The American Century: Literature since 1945 617behind it. A successful relation of verbal imagery or visual planes should create a
lively, depthless microcosm of the artist’s world, as empirically verifiable as a street
map yet also surreal, fantastic – since it involves mind as well as scene, the active
engagement of the artist with subject matter and materials. In turn, the audience
responding to the work should “travel over the complicated surface exhaustively” –
that is the second imperative. The audience should be no more self-indulgent that the
artist is, and no more detached: they should give themselves up to the lively play of
figuration, the “marvelous burgeoning into life,” that constitutes the work, continually
refreshing their instinctive sense of what it “says.” “The best of the current sculpture,”
O’Hara insisted, “didn’t make me feel I wanted to have one, they made me feel I
wanted to be one.” And it is precisely this surrendering of the self to surface, not
interpreting but participating, that he aimed for in his own work. If the poem or
painting creates presence, he believed, and if the audience is as attentive to presence
as the artist has been, then the process of identification is complete.
O’Hara’s own term for this aesthetic he shared with other poets and painters was
“Personism.” He even wrote his own “manifesto” for this Personism. Characteristically,
this is both an act of comic bravado (he had an instinctive distrust of programs of
any kind and this, in part, is a witty parody of them) and a serious statement of
intention. “Personism,” the poet tells us, “puts the poem squarely between the poet
and the person.... The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.”
True to this credo, there is a quality of intimate conversation to much of O’Hara’s
poetry – of talk “between two persons” that is at once familiar and fantastic. “It is
12.10 in New York and I am wondering / if I will finish this in time to meet Norman
for lunch,” is a typical opening (“Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul”),
“ah lunch! I think I am going crazy / what with my terrible hangover and the weekend
coming up ...” The voice talking here, however, is not a confessional but a responsive
one, eager to attend to the continuum of things and ready for immersion in the
processes it contemplates. O’Hara does not reflect in a traditional way nor try to
extrapolate significances. Instead, he swims in the medium of his feeling and being,
inviting us to come into momentary awareness of things just as he does. He traces,
say, the disjunctive movements of his sensibility (“In Memory of my Feelings,” “Ode
(to Joseph Le Sueur) on the Arrow that Flieth by Day”). Or he compels us into
attention to the total environment of the city: its noises (“a faint stirring of that
singing seems to come to me in heavy traffic”), its shifting qualities of light (“the cool
graced light / is pushed off the enormous glass piers”), its discontinuities, surprises,
and the “strange quiet excitement” it can generate. As he does so, he alerts us to his
own instinctive belief that the “slightest loss of attention leads to death.” Life in these
terms has an immanent rather than transcendent value: it is, as O’Hara himself put
it once, “just what it is and just what happens.” “I’m not going to cry all the time, /
nor shall I laugh all the time,” O’Hara announces in “My Heart,” “ / I don’t prefer one
strain to another.” “I want my face to be shaven,” he continues, “and my heart – / you
can’t plan on the heart, but / the better part of it, my poetry, is open.”
How does O’Hara achieve this “openness,” and so dodge the habitual? On a larger
scale, he does so by opting for a range of tone and form. There are his “I do this, I doGGray_c05.indd 617ray_c 05 .indd 617 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM