David Kaufmann

Frank O’Hara’s Timing

I think our sense of timing’s
the most important thing
O’Hara taught us
don’t you Ken?
                     — John Forbes (“thin ice”)

Frank and I happened to be in Paris at the same time in the summer of 1960… And I had located the “bateau lavoir” where Picasso and Max Jacob had first lived and where they had held all those studio parties with Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin. And across the street was a very good restaurant. I suggested that we have lunch there, our party included Grace Hartigan and her husband at the time, Robert Keene. We had a “marvelous’ lunch, much wine and talk and we all congratulated ourselves on being in Paris and moreover being in Paris at the same time… After lunch I suggested that we cross the street to the “bateau lavoir.” A discovery of mine and one I thought would intrigue Frank. Not at all. He did go across the street, but he didn’t bother to go into the building. “Barbara,” he said, “that was their history and it doesn’t interest me. What does interest me is ours, and we’re making it now.”
                      — Barbara Guest

O’Hara tells us that poets go on their nerve and so his refusal to enter the “bateau lavoir” with Barbara Guest was reflexive, and like most reflexive acts, overdetermined. There is more than a touch of New York School chauvinism in his unwillingness to go further than the door. O’Hara was in Paris at this point to prepare the way for two MOMA shows — “New American Painting” and a Pollock exhibition — and so might have been feeling especially strongly that the torch had indeed passed both to a new city and to a new generation.[1] He had already expressed something of this sentiment in ‘Memorial Day’ of 1950, a poem that served as both a tribute to the great figures of modernism and an indication that they were in some aesthetic way quite dead.

O’Hara’s claim that he and his friends were making their own history expresses more than a soupçon of an existentialist pathos. This pathos, appropriate to Paris, runs through his poetry at this time (as in “Ode to Tanaquil Leclercq” from 1960: “the superb arc of a question, of a decision about death” [CP 364]). O’Hara’s loose appropriation of existentialist language and themes forms part of a larger project. His sense of history and ofhis place in it — a sense which he articulates in “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art” — has important implications for what his poetry does and doesn’t do. Not surprisingly, it all comes down to being modern, or rather O’Hara’s particular understanding of what being avant-garde might mean.

O’Hara’s notion of the artistic vanguard was hardly idiosyncratic. The avant-garde obviously banks on the future and so tries to live between times. It wants to speak on behalf of the future while counting on the future to justify it. In the process, it comes show the present as history. As Larry Rivers notes in his memoirs, “From 1950 on, Frank and I wrote stacks of letters to each other. wrote as if the committee that decides who goes down in history was looking over our shoulders at them (Rivers 232).

That committee was watching when Rivers set out to paint Washington Crossing the Delaware, and it was judging that work by distinctly modernist criteria, by its ability to be objectionable in a way that made it new. Rivers was quite clear about this. In an interview with O’Hara in 1959, he described his earlier self “energetic and egomaniacal and, what is even more important, cocky and angry enough to want to do something that no one in the New York art world could doubt was disgusting, dead, absurd(Art Chronicles -2). The strategy seems to have worked. He was laughed at at the Cedar Bar and called a phony (Art Chronicles112)

But not everyone saw the painting as a step back into a gimcrack realism. Rivers was no reactionary and saw the work as an expression of the new: “Like many younger artists, I took modern painting seriously: it would be experimental and show curiosity” (Rivers 312). When he claimed that Rivers was “a painter who embodies the revolution in new ways of seeing” (Rivers 312), James Thrall Soby, the curator who acquired the painting for the Museum of Modern Art was arguing that Rivers’ painting was the extension, not the revocation, of modernism. To make his position perfectly clear, Soby hung Washington Crossing the Delawarenext to work by Kline and Guston.

Like a number of Rivers’ contemporaries, literary critics have tended to take “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art” as a goof, as an ironic vision of the “Dear father of our country,” with “his nose / trembling like a flag under fire” (See inter alia, Perloff 93).This kind of reading often rests on O’Hara’s apparently bathetic assertion that we would want to be “more revolutionary than a nun,” because it evidently isn’t hard to be more radical than a nun. But it is. O’Hara tells us that ourdesire is “to be secular and intimate” (emphasis added). The “we” here is not the philistine patriot, but the artistic avant-garde. And our desire is for a complete secularity, a truly human history.

