Imperial Poet: The dumb heart finds no neighbor to kill its rising fever

 

A number of weeks ago, I wrote a brief post about Frank O’Hara and included two of my favorite poems. I didn’t know at the time that there was a newly edited Selected Poems, or that the volume had been reviewed by William Logan in The New York Times Book Review. (I parenthetically confess to not reading the NYTBR…and will blogh about that decision another time).

 

Logan’s review is for the most part condescending and dismissive. He says what I might have said at one point, that O’Hara is a one-off, a poet of style and dash who, except for here and there, doesn’t hold up. He sees his art as ephemeral, chatty, composed of this and that, on the fly, without deliberation or effort. A poetry so composed would necessarily be trivial, as superficial as the objects and sensations it names. Most people conceive of poetry as an art of almost endless depth, mysteries of existence expressed in dark symbols and metaphors in need of exploration and explication. These poems, like Pop Art, have no depth at all. Except in the handful of poems where he makes it work (according to a certain line of thinking), O’Hara is a curiosity, a light comic poet capturing the effervescent inconsequentiality of a moment in New York. This supposed lack of depth, this insistent clowning of his, combined with long surreal poems (such as Second Avenue), is precisely what makes him so attractive to the avant-garde, what marks him as one of the prime sires (along with Zukofsky, Olson and Gertrude Stein) of LangPo.

 

I don’t think O’Hara deserves the condescension of the review. Moreover, it fails to take seriously the aesthetic of Pop Art, of the surface. That aesthetic may have arisen in painting, but it certainly has a place in poetry, though a problematic one I admit. And I agree that O’Hara wrote too much, or that too much of what he wrote has been published, and that the many poets who knew him or were influenced by him have been more adept at imitating and celebrating the manner and not the substance. Poets like O’Hara are deadly to other poets. Just consider the insipid poetasting of Ted Berrigan. But it is when you compare him to other poets of his generation that his great strengths begin to emerge. He is a poet of highly sophisticated taste and style, and he is celebrating a moment in American history that was itself ephemeral. The poetry in fact has long out-lived it.

 

O’Hara doesn’t resemble any American poet before him really. Hart Crane perhaps, and Whitman in the obvious ways. There are echoes, highly conscious, usually parodic, of Pound and Williams, and he had read Olson’s Projective Verse. But you have to go to the French of the 19^th century, to Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Jarry; to the Paris of the de Goncourt brothers; or to the European avant-garde art of the early 20^th Century, Apollinaire, Cendrars and Mayakovsky (in particular), to get the flavor of O’Hara. And I actually think you have to go much farther back than that, to Rome. He is more like Catullus, Ovid, or Propertius than Stevens, Pound or Eliot. He is the poet of the American Empire, writing out of the Imperial Center, New York, about his fellow New Yorkers. At no prior point in our history could this have happened. The streets, the color of our hard hats and cabs, ‘the blab of the pave’ were suddenly not provincial concerns. He doesn’t need to proclaim that he is singing the song of himself, of a new country with its own Art. O’Hara has nothing to prove.  He can quite comfortably and quite simply BE. Here is a famous O’Hara poem, of the I-Do-This-I-Do-That variety. It is certainly Pop Art. The images are either stolen from famous photographs (the dress on the grate) or are graphic representations of graphic art and brand names:

 

 

A STEP AWAY FROM THEM

It’s my lunch hour, so I go

for a walk among the hum-colored

cabs. First, down the sidewalk

where laborers feed their dirty

glistening torsos sandwiches

and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets

on. They protect them from falling

bricks, I guess. Then onto the

avenue where skirts are flipping

above heels and blow up over

grates. The sun is hot, but the

cabs stir up the air. I look

at bargains in wristwatches. There

are cats playing in sawdust.

                                          On

to Times Square, where the sign

blows smoke over my head, and higher

the waterfall pours lightly. A

Negro stands in a doorway with a

toothpick, languorously agitating.

A blonde chorus girl clicks: he

smiles and rubs his chin. Everything

suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of

a Thursday.

                   Neon in daylight is a

great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would

write, as are light bulbs in daylight.

I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S

CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of

Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice.

And chocolate malted. A lady in

foxes on such a day puts her poodle

in a cab.

