a Tr i b u t e t o

F R A N K

O’H A R A

Memorial Day 1950—John Ashbery

I’ve always felt a special connection to Frank’s “Memorial

.Day 1950.” For one thing, I rescued it from oblivion. It

wasn’t in his papers when he died. Then I remembered I had

once typed it out in a letter to Kenneth Koch when he was in

France on a Fulbright. I had been trying to persuade

Kenneth, who at that time was insisting that he and I were

the only important young American poets, to include Frank

in our mini-cenacle, and sent him Frank’s poems in an effort

to convince him. I was successful since Kenneth returned

persuaded and kept the letter in his files.

I first read the poem in the summer of 1950 (I assume it had

been written on Memorial Day of that year), on a trip to visit

Frank in Boston. He was staying in a house on the back of

Beacon Hill that belonged to his friend Cervin (“Cerv”)

Robinson’s family, who were away. I had graduated from

Harvard in 1949 and was living in New York. Frank, though

a year older than I, graduated in 1950 since he had spent two

years in the Navy during the war. I was missing him and

Boston, and I remember our going to lots of movies (“Panic

in the Streets” and Olivier’s “Hamlet” among them) and

drinking zombies (a newly invented drink, I think) at a bar

near the State House. I too stayed at the Robinsons’ and

remember admiring Frank’s room for the kind of Spartan

chic he always managed to create around him. The room

looked out on a courtyard of trees and was practically bare

except for an army cot and blanket and a frying pan on the

floor, used as an ashtray, an idea he got from George

Montgomery, a sort of arbiter of Spartan chic who had been

at Harvard with us. Hence, no doubt, the line: “How many

trees and frying pans I’ve loved and lost.” There were

probably reproductions from MOMA and maybe a clay

candelabra, but I don’t remember them.

The poem’s aggressively modernist tone may seem a little

dated today, but at the time such figures as Max Ernst,

Gertrude Stein, Boris Pasternak, Paul Klee, Auden and

Rimbaud were far from being accepted cultural icons, at least

in the world of Boston-Cambridge. (The year before, Frank

and I had attended a concert that featured the premier of

Schoenberg’s String Trio. We both loved it, but I remember

Frank getting into an argument with a young member of the

Harvard music faculty who insisted that Schoenberg was

literally crazy, and that Frank was too for liking him.)

If his truculent modernist stance, through no fault of his,

inevitably seems old-fashioned today, his political

incorrectness, as illustrated in the passage about the sewage

singing under his bright white toilet seat, was decades ahead

of its time.

To paraphrase his Lana Turner poem: “oh Frank O’Hara we

love you get up.”

4

HomagePoets Discuss

Their Favorite

Frank O’Hara

Poems

from Memorial Day 19501

Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world;

just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down

outside my window by a crew of creators.

Once he got his axe going everyone was upset

enough to fight for the last ditch and heap

of rubbish.

Through all that surgery I thought

I had a lot to say, and named several last things

Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for; but then

the war was over, those things had survived

and even when you’re scared art is no dictionary.

Max Ernst told us that.

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! I

wasn’t surprised when the older people entered

my cheap hotel room and broke my guitar and my can

of blue paint.

At that time all of us began to think

with our bare hands and even with blood all over

them, we knew vertical from horizontal, we never

smeared anything except to find out how it lived.

Fathers of Dada! You carried shining erector sets

in your rough bony pockets, you were generous

and they were lovely as chewing gum or flowers!

Thank you! […]

The Dirty Poemsof Frank O’Hara—Elaine Equi

Ihave always found the idea that poetry should be uplifting

.a depressing one. Our ideal self is our most boring self,

except perhaps as a study in how far we will go to maintain

clean hands, a clear conscience and an unequivocal

demarcation between our nobler (or at least our more

politically correct) instincts and our baser ones.

For the most part, “negative” emotions such as greed, envy,

cruelty or pettiness are rarely allowed in poetry except as bad

guys to be killed off, then transcended. Occasionally, a poet

(particularly a confessional poet) will confess to them, but

always with a sense that he or she has sinned. Unfortunately

even lust, with its blatant objectification of the other, no

longer seems quite acceptable.