For O’Hara, that clearly means concentrating on action, on the “physical event”:

                                         Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding

on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract
the robot? they’re smoke, billows above
the physical event.

(‘On Seeing…”)

Our fears and abstractions dissolve in the face of the concrete and the physical. O’Hara equates that event with the “white freedom” that glints on the Washington’s flintlock as he shoots (again?) in the final stanza. The act is the embodiment of human freedom.

O’Hara depicts Washington as a real model, a real hero. He is not making fun of “beautiful history” of America’s revolutionary past. He is appropriating it just as Rivers had. Rivers claimed that he depicted a trembling Washington because he was interested not in Leutze’s icon of resolute courage, but in the sheer unpleasantness of Washington’s crossing: “ I saw the moment as nerve-wracking and uncomfortable. I couldn’t picture anyone getting into a chilly river around Christmas time with anything resembling hand-on-chest heroics” (Art Chronicles122). Like River’ painting, O’Hara’s poem underscores the moment, the experience of a winter crossing during a perilous retreat. He emphasizes that the whole enterprise is nothing more than a wager. O’Hara expresses this elsewhere, but never as definitively as in the last sentence of his catalogue essay on Pollock, where he writes that the painter was “an artist who was totally conscious of risk, defeat and triumph. He lived the first, defied the second, and achieved the last.” (Art Chronicles39). Such are the stations of existentialist (and of course capitalist) heroics: risk and ultimate triumph.

Of course, by taking as his examples Pollock, Rivers and Washington, O’Hara has stacked the deck. He has taken the risk out of risk because he only lists certified successes. But as O’Hara looks at his friend’s painting on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, he is witnessing two triumphs that have already taken place. The Revolution has indeed been won and the Museum of Modern Art has admitted Rivers to the modernist canon. The future — O’Hara’s present — has already ratified these particular pasts.

O’Hara’s commitment to the secular — to the open moment of the physical event — has deep literary implications beyond Ginsberg’s description of O’Hara’s poetry as “gossip, local gossip, social gossip” (Shaw 102). It explains the peculiar contours of O’Hara’s “landscape without depth” (Altieri 91), his rejection of the Symbolist promise that a poem’s disparate details will cohere and prove meaningful, not merely in the text, but in time as well (Perloff 23, 124; Altieri 111). Perhaps the only truly “symbolist” poem O’Hara wrote was “To the Harbormaster,” which uncharacteristically turns on a single metaphor — the loved one as the harbormaster and the poet as mariner. Significantly enough, it is the one where he most openly quotes Crane — the enthusiast of Symbolist hope — although apparently only to invert him. (Crane’s “Spry cordage of your bodies” in “Voyages I” becomes “The tattered cordage of my will” in O’Hara.) He did not work in this mode before he wrote “To the Harbormaster” in 1954 and he did not work in this mode again. On the whole, then, O’Hara’s poems are singularly resistant to New Critical close reading and to the ideal of organic unity. Even the aural looseness of his lines can be attributed to O’Hara’s adamant secularity. As he says in “Personism,” “I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures” (Collected Poems 498).

Cut loose from the pretensions of binding metaphor, serious rhyme and enduring truth, O’Hara’s poems cannot help but seem contingent. Auden warned O’Hara against “the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style,”its tendency to confuse authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise” (Gooch 261). There are necessary relations that poetry uncovers and accidental ones that the poet devises. Auden rehearses Coleridge’s distinction between the imagination and wit and, as with Coleridge, wit gets short shrift. It is too conscious. It calls too much attention to its odd, sole self.

O’Hara’s willing embrace of the contingent and the idiosyncratic shows most clearly in the poems of what Ashbery has called O’Hara’s “French Zen” period (Collected Poems ix), that is, that span in the early 1950s which produced the most obviously “surreal” of his works, such as “Oranges,” “Second Avenue” and “Easter.” To take a relatively random example from “Second Avenue:”

What spanking opossums of sneaks are caressing the route!
and of the pulse-racked tremors attached to my viciousness
I can only ennumerate the somber instances of wetness.

