Urban Poet

Death is often a good career move in poetry. No sooner are the obsequies over and the baked meats eaten than the publisher warms up the presses for a definitive edition of the collected poems, solemnly proofread down to the last querulous comma. Yet not all poets are well served by such an exhaustive volume, which may seal up a reputation forever — indeed, such a book has sometimes been called a tombstone. A collected poems may be cruelest to a poet whose genius shone as intermittently as a firefly.

At 40, Frank O’Hara was struck one night by a Jeep on a Fire Island beach. He died scarcely two years after the publication of “Lunch Poems” (1964), the volume that introduced him to most readers. As a poet he wrote so much — so wildly and unevenly much — it has been difficult to reach a just estimate of his wayward, influential talent. O’Hara was born in Baltimore and schooled at Harvard, a roommate of Edward Gorey and a friend of John Ashbery. He soon went to work at the Museum of Modern Art, where he rose to become an associate curator. As he had fallen in among a crowd of painters and poets that included Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch, it was perhaps natural to make poems out of their parties, feuds, love affairs and drunken gossip.

By the poetic fashion of the day, it was not natural at all. In the heady atmosphere of postwar Manhattan, however, young poets hostile to the philistines surrounding them (even coddled artists believe their society philistine) envied the technical bravado and rebellious invention of the Abstract Expressionists. The poets of the New York School, as they were eventually known, were long on spontaneity and short on traditional literary effect. O’Hara later recollected, according to Brad Gooch’s biography, “City Poet,” that he and other young 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. So far as I know nobody painted in the San Remo while they listened to the writers argue.”

O’Hara’s earliest poems, the work of Harvard and just after, sound like Wallace Stevens at the soda fountain (“Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!”). Jazzy, elated as an eel, a talent giddily in search of a manner, the poet scatters exclamation marks like penny candy. Posing as a wide-eyed innocent, O’Hara was drawn to illogic and absurdity, to modes of presence and display far from poets like Yeats and Eliot and Lowell. When Auden chose Ashbery’s first volume for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, he wrote O’Hara a thoughtful rejection, saying, “I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”

The peculiar thing about O’Hara’s “surrealistic” style is that it sounds not like early Ashbery but like late Ashbery. Here’s O’Hara:

   How many trees and frying pans
I loved and lost! Guernica hollered look out!
but we were all busy hoping our eyes were talking
to Paul Klee. My mother and father asked me and
I told them from my tight blue pants we should
love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures.
Wasted child! I’ll club you on the shins!

Ashbery developed such insouciant nonsense into a charming anti-literary manner, but O’Hara soon grew bored with it. He was always looking for some vivid stimulus, preferably one a little outlandish — not a bad thing for a curator of modern painting, perhaps, but not necessarily a good one for a poet (O’Hara treated contemporary art with far more deliberation than he treated poetry). He began to make poetry from whatever happened around him — today, he might have written a blog. At the time, however, this preoccupation with the trivial, with the nothing of life that is nothing, seemed to jettison everything — meter, the calculated symbol, the grave poetic tone — associated with the manners of the art. However much one loves “Four Quartets” or “Lord Weary’s Castle,” it’s refreshing to open O’Hara and read:

                                LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases, then
we go eat some fish and some ale it’s
cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich.

The headlong style, the lines broken like breadsticks, the punctuation limping along or missing entirely, capture the city’s rush and welter, though O’Hara’s physical world is curiously impoverished. Every poem seems to start from scratch. The back cover of “Lunch Poems” claimed that frequently O’Hara, “strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up 30 or 40 lines of ruminations.” This was most unlikely (even more so the notion that he had “withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life”); but the lie was as close to an “Ars Poetica” as the poet ever made.