Selected Poems Frank O 39;hara

[Claribel Szwaja]

Goldberg did in fact make an abstract painting with the word Sardines written on it as the title. Two other poems written at Harvard--the "Poems," beginning "At night Chinamen jump" and "The eager note on my door"--although among his earliest and having the same daring imagery as the surrealist poems, are exceptional as well for their narrative and dramatic poise. They remain among his finest, and he readily included them in later collections. Following his four years in Cambridge, O'Hara went to the University of Michigan on the advice of John Ciardi, his creative-writing teacher at Harvard, to compete in the Hopwood Awards, winning an award in writing for his manuscript "A Byzantine Place" and his verse play Try! Try! (later produced by the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which he helped found). He missed the activity of New York and returned in 1951, working briefly as private secretary to photographer Cecil Beaton and then at the Museum of Modern Art. During this period the New York School took its distinct shape, the name parodying, according to poet Edwin Denby who was there, the School of Paris, "which also originated as a joke in opposition to the School of Florence and the School of Venice." O'Hara himself describes the milieu in a memoir of the painter Rivers: "We were all in our early twenties. John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and I, being poets, divided our time between the literary bar, the San Remo, and the artists' bar, the Cedar Tavern. In the San Remo we argued and gossiped: in the Cedar we often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue and gossip. . . . An interesting sidelight to these social activities was that for most of us non-academic and indeed non-literary poets in the sense of the American scene at the time, the painters were the only generous audience for our poetry, and most of us read first publicly in art galleries or at The Club. The literary establishment cared about as much for our work as the Frick cared for Pollock and TX O'Hara's poems at this time were still heavily surrealistic, as exemplified by "Memorial Day 1950," "Chez Jane," and "Easter," which prefigured the more ambitious Second Avenue (1960) with its catalogue of random juxtapositions. In "Easter" the images are fully nonreferential, or referential to their own reality alone: "The razzle dazzle maggots are summary / tattooing my simplicity on the pitiable." Only the accustomed syntactic structures prevail--subjects, predicates, clauses--supporting the progression that becomes a tramp of alien, autonomous images over an otherwise familiar bridge. When the images expand out, however, and a narrative occurs, as in "A Terrestrial Cuckoo" from this same time, the results are delightfully comic:

This is O'Hara at his best, combining his voice and personality with the most far-flung word montages."

Among the early poems, Second Avenue, in eleven parts, is easily the most ambitious. It was written in the spring of 1953 but not published in book form until 1960. The artist Rivers recalls how this "long marvelous poem" was written in his "plaster garden studio overlooking" the avenue of the title, with the poet finishing it between poses for a sculpture Rivers was making of him. Koch, who also had some role in the poem's composition, finds it "among the wonders of contemporary poetry," and Albert Cook, the first of the academics to recognize O'Hara, finds it "too perfect of its kind, which it has invented, to induce anyone's strictures." Most readers, however, have found difficulty with it. Perloff calls it O'Hara's "most Byzantine and difficult poem," while even Ashbery in his introduction to the Collected Poems speaks of "the obfuscation that makes reading 'Second Avenue' such a difficult pleasure." O'Hara sensed some of the difficulties and later offered a few thoughts concerning the poem in a letter to a reader or editor who had apparently found it obscure. In his letter he identifies some of the components, including a derisive portrait of "a poetry critic and teacher," a description of painter Hartigan at work, and "a true description of not being able to continue this poem and meeting Kenneth Koch for a sandwich while waiting for the poem to start again." He also insists: "actually everything in it either happened to me or I felt happening (saw, imagined) on Second Avenue"--even though the landscape is neither recognizable nor significant on its own terms. Koch writes elsewhere that the poem "is evidence that the avant-garde style of French poetry from Baudelaire to Reverdy has now infiltrated American consciousness to such an extent that it is possible for an American poet to write lyrically in it with perfect ease," although when he states that the language of the poem resembles William Carlos Williams's in being "convincing and natural," nothing could be further from accuracy. Koch also suggests the chief persona of the poem is "a sort of Whitmanian I," though this is hardly discoverable. Rivers's painting Second Avenue (1958) needs to be mentioned as well."