O’Hara favors adjectives and adjectival phrases that do not seem to belong to what they modify (“spanking opossums,” “pulse-racked tremors”), just as he likes to insert abstract nouns where the more concrete would be expected. And note that lines two and three of this quotation indulge in an archaic literary inversion (“I can only enumerate the somber instances… .of the pulse-racked tremors… .”). O’Hara points to the difficulties of interpreting his verbal flash when at the end of his thwarted prose explication of the poem writes that its 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… and I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it” (Collected Poems 497). To put it in the old-fashioned dichotomy between superficial artifice and hermeneutic depth, the surface constitutes the meaning of the poem.

It is almost too easy to talk about O’Hara in the terms of Harold Rosenberg’s emphasis on action and risk in the work of the New York School. In his famous essay on “the American Action Painters,” Rosenberg invokes the pathos of risk under the sanction of Kierkegaard: “The artist works in a condition of open possibility, risking, to follow Kierkegaard, the anguish of the esthetic, which accompanies possibility lacking in reality” (Rosenberg 32). In this light, the contingencies of O’Hara’s writing can be recast in the terms of the 1950s as the expressions of individual freedom. Rosenberg’s artist is a struggling individual liberated, however anxiously, from traditional and from the constraints of the transcendent. O’Hara becomes one of Rosenberg’s Action Painters through the “accidental” nature of his images are the measures and the marks of a solitary subject. They do not stand in for anyone or anything else.

This assertion of subjective freedom is no less important in O’Hara’s least surrealist works, the canonical “I Do This, I Do That” poems. poems stage the illusion of consciousness by marking the convergence of three different gestures: “I go here, I go there”(the poet’s general itinerary); “I see this, I see that” (a moment of sensory perception) and “I think this, I think that,” which renders visible the poet’s interiority. These moments are not always simultaneous and there are times when they tear away from each other and threaten the thin web of subjectivity. At the critical center of “A Step Away from Them,” O’Hara thinks, apparently without motivation, of three recent deaths and then moves, just as suddenly into the third person:

And one has eaten and one walks
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse …

In the third person, the figure of O’Hara dissolves into the background of the city, becomes an opportunity to form a list of things to be seen, of objects. Only after performing this moment of disintegration, does poetic subjectivity reconstitute itself in its reflective identification with another lyric poet, Pierre Reverdy.

In this way, “A Step Away from Them” resembles the equally paratactic and canonical “The Day Lady Died.” There again the figure of the poet moves between perception of and reflection on the city as he engages in a series of discrete tasks along a loose trajectory. There again death tears through the chatter of events and there again it is the death of an artist that shocks him. In this case though, the poet’s subjective integrity is maintained through an act of memory and, more importantly, through the projective peculiarity of the last lines: “she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron/ and everyone and I stopped breathing.” Beyond the uncharacteristic stumbling for effect — the “whispering” a song along the keyboard — O’Hara indicates that Billie Holliday’s singing slayed the audience (as the old vaudeville expression goes), but not quitefor real. This aesthetic death lasts only a moment and is merely a rehearsal for death or, more likely, its exorcism. It’s as if the poem were saying, “Hey, no one’s really dead here! It’s only art!”

The complexities, successes and failures of O’Hara adherence to a secular vanguardism — no guarantees, no Guarantor, no eschatology, no “elaborately sounded structures” and only the specific caught as it is in a train of contingencies — leads him to chart the fragility of that hinge of reflective consciousness on which he has come to depend. On the one hand, reflection threatens to fall into the surrealist assertions of an unanchored subjectivity. On the other, it always looks ready to slide into the blunt rapportage of an apparently subjectless objectivity. It’s either me or the city (as O’Hara expresses it in “Commercial Variations”) and just the thinnest skein of consciousness keeps it all together.

The “I do this, I do that” poems tpresent a kind of tenuous equilibrium and O’Hara tried to move beyond it in the poems he wrote after 1961, that is to say, around and after “Biotherm.” In these poems, the dichotomy between the self and the city begins to dissolve and is replaced as a carnival of voices. These voices are more often than not anonymous, neither objective nor subjective as such. They serve as markers of other people and therefore of a world of vocalized sociability, not of avenues, stores, lunch counters and trains.

In “Biotherm,” the voice, that is, the style (the vocabulary, cadence and tropes) that we come to associate with O’Hara from his earlier poems is set off from the others by quotation marks:

I went to Albania for coffee and came back for the rent day
“I think somebody oughta go through your mind with a good eraser”
meanwhile Joe is tracing love and hate back to the La Brea Tarpits

(“Biotherm”)

Albania. Rent day. An odd juxtaposition that is recognizable as a throw-away bit of O’Hara’s whimsical surrealism, just as the unexplained bit of exaggeration about Joe LeSueur. All this is both a collage and a pastiche. It’s not at all clear who says the middle line here (that tough-guy “oughta” is hardly O’Hara’s normal diction), but it is a fair guess that the mind that needs cleaning up is O’Hara’s.

