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Frank O'Hara's Process Poems
Frank O'Hara's Process Poems
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Mark Silverberg
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Mark Silverberg
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Mark Silverberg
rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, or
express an object [] What was to go on the canvas was not
a picture but an event. (Rosenberg 1959: 25)
Rosenberg takes pains to explain that this painting should not be read
as a psychologically-oriented autobiography of the person but a
process-oriented transcription of the moment. Nonetheless, it is clear
that what is enacted on the canvas is an identity that precedes the
moment of expression thats why, particularly for Pollock or
DeKooning, the persona of the painter is so important to the quality of
the painting. OHaras I do this, I do that poems are similarly
performative events of the poets daily life, chronicles of personality
in process. It is the action of OHaras life and the movement of his
body that both inspires his poetry and constitutes its subject. The
poems enact Franks lunchtime strolls from his MoMA office on West
53rd to restaurants, bookstores, artists studios, nightclubs, parties,
movies, concerts, and other favourite spots. However, unlike the
Abstract Expressionists gesture or for that matter the selfrevelatory, confessional gestures of a Robert Lowell or Anne Sexton
OHaras poems are not portraits of a stable identity (an identity
which precedes writing), but rather postmodern studies of identity in
action/through language. OHaras is a performative self which exists
contingently in the time span of the lunch hour and the space between
West 53rd St. and Times Square (in this case).
As with Rauschenberg, neither art (the poem) nor life (the I)
is already made; both are in the process of becoming. The poem is in
large part about its own becoming the way it generates itself as it
goes along. What is interesting in OHara, contra Lowell or Sexton, is
not a sense of psychological depth (an identity anterior to the poem)
but a vibrancy of painterly surface, a surface which is both poem and
identity, art and life. Readers follow the poems and the poets
progress through a variety of routes. For example, we are offered an
excursus on the colour yellow (from the hot sun and the yellow
helmets, through the hum-coloured cabs, to the final glass of papaya
juice); we journey through a variety of textures (glistening torsos,
blowing smoke, falling water, ticking clocks); and, as the last item
suggests, we experience a brisk meditation on fleeting time (from the
passing of the lunch hour to the passing of friends). Whatever
personality readers may find in OHara (a poet who made
Personism not Personality his central credo) is mitigated by the
works high level of stylisation. This can be seen, for example, in
OHaras grammatical awkwardness: in his frequent use of misplaced
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While this early attempt reads more like bad A.A. Milne than typical
OHara, what we are witnessing is the makings of an important
strategy for transforming a poem into an event by presenting it as a
communal journey (between two persons instead of two pages). It
took some time for OHara to find more sophisticated and convincing
ways of bringing readers into the poem, but with Lunch Poems like
A Step Away from Them, The Day Lady Died, or Personal
Poem (1959) he had succeeded.
Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
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Mark Silverberg
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion
but now Im happy for a time and interested
I walk through the luminous humidity . . .
(Personal Poem, OHara 1995: 335)
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the gap between life and art seriously. Instead, he plays with the
possibility, thematising it in almost all his work: holding out
reconciliation with one hand only to withdraw it with the other.
OHaras life is everywhere and nowhere in the work; he is
constantly and enticingly deferred. His whole oeuvre might be better
seen as our pursuit of rather than our acquaintance with OHara, a
figure whose compelling presence presages its equally effective
absence.
The final trope of A Step Away From Them, the book of poems
in the pocket, can be read as a metaphor for the OHara authorfunction not the person but the existence, circulation, and
operation of the authors name in the poems (Foucault 1977: 124).
The figure offers the poets heart (itself a synecdoche for the
author), but concealed. Rather than on his sleeve, his heart is in his
pocket: we know where it is, but we cant quite reach it. Moreover,
OHaras heart is not quite his heart. The heart, that is, the
transcendental signified (meaning, soul, presence) is persistently
deferred. Its vehicle, appropriately, is Poems, but more troublingly
these poems are by somebody else so that the author/heart is no
longer self-identical. This last gesture (the sudden introduction of
Reverdy) stages another level of deferral by a poet who is always
hiding in plain sight, a poet who refuses to settle on art or life but
persistently works in the open gap between the two:
MY HEART
Im not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I dont prefer one strain to another
Id have the immediacy of a bad movie
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says Thats
not like Frank!, all to the good! I
dont wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart
you cant plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.
(O Hara 1995: 231)
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Mark Silverberg
Works Cited
Altieri, Charles
1979
Ashbery, John.
1989
Foucault, Michel.
1977
What is an Author? (tr. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon)
in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews (ed. Donald F. Bouchard). New York: Cornell UP:
113-138.
Lehman, David.
1998
Jackson Pollock
1990
.
Murphy, Richard.
1999
Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the
Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
OHara, Frank.
1995
Perloff, Marjorie
1977
Rosenberg, Harold
1959
The American Action Painters in The Tradition of the New.
New York: Horizon Press: 23-39.
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Rauschenberg, Robert
1996
Robert Rauschenberg Untitled Statement in Stiles, Kristin and
Peter Selz (eds) Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists
Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press: 321.
Schjeldahl, Peter
1981
Silverberg, Mark
2003
Zinnes, Harriet
1990