Carcanet Press - Frank O'Hara extra reading matter from The Lives of the Poets

FrankO'Hara (1926-1966)

AtHarvard, John Ashbery says, Frank O'Hara 'had a very sort of pugnacious andpugilistic look. He had a broken nose. He didn't look like a very cordialperson.' Ashbery got to know him properly a month before graduation. Theybecame friends in New York.

            Many people tend to get O'Harawrong, as a man, as a poet. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised inGrafton, Massachusetts. He served in the navy for two years, then went toHarvard where he took a degree in Music. After graduate school, in 1951 hesettled in New York and took a job with the Museum of Modern Art. His lifebecame New York and the art scene of the time, Willem De Kooning, Franz Klineand Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionists. He was an editorial associateof Art News. In 1960 he became assistant curator of the Museum of ModernArt. He was killed on Fire Island in an accident with a beech buggy, struckdown in the early hours of 24 July in the dark on the dunes.

            He was casual about his poems: it'snot that he didn't value them, but he didn't worry much about them after theywere complete. He could be scruulous but was not always too concerned about thefinal text. The editor of the posthumous Collected Poems found more thanfive hundred (others have been added since), many previously unpublished. Whatmattered to O'Hara was the writing of them. He published only four collections,none of them with 'leading' publishing houses. He preferred to work withgalleries, as though the poems were entries in an exhibition catalogue, anexhibition made of daily life.

            In ‘Notes on Second Avenue',appended to his longest and most ambitious poem, he rejects theories of poetry:‘I have a feeling that the philosophical reduction of reality to adealable-with system so distorts life that one’s “reward” for the endeavour (aminor one at that) is illness both from inside and from outside.’ His poems arebusy in the world; they haven't no inclination to stand back and preach or toinvent monstrous forms.

He is the most New York of the New York poets. Heexperiments with prose poems, mixtures of prose and verse, complicating formalchoices, with Williamsesque lineation here, a touch of Auden there where heexperiments with sonnets, or ridiculises Wyatt, or apostrophises friends, orcelebrates. There is Jane Freilicher, whom he watches as a painter would watchhis models and portrays in a hundred postures and gestures. At no point does hedisguise his sexual imagination. He doesn't foreground it, either. His camp isa natural manner, less refined than in Firbank's, less crafted, more off thecuff.

            The characters in his city arepoets, painters, editors, arts administrators, delicatessen people,booksellers. He calls God ‘The Finger’ and has dubious and riotous thoughtsabout him. As he develops, the poems experiment with ‘painterly’ approaches,the cubism of language. He reifies language. Words fit things andperiods and attitudes, and it is getting that fit, for descriptive or ironicpurposes, that interests O’Hara. There are grand poems about big and littlethemes, lightly ironised, and then the larger ironies of the mature work, whereheartbreak and laughter hold hands.

            ‘Pain always produces logic, whichis very bad for you’, O'Hara warns us. Authority produces logic, too, perhapsbecause it produces pain. Legitimacy produces logic. And logic is invariablyreductive and constraining, leading to rules and programmes and building theprison house. ‘I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most loftyideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re justideas.’

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Frank O'Hara extra reading matter from The Lives of the Poets