In the later poems, O’Hara does not supply those quotation marks and therefore the reader has to go by his or her nerve, or more to the point, by his or her ear. In “Cheyenne” and the series of poems that O’Hara sent to Jan Cremer in May 1964, the intervening voices are parodically macho (“I’ll skin you alive for this” or ‘“Listen Jelly Belly. Back down a little, will you?” [“Cheyenne”]) and echo Westerns and film noir “(“A million guys in this/town and you have to shoot /the Crime Commissioner” [“Here in New York We Are Having A Lot of Trouble With the World’s Fair”]). In these works, the diction of mid-century male aggression plays off O’Hara’s campy deflations (“I’ll skin you alive for this/ I’m sure you would/if you don’t see me tomorrow don’t be surprised I doing/ the prairie dog bit” [“Cheyenne”]) or off itself, with the same result. It gets transformed into O’Hara’s “sissy truck driver’s” double entendres of (“Well,I got stuck on this/cowboy, baby, and as far as I can see it depends on what/you want to ride” [“The Green Hornet,”]).

As in earlier poems, subjective coherence is actively and often anxiously threatened by dissolution, as in “Maundy Saturday:”

Why must all Russian composers   try to be brave
one more trombone and I’ll go out of my mind       like Canadian
poets try to be honest             honest for the love of god how boring

This is prime O’Hara — the tone of the exasperated, overdrawn, self-mocking aesthete holding forth in unscannable lines. But soon after, the poem seems to dissolve into a disjointed meditation, less about music and more about names:

“Franck O’Hara”         Marceline Pleynet          ego
Nikki de St Phalle a long drunken talk with Maxine
“these are my jewels”             don’t you
hate to think really think               “croce delizia” what it means
yeah “mysterioso” allright   ahahahahoh ahah     or O’Hara

There is no such thing as “Maundy Saturday.” The poem thus begins with a signal mistake and a mistake seems to motivate the condensed slippage that constitutes the poem. O’Hara’s name has been misspelled (somewhere) and misspelled in a particularly French way, as in Cesar Franck. This leads to the names of the French writer Marceline Pleynet and the painter Nikki de St Phalle as well as the French-sounding Maxine. When the poem devolves to nonsense syllables, they reconstitute themselves as “O’Hara,” though nowhere in the poem is Frank reconstituted to its proper spelling. Francis — O’Hara’s given name — does appear in a later line, in a thicket of names associated with music. And it is quite a thicket. It includes Francis Robinson (the press and tour director of the Metropolitan Opera), the conductor Fritz Reiner, Ilya Mourometz (subject of a symphony by Reinhold Glière), Verdi and the soprano Elizabeth Rethberg.

It is in the context of names and of art that the question of ego becomes important:

                                                                                                        if
I could destroy my ego    but I might end up with only an id.

Why would you want to destroy the ego? Only where ego becomes synonymous with egocentricity would one — especially a poet interested in “negative capability” — want to overcome one’s ego. But O’Hara is hardly such a poet. In “Personism,” he rejects, however jokingly, negative capability as a form of abstraction. Here he goes further. He claims that even if he wereto transcend his ego, he would hardly disappear. He would remain as unmediated desire.

O’Hara’s misspelled name seems to present the possibility of destruction without annihilation, of a willing rejection of subjectivity that would not get rid of the individual but merely of will. Not for nothing, then, does the poem end “and I am still.” The poet’s stillness can be read as a falling into the silence of the poem’s end, as quiet moment after release. But it is also and more obviously a statement of the ego’s persistence, of an “I” that cannot stay put, let alone silent. For all that, the poem hardly constitutes a heroic assertion of the self. The subject itself is assumed to be a mixed but necessary good. If the ego presents a problem, so does its destruction.

My purpose in all this is not so much to enlist O’Hara in the cause of the modern subject against the subject’s postmodern demystification or vice versa. Rather it is to argue that his work represents the very specific (im)possibilities that confronted subjectivity in a very specific place at a very specific moment.

