His anxiety is expressed in his exactitude about time and date, in specificity of book titles, and names. Every stanza begins with an assertion of these certainties (as it turns out, an evasion), and ends with those qualities effaced, diminished or dissolved. The stanzas end in strangeness and isolation because, in O'Hara's view, temporal experience by nature is always shifting, constantly moving. O'Hara, in his typically anti-effete fashion, talked about his "I do this I do that" poems because he was interested in action and gesture, but also, as a Modernist, he was keenly aware of movement. He was drawn to painters like Pollock, Klee and de Kooning because of their movement, color and composition. In most poems he embraced that movement as energetic and vitalizing, but in "The Day Lady Died," the loss of love and art takes away his capacity for sheer lightness and acceptance.