Of course, not all poetry makes human emotion the focal

point of its content. But even in more abstract and

experimental styles, poets often assume the moral

high-ground of being set apart from the world of industry,

ambition and back-stabbing aggression.

Perhaps that is why, when looking over all of Frank O’Hara’s

most impressive body of work, I keep returning to the two

following rather modest lyrics on “dirt” and “hate.” First of

all, consider how amazing it is to even find “dirt” in a poem.

Easily, nonchalantly, it locates us within the urban experi-

ence. In poems extolling nature, one finds “earth.” In the

country, there is rich “loam.” But in Frank O’Hara (and in

New York City) one finds simple and unpretentious dirt. Dirt

is pollution, the inevitable by-product of commerce. And in

poetry, commerce (as we know) is a dirty word. Yet here

there is no need to separate the two worlds. In fact, it

would be impossible to do so. “You don’t refuse to

breathe do you”?

Dirt is also slang for gossip, dish, the juicy lowdown. Dirt,

like talk, is cheap. This connotation of the word seems

exceedingly appropriate in helping to characterize O’Hara’s

style and contribution to contemporary poetry. In his work,

he gossiped about everything from artists and parties to the

weather, creating an aura of intimacy, excitement and expec-

tation around whatever he chose to discuss. Today we have

the tabloids to satisfy our prodigious appetite for dirt. But

perhaps, if we were less threatened by our own ambiguity,

the need to vilify others wouldn’t be quite so strong.

In “Song” the literal and figurative qualities of dirt morph

into a single character familiar to all of us: the bad influence

(“attractive as his character is bad”). It is typical of O’Hara

that the poem, in its way, celebrates the whole idea of bad

influences, finding them to be both seductive and necessary—

even educational (“is the character less bad. no. it improves

constantly”). Obviously, Frank is ready and willing to avail

himself of this and, we may assume, many other bad

influences. True, he was writing in the ’50s and ’60s when

smoking, drinking and promiscuity all seemed more sensible

5

1All citations from Collected Poems by Frank O’Hara. Copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith,Administratix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a Division ofRandom House, Inc.

A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A

modes of behavior, but the underlying message of finding

nothing pure or uncompromised has wider applications.

While hinting at a sexual encounter, the poem itself is about

those things.

In “Poem” on the other hand, Frank assumes the role of bad

influence by encouraging the person he’s addressing, as well

as the reader, to experience (actually, enjoy) darker emotions

such as hate, unkindness and selfishness. Surprisingly, it turns

out to be a sweet and gentle poem of assurance that one need

not always be good in order to be loved.

I must admit that this has always been a favorite poem. Poets

look to other, more well-known poets for permission—and

for me, this permission feels retroactively custom made. To a

woman who is tired of being passive and nurturing, and to a

poet who is tired of being sensitive, and finally to someone

who is just plain tired, living in our relentlessly competitive

and upbeat times, it offers relief. “Don’t be shy of unkind-

ness, either/ it’s cleansing and allows you to be direct.”

O’Hara is also a great one for mocking the heroic notion

that artists feel more deeply than your average individual

and suffer more because of it. “Think of filth, is it really

awesome/ Neither is hate.” Absurd as the idea of “poet

as Designated Empath” sounds, variations of it continue

to live in the public imagination of what a poet is and

does. That’s why refusing to take such notions seriously

is still a radical step.

Art stays art by maintaining strict borders between itself and

the rest of life. Like Duchamp who came before him, and

Andy Warhol who came after him, Frank O’Hara, whether

intentionally or not, is one of the figures who questioned and

minimized borders. In the sacred temple of fifties art,

O’Hara’s work was like a window that let in, not only fresh

air, but also dirt.

Maybe if the battle between high and low culture had ended

back then, Frank’s poems might be merely interesting or just

terribly entertaining to us today. They would have served

their purpose. Instead, when I reread them, they strike me

with a now-more-than-ever vitality.

Art is not so easily democratized. It continues to seek new

ways to reclaim its privileged status and frighten worshippers

into hushed subservience. But if there is a way to be both an

aesthete and a populist, Frank O’Hara found it.