To sketch this moment: in the Fifties and early Sixties in New York the ideology of the avant-garde contained this kernel of hope — that vanguard art had emancipatory potential, not necessarily for what it depicted (though that counted) but for what it enacted. In “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art,” a 1957 article in Art News, Meyer Schapiro claimed that as “culture that becomes increasingly organized through industry, economy and the state,” abstract — that is, vanguard — artworks “are the last hand-made, personal objects.” As a result, “the object of art is… more passionately than ever before, the occasion of spontaneity or intense feeling” (Schapiro 216-7). In other words, caught between the command economies of the East and consumerist mass-production in the West, the artist represents a last stand against alienated labor and enforced social integration. The artisanal quality of the work grants the artist the freedom necessary for spontaneity work itself provides the site necessary for the intensities of self-expression. Vanguard art provides the last hope for a free subjectivity in a dangerously administered age.

O’Hara’s loose existentialism is therefore of a piece with his alliance with avant-gardes in all the arts in that they all serve the cause of a particular constellation of notions of freedom. But that constellation was (and remains) contradictory. Defined as spontaneity both in the supermarket and in one’s life project, its importance as a justification for America’s position during the Cold War increased even as its sphere of activities shrank. On the most mundane level, O’Hara shows that as far as poetry is concerned, this free subjectivity only exercises itself in the interstices of the workday — at lunch, in the evening or on weekends.

It might turn out to be the central insight of O’Hara’s poetry that subjectivity as it presented itself in the first twenty years of the Cold War teetered between the twin dangers of a empty interiority (whose most painful and beautiful examples are probably Rothko’s paintings) and the subject’s more or less complete disappearance into the phantom objectivity of the social-economic world whose specter haunts titles like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suitand The Organization Man. The complicated compromises that made up the artworld that O’Hara represented began to come undone by the early 1960s as new constellations were being formed. A case in point: by the time that President Kennedy made his fatal trip to Dallas, it seemed that the avant-garde was no longer interested in the artisinal and the expressivist. Rather, the emphasis had turned to the impersonal and the industrial (Stella’s paintings; Warhol’s “Factory,” Judd’s recourse to new materials and new modes of fabrication [Jones]). The day was carried by the permutations of what Richard Wollheim called the “minimalist” concentration on artist’s choiceof subject and object, rather than on the artist’s trade skills or his or her emotional state. In this new dispensation, freedom was exercised before the work was made. It could be traced in the choices the artist made when she considered all the possibilities presented by mass production and reproduction. It manifested itself in thought, not action, in pre-figured planning and not spontaneous confrontations.

Beyond his often heady accounts of his comings and goings, O’Hara made his history by recording the constraints and contradictions of the subject’s freedoms in the Fifties and early Sixties. The deep work of his poetry lies in its enactment of those conditions. His identification with the avant-garde, his saturation by it, allowed him to look back at himself from the vantage point of a future that he hoped would ratify the choices he had made and reward the risks he had taken. Judging by his posthumous success, his timing was excellent.

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Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 1979.

Gooch, Brad. City Poet. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Guest, Barbara. “Frank and I happened to be in Paris… ,” Homage to Frank O’Hara. Ed Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur. Bolinas: Big Sky, 1977. 77.

Jones, Caroline. Machine in the Studio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

O’Hara, Frank. Art Chronicles. New York: Braziller, 1975.
The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara . Ed Donald Allen. New York: Knopf, 1971.

Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O’Hara: Poet Amongst Painters. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.

Rivers, Larry. What Did I Do? New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Rosenberg, Harold. “The American Action Painters.” The Tradition of the New. New York: Horizon, 1959. 23-39.

Schapiro, Meyer. “Recent Abstract Painting.” Modern Art . New York,: George Braziller, 1978). 213-26.

Shaw, Lytle. Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006.

Wollheim, Richard. “Art.” Arts MagazineJanuary 1965. 26-32.

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[1] According to Guest, this lunch took place in the summer of 1960. According to Brad Gooch, it happened in January 1959. Donald Allen places two poems that O’Hara wrote during this trip in 1958 (Guest; Gooch 314; O’Hara, Collected Poems 542).

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David Kaufmann teaches literature at George Mason University. He is in the final throes of a book, Telling Stories: Philip Guston’s Later Work, which is due to appear from the University of California Press next spring.