616 The American Century: Literature since 1945can say,” he suggested, and as a way of saying this himself – a means of assuring
recognition of the lively details of the now – he pursued a poetic structure that was
changing, shifting, quirky, quick, and immediate. His literary mentors were people
like Whitman, with whom O’Hara shared a belief in the multiple nature of identity
(“Grace / to be born and live a variously as possible”), and Williams, whose
commitment to seeing and mobility O’Hara appreciated (“How I hate ... / ... all
things that don’t change”). There was also Pound, whom he called “the father of
modern poetry in English.” O’Hara clearly learned much from the Surrealists and
Dadaists, who taught him how to capture the simultaneity of the instant. On a
strictly literary level, in fact, O’Hara’s development could be charted through his
Selected Poems (1973) from his early experiences in what might be termed “straight
Surrealism” (“Chez Jane”) and, rather different, his imitations of American writers
such as Williams (“Les Etiquettes Jaunes”), to the mature poetry of the late 1950s
where the two modes are wedded. The result of this union – between a surreal
understanding of the elusive, metamorphic nature of things and a toughly empirical
American idiom – is poetry that can shift, with astonishing speed, from flat literalism
to fantasy and then back again. But to talk in strictly literary terms about O’Hara or
the other New York poets is only to tell half the story. “After all,” O’Hara mischievously
remarked, “only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are
better than the movies.” He, and his friends, were interested in an art fired into life
by the moment; and that meant particular kinds of poetry certainly, but also all
forms of dance, the motion picture, and action painting.
“We ... divided our time between the literary bar, the San Remo, and the artists’,
the Cedar Tavern,” O’Hara later said of his early days together with Ashbery and
Koch, “... the painters were the only generous audience for our poetry.” A rapport
was quickly established between the poets and painters as diverse as Jasper Johns,
Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, Grace Hartigan, and Willem de Kooning. All of
them shared the excitement of New York City, which was, as they saw it, a model of
simultaneity, the place where more was happening at one moment than anywhere
else in the world. By comparison, the rest of the country, and especially the
countryside, seemed stale: “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass,” O’Hara claimed,
“unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that
people do not totally regret life.” The shared excitement issued in collaborative work,
poem–paintings and mixed media performances, and in mutual appreciation:
O’Hara was and Ashbery still is a distinguished art critic, while O’Hara was also a
curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Above all, it generated a common aesthetic:
one that perceived the surface of the poem or painting as a field on which the physical
energies of the artist could operate, without mediation of metaphor or symbol. “Now
please tell me,” wrote O’Hara in a letter to Larry Rivers, in which he enclosed some of
his work, “if you think these poems are filled with disgusting self pity ... if the surface
isn’t ‘kept up’ ... or if they don’t have ‘push’ and ‘pull.’ ” That request signals his
priorities, those imperatives of artistic creation that he shared with other members of
the New York group. The surface is to be “kept up” – that is the first imperative. The
artwork should not be “reflective, or self-conscious,” there should be nothingGGray_c05.indd 616ray_c 05 .indd 616 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM