"And Everyone and I Stopped Breathing": William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, and the News of the Day in Verse

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2003 by Cappucci, Paul R

You could have closed the door

when you came in;

do it when you go out.

I'm tired. (52-55)

Robitza's curt dismissal and command to close the door ultimately displays her power. In fact, since her voice is the only one heard, she has, in a way, dominated him. "Williams presents," according to Barry Ahearn, "a woman of the social class without resort to cliche or stereotyped form" (25). Although this point is debatable, such a poem marks Williams's capacity to discover the newsworthy quality in his subject. He moves beyond the surface to represent a poor woman who in her own voice-that "profound language"-reveals the unspoken limitations of the American Dream.

As a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Frank O'Hara obviously did not access the news in the same way as did Williams. He failed to walk the back streets of northern New Jersey or enter the "secret gardens" of working class patients. He lived in the city and wrote about its hurried streets and people. Instead of foregoing the popular news items of the day, O'Hara parodies Williams and incorporates these headlines into his verse. Yet through this approach, he still manages to express the profundity Williams demanded.

Despite his different approach to the news, O'Hara enjoyed Williams's poetry. In "Personism," he declares Williams to be the only living American poet better than the movies. All phases of Williams's work appealed to O'Hara. In a July 1959 letter to his friend Jasper Johns, he writes, "You said you liked PATERSON; all the books of WCW have great great great things in them. I don't believe he ever wrote an uninteresting poem; the prose poems KORA IN HELL have recently been reprinted and are very good, interesting because very early and ambitious" (qtd. in Perloff 45). O'Hara's comment to Johns is very telling-in particular, mentioning the improvisational prose poem Kora in Hell shows his attraction to Williams's experiments with form and language. As Marjorie Perloff points out, this work, along with Williams' s early short poems, influenced O'Hara, specifically in regard to his use of short lines, line breaks, and colloquial language (45).

Although Williams certainly influenced the younger poet, O'Hara refused to mimic or imitate, to become merely another one of what he calls the "WC Williams-ites" (Perloff 45). In his poem "To a Poet," with its echo of "The Wanderer" and Williams's "rococo self," O'Hara reverses Williams's well-known phrase from Paterson-"No ideas but in things": "and when the doctor comes to / me he says 'No things but in ideas'" (20-21). O'Hara certainly focuses on the "things" of his locale, but he does so from a different perspective. His poems, particularly those of the "I do this, I do that" variety, offer a panoramic view of the objects he encounters. James Breslin identifies this central distinction between O'Hara and Williams:

Williams slows us down and concentrates our attention on both the object and the words representing it; his poems present isolated images arrested in an empty space. The object has been lifted out of the temporal flux and preserved in 'eternal moment.' But O'Hara's observations are not grasped and eternalized in this way. . . . What is preserved in O'Hara is precisely this fleeting, ever-changing experience of temporal process itself. (218)