Second Avenue is a poem of brilliant excess and breakneck inventiveness, beginning: "Quips and players, seeming to vend astringency off-hours, / celebrate diced excesses and sardonics, mixing pleasures, / as if proximity were staring at the margin of the plea. . . ." This is language in love with itself. The poem is dedicated to Mayakovsky, one of O'Hara's great heroes (though an early draft is inscribed to de Kooning), and certainly the images throughout are as wide-ranging and as startling as Mayakovsky's, but they arrive more rapidly and with less continuity, jostling for attention, a bewildering mixture. Moreover, they do not have Mayakovsky's large, carrying, unifying voice. O'Hara himself explained: "where Mayakovsky and de Kooning come in, is that they both have done works as big as cities where the life in the work is autonomous (not about actual city life) and yet similar." Here the result is a highly mosaic-like, patterned surface. "The verbal elements," by the poet's own insistence, "are extended consciously to keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious." But it is perhaps the most difficult of all accomplishments in art, the texture of surface appearance. "Perhaps," O'Hara continues, "the obscurity comes in here, in the relationship between the surface and the meaning, but I like it that way since the one is the other (you have to use words) and I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it." At this point O'Hara began adapting the processes of surrealism to the conception of poetic form founded on the idea that the poem is an enactment of the actuality of perception and the realization of thinking. The achievement of a form, then, which was also the imperative of Abstract Expressionism, brought O'Hara into the creative ambience of the painters."

This last statement is, in effect, a succinct definition of nonrepresentational art--and in that sense, Second Avenue is an embodiment of the techniques of Abstract Expressionism, the series of strokes that in their totality alone completes a form. There is a cinematic "sleet" of images, colored vaguely by the city's lights and shapes glimpsed from the window on Second Avenue, falling with such rapidity that the dissolves occur before the gestalt-making powers of the mind can focus them. These images are, in the words of the poem, "diced essences"--sharply cut and full of chance. "Butter. Lotions. Cries. A glass of ice. Aldebaran and Mizar, / a guitar of toothpaste tubes and fingernails, trembling spear"--they are hardly full-bodied; rather they are subliminal phantoms, too fleeting even for associations. The poem projects intense energy as it enacts the process of motion, of the eye and the mind moving on and around the urban scene. The area described, the canvas of the poem, is huge, and without a guiding narrator; the poem attempts to allow chance events, the random thought and image, to enter the design. This is a large poem to maintain without a narrator; but, on the other hand, the situation removes the ego of the poem from the process of the poem and then allows a multitude of gestures to run in at all points. It could be called an "action poem." Like Pollock, who created a procedure of entering the field of action of the painting, O'Hara creates the illusion that he has entered the process of writing to such an extent that the surface details in all their seeming discontinuity actually constitute the form of the poem itself. The generation of an idea of form in the poem, then, becomes much more important than a doctrine of composition or a sermon about city life. When the Surrealists left Europe for America just before and during World War II, they injected Surrealism into American poetry and painting. O'Hara's poem of 1953 is the leading example of an attempt to install the European model in contemporary writing, but as Koch writes in his review of The Collected Poems in the New Republic: "For all their use of chance and unconsciousness, Frank O'Hara's poems are unlike Surrealist poetry in that they do not programmatically favor these forces (along with dreams and violence) over the intellectual and conscious. He must have felt the beauty and power of unconscious phenomena in surrealist poems, but what he does is to use this power and beauty to ennoble, complicate, and simplify waking actions." The poem might be said to be, in light of the manner of composition and success of the later poems, overworked, trying too hard to assert the mode of composition. One need only compare the "Poem" beginning "Now the violets are all gone, the rhinoceroses, the cymbals"--the same catalogue of disparate objects--to see how, when the personality takes over, a true, more shareable lyricism flowers. Perloff wisely points out that when the two strands are merged--the surrealistic, with its endless variety and high-spirited inventiveness, and the personal, the spoken American, the colloquial narrative with its charming persona--O'Hara attains his triumph."

As long as the succession of rapid-fire discontinuous images does not extend beyond tolerance, and, further, when there is some attempt to relate those images to an order of reality beyond themselves, O'Hara's surrealism works. In "On Rachmaninoff's Birthday," beginning "Quick! a last poem before I go / off my rocker," the final line-- "You'll never be mentally sober"--comments on the previous assortment of images and relates to the initial "I," rounding out the poem while adding a dimension of self-reflection and conscious control to an otherwise indulgent randomness. (This is just one of seven poems O'Hara wrote for the Russian composer's birthday over the years.) Or where the images are consistent, added to with like elements, as in "Romanze, or the Music Students," beginning:"

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