             There are several Puerto

Ricans on the avenue today, which

makes it beautiful and warm. First

Bunny died, then John Latouche,

then Jackson Pollock. But is the

earth as full as life was full, of them?

And one has eaten and one walks,

past the magazines with nudes

and the posters for BULLFIGHT and

the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,

which they’ll soon tear down. I

used to think they had the Armory

Show there.

                   A glass of papaya juice

and back to work. My heart is in my

pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

 Pop Art? Yes. Surface? Yes. But it asks a pertinent, poetic question:

 First

Bunny died, then John Latouche,

then Jackson Pollock. But is the

earth as full as life was full, of them?

And one has eaten and one walks, 

 

 

Bunny Lang was a dear friend of O’Hara’s. He was gay, but he loved Bunny almost to distraction.

  

The review begins with the sentence “Death is often a good career move in poetry.” And it is impossible to think about O’Hara without wondering what he might have done had he lived beyond the age of 40, or how his death affected his reception. One thing that didn’t live was the Imperium. With the assassination of Kennedy (an event not, to my mind, referred to by O’Hara; he was out of the country at the time, in Prague, an intriguing detail), the world O’Hara so passionately chronicled, and for which his peculiar sensibility was so uniquely suited, ended. How would O’Hara have fit in the late sixties and early 70’s? I can’t imagine him dressed in a dashiki and beads, with long hair and a beard, chanting to end the war in Vietnam. He would have had to live into our own time of escapism and peril to feel at home again.

 

I think there are other facets, even depths to O’Hara that are easy to miss in this kind of reading. Two are referred to in the review: one, that O’Hara was engaged in a sort of Urban Pastoral: “The poems describe an urban pastoral where no one has a real job, where martinis flow like nectar and where the days of Elysium are marked by the arrival of a new issue of New World Writing.” In this reading, O’Hara et al are like Frank and Sammy and Dino! The other point touches upon the fact that he was writing about gay life at a time when few others were: “(O’Hara wrote about homosexual life with a cheerful nonchalance rarely matched since; Allen Ginsberg by contrast was slightly lugubrious about sex).” It is worth considering what being a gay poet in the fifties meant or was like. As far as I know Auden’s homosexuality was carefully coded in his poems. Gay poets of the fifties, despite being stylistically radically different from him, looked to Auden. They could read between the lines, and of course he was living and drinking in New York (there are two amazing books documenting Auden’s conversation: Howard Griffin’s Conversations with Auden, which is a high-minded discussion of Shakespeare, largely, and Alan Ansen’s Table Talk of W.H. Auden, which is a hilarious, bitchy book of low talk and gossip, with much wine). Then comes a poem like Howl. Ginsberg writes about sex in rebellion and every sex act is an iconic act of liberation, of naming the unnamable, whereas O’Hara seems to take for granted that being gay is NORMAL. This is astonishing, and relates to his pastoral vision in that, given where and when he is writing, the pastoral is a major achievement, an act of vision in defiance of reality. O’Hara’s upbringing had to be horrendously homophobic, as were all of our childhoods, to this day in most of the country. The spotty reading I’ve done in Brad Gooch’s City Poet indicates that his life in Grafton, MA was difficult in all the ways a provincial life is to a major artist. Yet he just writes about himself and his friends as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if Americans had been dashing off witty, gay, urban verse for centuries, as if there were a tradition of this. There is a stanza in Biotherm (For Bill Berkson) a late poem (and one that is used as an example of O’Hara’s silliness in the review) where he overhears someone on a train:

 

then too, the other day I was walking through a train
with my suitcase and I overheard someone say “speaking of faggots”
now isn’t life difficult enough without that
and why am I always carrying something
well it was a shitty looking person anyway
better a faggot than a farthead

 

I seem to recall (forgive my shoddy squalorship) Marjorie Perloff quoting the first, painful part of this stanza in her book Poet Among Painters, but leaving out the embarrassing last two lines, which, charitably read, respond to the word ‘faggot’ with an equally puerile one. Either that or O’Hara is willing to be both childish and funny in a way that is totally inassimilable to ‘serious’ art. With O’Hara you will always get a little Dada. At no point in O’Hara’s career will the reader find him making art that courts a ‘mature’, academic or establishment audience. It accounts for the reams of uninteresting verbal doodles, and the stunning poems which should define him as a poet.