In addition to the great pleasure his work gives, it also

teaches a valuable lesson. Thanks to him, when art becomes

religion (whether of the traditional or avant-garde variety), I

know what to do. I light a candle to dirt.

Poem

Hate is only one of many responses

true, hurt and hate go hand in hand

but why be afraid of hate, it is only there

think of filth, is it really awesome

neither is hate

don’t be shy of unkindness, either

it’s cleansing and allows you to be direct

like an arrow that feels something

out and out meanness, too, lets love breathe

you don’t have to fight off getting in too deep

you can always get out if you’re not too scared

an ounce of prevention’s

enough to poison the heart

don’t think of others

until you have thought of yourself, are true

all of these things, if you feel them

will be graced by a certain reluctance

and turn into gold

if felt by me, will be smilingly deflected

by your mysterious concern

Song

Is it dirty

does it look dirty

that’s what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirty

that’s what you think of in the city

you don’t refuse to breathe do you

someone comes along with a very bad character

he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very

he’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes

that’s what you think of in the city

run your finger along your no-moss mind

that’s not a thought that’s soot

and you take a lot of dirt off someone

is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly

you don’t refuse to breathe do you

6

A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A

True Accounts—Mark Doty

There are moments in any artistic life when it seems

validation will never come from without, and that all

one’s striving and laboring haven’t the least thing to do with

whether anybody ever sees one’s work. When this crisis of

belief becomes acute, it becomes necessary to minister to

one’s own needs, to award oneself some form of recognition.

Nobody ever did so more good-humoredly and graciously

than Frank O’Hara, the second poet ever to be directly

addressed by the sun.

The first writer that luminary chose “to speak to personally”

was Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1920’s “An Extraordinary

Adventure Which Happened to Me, Vladimir Mayakovsky,

One Summer in the Country,” the Russian Modernist tells us

exactly where he is—“Pushkino, Mount Akula, Rumyantsev

Cottage, 20 miles down the Yaroslav Railway”—when he

yells an invitation to a sun whose predictability he’s grown

weary of. Naturally, he doesn’t expect an answer when he

shouts (in Herbert Marshall’s translation):

Listen, golden brightbrow,

instead of vainly

setting in the air,

have tea with me

right now!

But the sun, “of his own goodwill,” takes the poet up on his

invitation, comes into the garden, banking his fires, and then

right into the house, ready for tea and jam. Before long poet

and fireball are clapping each other on the back, and the sun

is comparing their vocations:

Why, comrade, we’re a pair!

Come, poet,

let us dawn

and sing

away the drabness of the universe.

But where these two seem like a couple of drinking buddies,

all bluster and conviviality, there’s something far subtler at

work in the visitation that same heavenly body makes to

Frank O’Hara, asleep in a summer house on Fire Island,

thirty-some years later. O’Hara unabashedly allows the sun

to come to him, and that big Russian roar is replaced by

something less ferocious than petulant, albeit steady and

warm. When he asks the barely awake Frank, “You may be/

wondering why I’ve come so close?” this sun’s character is

clinched—polite, conspiratorial, friendly albeit capable of

hauteur, and bearing a distinct message.

A message launched by a deliciously shameless pun: “Frankly

I wanted to tell you/ I like your poetry.” Imagine the poten-

tial pitfalls facing a poem of self-praise, a poem intended to

cheer oneself up about one’s own artistic achievement!

O’Hara’s brilliant solution is not only to put the praise in

someone else’s mouth, but to make it funny from the first

word and then to keep it appealingly qualified through the

sun’s decided unwillingness to inflate the poet’s accomplish-

ment: “I see a lot/ on my rounds and you’re okay. You may/

not be the greatest thing on earth….”

