A History of American Literature

618 The American Century: Literature since 1945

that” poems, like “Joe’s Jacket,” “Personal Poem,” and “Lana Turner has Collapsed!”;

and there are also more intensely surreal pieces, such as “Second Avenue,”

Whitmanesque odes like “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” and powerfully erotic

lyrics of homosexual love, the most striking of which perhaps is “You are Gorgeous

and I’m Coming.” On the more local level of the individual poem, O’Hara’s

discomposing mix of literalism and surrealism works with other strategies to strip

away the veneer of habituation. His lineation for instance, with its ambivalent

positioning of words, constant breaks and compulsive enjambment, generates

tension, a sense of breakneck speed. At the same time, an elaborate system of

syntactical ambiguity, based on nonsequiturs, pseudo-connectives, ellipses and

dangling, incomplete sentences, all helps turn the poem into an instantaneous

performance, denied conventional divisions of beginning, middle, and end. Like a

Cubist or Abstract Expressionist painter, O’Hara scrambles his representational

clues, preferring complex effects of simultaneity, the clash of surfaces, to the illusions

of depth and coherence. There are constant temporal and spatial dissolves too; the

poet shifts rapidly from one place to another without the usual semantic props, such

as “when,” “after,” or “before.” Everything, as a result, is absorbed into an

undifferentiated stream of activity, the flow of the now – as in these lines from

“Rhapsody,” where an elevator ride in Manhattan becomes a trip to heaven becomes

a voyage into a Hollywood jungle:

515 Madison Avenue

door to heaven? Portal

stopped realities and eternal licentiousness

or at least the jungle of impossible eagerness

your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables

swinging from the myth of ascending

I would join ...

“O’Hara’s poetry has no program,” John Ashbery has insisted, “and therefore cannot

be joined.” This is perfectly true. Nevertheless, many poets have felt an affinity with

him, and shared at least some of his purposes. Their personal affection for him has

been expressed in the numerous elegies that appeared after his death, the most nota-

ble of which, perhaps, are “Strawberries in Mexico” (1969) by Ron Padgett (1942–),

“Buried at Springs” (1969) by James Schuyler (1923–1991), and “Frank O’Hara”

(1967) by Ted Berrigan (1934–1983). And the sense of aesthetic kinship is evident

not only from what members of the New York group have said about O’Hara but

from particular poetic habits. The attention to surface, the unexpected line-breaks

and gamey, casual idiom, the switchback movement between the literal and surreal,

an almost voyeuristic attention to empirical detail and an expressionist involvement

in the poem as field of action – all, or at least some, of these characteristics help to

mark out writers like Schuyler, Berrigan, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and Ashbery

himself. But of course such writers are not possessed of a corporate mind and, as

Ashbery points out, were not following a formulated program; so, inevitably, very

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