 

A third facet, not in the review at all, is what I want to call O’Hara’s emotional sophistication. This more than anything sets him apart both from the main modernist tradition and from many, if not all, of his contemporaries, and accounts partly for his continuing popularity. The founding mullahs of modernism issued their fatwas against personal emotion in poetry and O’Hara’s generation inherited the bias. They responded by either adopting a tone of ironic detachment (the New York School) or veering off into expressionistic emotional excess, where the individual makes a return as a mad neurotic, destroyed by parents or society (Roethke, Ginsberg et al). They also inherited from their forebears an aesthetic commitment to the impersonal in art. Modernists framed this as an opposition to Romanticism and it was in that sense neo-classical. But there is nothing unemotional about classical poetry, even if it is in no way confessional or personal in today’s terms. The fact is that in O’Hara’s poems, even in single lines, there are many gradations of emotion; he writes with a detailed, nuanced emotional vocabulary. These lines are from For Grace, After a Party: “You do not always know what I am feeling…I was blazing my tirade….it was love for you that set me afire….in rooms full of strangers my most tender feelings writhe and bear the fruit of screaming…someone you love enters the room….”

 

O’Hara is certainly ironic in every imaginable way but there is a dark, emotional, turbulent current running through all of his poetry and against the image casual readers apparently have of him. When I was starting to write this post I turned to my collected edition and on page after page found the poignant, melancholy, carefully written poems that so mesmerized me when I was young. Perhaps his image of lightheartedness arises from the way in which he has been anthologized, and from the prejudice against genuine, naked emotion still harboured by the PhD poets of our time who command the abandoned bulwarks of the avant-garde and define how experimental writing is taught and read.

I selected two poems to demonstrate what I mean in this post. Here is one of them:

 

BERDIE

 

It has suddenly rained

on Second Avenue and

we are thinking of you

as the small thoughts of

the rain drum on tin

and soot runs down the

windows we always do

in the rain it’s no more

different than the rain

you went there honorably as

stone becomes sand and

the sad shore falls

into the unwilling sea

 

This is just what life is like now. There is nothing frufru about this, it is a somber, beautiful poem. The only enjambment comes as the poem makes its emotional turn: “windows we always do/in the rain it’s no more/different than the rain” for it is after this that it becomes evident that this is not a sad poem about a rainy afternoon on Second Avenue, but a poem addressed to someone who has died. I wondered who this person could be. O’Hara was in the war, on an aircraft carrier in the pacific. Surely he was haunted by the experience of so much death. Several nights after transcribing this poem I was reading his essay Larry Rivers: A Memoir, (another artist I had foolishly come to dismiss over the years) and read this paragraph:

 

“His mother-in-law, Mrs. Bertha Burger, was [his] most frequent subject. She was called Berdie by everyone, a woman of infinite patience and sweetness, who held together a bohemian household of such staggering complexity it would have driven a less great woman mad.  She had a natural grace of temperament which overcame all obstacles and irritations. (During her fatal illness she confessed to me she had once actually disliked two of Larry’s friends because they had been ‘mean’ to her grandsons, and this apologetically!) She appears in every period: early Soutinesque painting with a cat; at an impressionistic breakfast table; in the semi-abstract paintings of her seated in a wicker chair; as the double nude, very realistic, now in the collection of the Whitney Museum; in the later The Athlete’s Dream, which she especially enjoyed because I posed with her and it made her less self-conscious if she was in a painting with a friend; she is also all the figures in the Museum of Modern Art’s great painting The Pool. Her gentle interestedness extended beyond her own family to everyone who frequented the house, in a completely incurious way. Surrounded by painters and poets suddenly in mid-life, she had an admirable directness in aesthetic decisions: ‘it must be very good work, he’s such a wonderful person.’ Considering the polemics of the time, this was not only a relaxing attitude, it was an adorable one. For many of us her death was as much the personal end of a period as Pollock’s death was that of a public one.”

 

I could, and would love to, quote this entire essay. It conveys the sense of his intelligence and grace. Most of his comments about his friend Larry Rivers’ paintings would apply equally to his own. It is easy to miss this kind of gentlemanly sophistication entirely. It restores to life and poetry something the avant-garde had deliberately robbed from them when it tore away at bourgeois sentimentality. And I don’t deny the need to have done so or to continue doing so. O’Hara is no less experimental or avant-garde for it either. I think what he establishes here is that the counter culture, the avant-garde, are not simply antithetical, not simply rejections of the way things are, but rather a way of living and loving, a positive value in the world, one not in need of defense. It is our true sanity.

 

LOVE

 

To be lost

the stars go out a broken chair

is red in the dark a faint lust

stirs like a plant in the creased rain

 

 

where the gloom

swells into odor

like earth in the moon

 

 

lightness the arrow ears its sigh of depth and its sorrows

of snow

 

Here we have love, lust, gloom, odor, and sorrows. Is it sentimental? Perhaps. “a faint lust/stirs like a plant in the creased rain”… “the arrow ears its sigh of depth” I don’t know of any finer poetry than this. I forgive him his sentimentality.

 

In Homage to Frank O’Hara his closest friends and colleagues consistently mention all that I have mentioned here. Ashbery in an interview talks about how broad O’hara’s talent is, how varied, how it bridges entire schools and contains multitudes. This poem, one I have always loved, infuses the I-Do-This formula with lyrical beauty:

 

MUSIC          

 

        If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian

pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,

that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s

and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.

Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.

I have in my hands only 35¢, it’s so meaningless to eat!

and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves

like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you

to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world,

      I must tighten my belt.

It’s like a locomotive on the march, the season

      of distress and clarity

and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter’s

lightly falling snow over the newspapers.

Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet

of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.

As they’re putting, up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue

I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,

put to some use before all those coloured lights come on!

      But no more fountains and no more rain,

      and the stores stay open terribly late.

 

 This changes the way I see Manhattan. “and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves/like the hammers of a glass pianoforte”

 

 These thoughts have been knocking around my head for years, ever since the day I realized that I had misjudged O’Hara, that I had stopped reading him and in the time I had stopped reading him he ceased being the living poet I knew and became a poet much like Logan describes in his review. It was one of many revelations O’Hara has given me over the years. One hot day in June (it was 1994) I went for a run in Central Park. I started out from Maja’s apartment on York Avenue and 91^st Street and by the time I got to Second Avenue I was sweaty and disgusted, dodging pedestrians and traffic, leaping past shitting dogs and over garbage bags. Even guys hosing down the pavement pissed me off. It was a typical New York mood, one of agitation, impatience and contempt. And that is the reality of New York. New Yorkers are not just always on the move, they are always on the verge of moving. Not even the monumental buildings between Madison and Fifth could assuage this mood of mine; they actually made it worse, as the city’s wealth and power fed the spiritual indictment my angry heart was scribbling out in my brain. But then I entered the park and got on the track. There was dappled shade and trees and water and the temperature dropped.  And here, on the cinder track around the reservoir, the entire oecumene of our empire was gathered, in a motley band of runners. This was no team, and there was no plan other than the pressure of a circle and people moving in a single direction, like a school of minnows or a flock of geese. And they were all there, all the city’s inhabitants, all of America. The fresh air and the people, the sun on the choppy water, the view of the west side skyline with its tragic Dakota, induced in me a quiet joy. These were my people. The city which had five minutes before been infernal was resurrected in my sight and I knew it. And as I was having my epiphany I thought, this is the city of Frank O’Hara. This is the city he saw. And I realized that O’Hara was in this sense a pastoral poet. O’Hara wrote in the fifties and early sixties. At that time the air was filthy. The streets were violent. There was garbage everywhere. People didn’t pick up after their dogs. There were no emission controls on cars. More soot, more dog shit, more muggings, more garbage and more people. But you would never know this from an O’Hara poem. Those poems, which seem so breathlessly real, subtly transform the city into this beautiful City of God. It was our Imperial moment, and O’Hara, living and writing when he did, is the great poet of that Imperium, reading the poets of Ghana, having lunch with his friends, watching the Bolshoi Ballet, playing Rachmaninoff. He is a poet of the surface, but it is a rushing surface full of the thickness of life, not just a cascade of superficial images and sensations. His subject is himself, but like the Joycean subject it is a self through which everything pours.