Now the poem begins to swim into deeper waters, as the sun

turns to increasingly lovely stanzas of advice, delivered in a

colloquial tone that keeps his principles, so to speak, down

to earth. It’s here that the poet is given his highest

compliment: “And now that you/ are making your own days,

so to speak,/ even if no one reads you but me/ you won’t be

depressed.” Even if a human gaze doesn’t fall on these

poems, sunlight always will. But now the poet doesn’t even

need that external light; he is “making his own days.” He’s

become a source of illumination, one that warms and orders

the world. Mayakovsky says that both his motto and the

sun’s is “always to shine,” and here O’Hara shares that

identification, poet and sun aligned in vocation.

Characteristically, the heightened nature of this moment is

undercut by O’Hara’s swooning exclamation, and the sun’s

comic response. But just as we’re imagining a talkative sun

fitting himself between Manhattan avenues, the sun bursts

forth with a rhetorical flight of startling gravity; it is a call

for a kind of generous and detached tenderness towards the

world which one can’t quite imagine O’Hara having been

able to make without his gleaming solar mask in place.

That tiny poem left in Frank’s brain might have been quite

enough to end “A True Account” on a note of graceful

charm, but there is a further distance to travel. If this poem

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A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A

is O’Hara at his warmest, it is also finally as resonant and

strange as a good dream. Whoever calls the sun also calls the

poet; it as if the poem’s pointed to voices and forces beyond

its cosmic theater, raising its own stakes. Suddenly the sun

seems a kind of intermediary between poet and larger,

unknowable forces—unknowable at least for now. There is

more to be understood; there is meaning up ahead, to be

gathered and understood. Somewhere in the world, this poet

is called, is wanted, has a purpose, a destination. This

mystery prepares us for the final sentence, the poem’s most

resonant and memorable phrase: “Darkly he rose, and

then I slept.”

And so what begins as a comical act of self-blessing—some-

thing a poet as out-of-the-mainstream as O’Hara was in his

own day could certainly have used—becomes a statement of

a deeper sense of vocation, of connection to mystery. We all

know that “true” in a title is intended to signal exactly the

opposite, and yet O’Hara’s poem arrives, through the vigor

of its lies, at something entirely credible. Endearingly funny,

marvelously knowing in its self-regard, his poem becomes a

kind of touchstone for makers everywhere: both a slyly ironic

blessing and an evocation of the mystery of a life of art.

from A True Account of Talkingto the Sun at Fire Island

“…Frankly I wanted to tell you

I like your poetry. I see a lot

on my rounds and you’re okay. You may

not be the greatest thing on earth, but

you’re different. Now I’ve heard some

say you’re crazy, they being excessively

calm themselves to my mind and other

crazy poets think that you’re a boring

reactionary. Not me.

Just keep on

like I do and pay no attention. You’ll

find that people always will complain

about the atmosphere, either too hot

or too cold too bright or too dark, days

too short or too long.

If you don’t appear

at all one day they think you’re lazy

or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

And don’t worry about your lineage

poetic or natural. The Sun shines on

the jungle, you know, on the tundra

the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were

I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting

for you to get to work.

And now that you

are making your own days, so to speak,

even if no one reads you but me

you won’t be depressed. Not

everyone can look up, even at me. It

hurts their eyes.”

Essay on Style—W.S. Merwin

For Frank O’Hara, writing poetry was tightrope walking.

What he balanced on that swaying, impossible, all-but-

nonexistent surface up in the vastnesses of mid-air is part of

what those of us who love his poetry keep recognizing, step

by step, as we read his poems. All of it, apparently, is there at

once: the totally serious and the utterly goofy, high camp and

startling plainness, the dailiness of existence and the

perennial risk of once-only art. For all their singularity, their

tone and stance and daring, their difference from those of

anyone else at all, his poems often seem luminously transpar-

ent, and it becomes clear that for Frank O’Hara life itself was

tightrope walking. Excitement and terror, the naked-new and

the fondly clung-to, were balanced in each moment without

particular regard for probability. And the hilarity, at every

move. He is one of the funniest of poets, and his seriousness

was never in danger of falling into earnestness. “You just go

on your nerve,” he says in that other great essay on style, his

“Personism: A Manifesto.” But you don’t just go on that.

There had to be the talent. And it had to be his own.

So “Essay on Style” is scarcely an essay in any ready-made

sense, but a run-through. And style is a way of moving,

appearing, performing, presenting. One of its elements is the

unexpected, but that in turn has subtle laws of its own. It

cannot just be any old unexpected thing, there has to be an

authenticity to it that is part of its surprise, becoming the

astonishing leaps and turns that we recognize as O’Hara’s

“personally.” And the voice, of course, is part of that: the

8

A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A

phrases that seem to have been picked out of his everyday

chatter and flung back with a new resonance, amplified, as

though he were his own parrot:

I am painting

the floor yellow, Bill is painting it

wouldn’t you know my mother would call

up

and complain?

and then it’s the play-back, and himself imitating himself

imitating his mother:

well if Mayor Wagner won’t allow private

cars on Manhattan because of the snow, I

will probably never see her again

and rapid though the flutter-stop is, situations, circumstances,

troubles, irritations, crises one after the other threaten to

enter

my growingly more perpetual state

and then with a reflection on the reality of an angel in the

Frick we are sitting in Jack Delaney’s thinking of what Edwin

is thinking about a new poem of Frank’s, and Frank begins

eliminating words from the language. Not only is the wish to

do without words (logical connectors, as and but, to start

with—after all, as he has said in the “Manifesto,” logic,

which pain “always produces,” is “very bad for you”) is

part of the style; the way he has arrived at that and the

way he pursues it are also manifestations of it, and where

it has got him:

where do you think I’ve

got to? The spectacle of a grown man

decorating

a Christmas tree disgusts me that’s

where

more words are banished from the language, and then:

treating

the typewriter as an intimate organ why not?

By the time the poem rises to its final flounce:

I am going to eat alone for the rest of my life

it is clear that the style is an essay, in the old run-through

sense. Trying it on and wearing it, going with it. It is his style

that makes the poems complete when he ends them, and

makes them work, as they do, again and again. When he

talks of treating the typewriter as an intimate organ because

“nothing else is (intimate)” he is describing, more or less,

what he has done. The poems work because their intimacy or

their play at intimacy, their closeness and their performance

convey something of O’Hara, naked, postured, made, and

immediately unquestionable, recognizable and pure. And

after “Essay on Style” we are on to Mary Desti’s Ass, which

we never do get news of.

from Essay on Style

[…] drinking a cognac while Edwin

read my new poem it occurred to me how impossible

it is to fool Edwin not that I don’t know as

much as the next about obscurity in modern verse

but he

always knows what it’s about as well

as what it is do you think we can ever

strike as and but, too, out of the language

then we can attack well since it has no

application whatsoever neither as a state

of being or a rest for the mind no such

things available

where do you think I’ve

got to? the spectacle of a grown man

decorating

a Christmas tree disgusts me that’s

where

that’s one of the places yetbutaswell

I’m glad I went to that party for Ed Dorn

last night though he didn’t show up do you think

,Bill, we can get rid of though also, and also?

maybe your

lettrism is the only answer treating

the typewriter as an intimate organ why not?

nothing else is (intimate)

no I am not going

to have you “in“ for dinner nor am I going “out”

I am going to eat alone for the rest of my life

9

A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A

Hôtel Transylvanie—Barbara Guest

The first clue to the meaning of the poem is the title, a

nineteenth-century title. Transylvania belonged once to

the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It belonged once to Romania.

It is in the Carpathian Mountains where Dracula comes

from. Although we note O’Hara does not mention this

blood-thirsty Count.

In our times the Carpathians have been a refuge for those

fleeing the Communist regimes of Romania and Hungary.

It is just possible that this hotel with the haunted name may

have been noted by O’Hara on his walks in Paris, and that

his imagination lent to it a sinister aspect and an accord

with a rumored place of political refuge, as much as with

Count Dracula.

If the Hôtel Transylvanie were staged, and the poem is

theatrical as are many of O’Hara’s poems, the hotel guests

would wear masks. Disguise is a theme of the poem. Another

is chance. Chance has a role in gambling and poetry. In a

place like the Hôtel Transylvanie they may speak of political

duels; there is even a mention by the poet of “rigging the

deck” (of cards). These guests have escaped from a sinister

regime; they may be in disguise, in order to live.

it will take them a long time to know

who I am/ why I came there/ what and why I am and made to happen…

The residents of the Hôtel believe in chance, which may help

them to survive while gambling with cards and with life.

oh hôtel, you should be merely a bed

surrounded by walls where two souls meet […]

but not as cheaters at card have something to win….

O’Hara is wishing there were not the false note, that the

poem would not be forced to obey the omens, the music of

the poem be less forbidding. In this sort of hotel faces wear a

mask. O’Hara puts on his mask as the poem gradually edges

toward the zones of danger. The poem is now about surface

disequillibrium. The setting of the poem begins to wobble as

the inhabitants of the hotel hide in their dominos, hissing

Shall we win at love or shall we lose […]

but not as cheaters at cards have something to win…

their dubious origin and employment suggests a

sublime moment of dishonest hope….

This is a moment of melodrama, and one asks why, but the

poet is leading us through his own sense of the dramatic, or

melodramatic. He is aware that he will write something any

minute that will both puzzle and frighten the reader. It will

not be about the hotel, but about his own life. O’Hara has

been readying himself for this explosion about himself, the

mask he wears. He chooses now to take off his mask and

addresses himself:

you will continue to sing on trying to cheer everyone up

and they will know as they listen with excessive pleasure that you’re dead

and they will not mind that they have let you entertain

at the expense of the only thing you want in the world

This is a Shelleyan moment in O’Hara’s writing, the admitted

loss of poetic power. His time has been spent trying “to cheer

everyone up.” It is not that this poem is one of his triumphs.

In this poem he achieves what he has always attempted.

Poetry has presented him with fictions and too much reliance

on his genius. He has betrayed his abilities through pleasure

and power. It has eluded him until now, the icy experience of

the fleetingness of poetry, the possible loss, even when

addressed. Of the poetic moment. Now he confronts himself

in a moment of testing, and knows he has experienced the

loss he writes about, the loss of poetic power, and through

this moment of recognition regains it.

We realize his continued addressing of the hotel is due to an

identification with it in all its disguises, and the final disguise

is the hotel as the personification of himself when he urges:

oh hôtel […] you have only to be

as you are being, as you must be, as you always are […]

no matter what fate deals you or the imagination discards like a tyrant….

from Hôtel Transylvanie

Shall we win at love or shall we lose

can it be

that hurting and being hurt is a trick forcing the love

we want to appear, that the hurt is a card

and is it black? Is it red? Is it a paper, dry of tears

chevalier, change your expression! The wind is sweeping over

the gaming tables ruffling the cards/ they are black and red

like a Futurist torture and how do you know it isn’t always there

waiting while doubt is the father that has you kidnapped by friends

10

A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A

yet you will always live in a jealous society of accident

you will never know how beautiful you are or how beautiful

the other is, you will continue to refuse to die for yourself

you will continue to sing on trying to cheer everyone up

and they will know as they listen with excessive pleasure that you’re dead

and they will not mind that they have let you entertain

at the expense of the only thing you want in the world/ you are amusing

as a game is amusing when someone is forced to lose as in a game I must

[…]

The Sanity of Frank O’Hara—Thom Gunn

At first I found it difficult relating “To the Harbormaster”

with what I had already read by Frank O’Hara. I knew,

I suppose, mainly the Lunch Poems, written in a relaxed free

verse with a gentle jokey tone, full of the trivia of his lunch-

hour, which is somehow never boring. He enjoys himself in

those poems, and we enjoy ourselves too, his style being

immensely seductive (it’s the rhetoric of pretending to

have no rhetoric).

But “To the Harbormaster” is so sad! This one does not seem

improvised but is written, like late Shakespeare, in iambic lines

moving irregularly between tetrameter and pentameter, which

gives the poem a solemn and deliberate sound. “I am always

tying up/ and then deciding to depart.” Such an undecorated

statement may sound like the bemused self- deprecation of the

Lunch Poems, but it has more disastrous consequences. The

mastering image of the poem is of the body as boat— O’Hara

is both boat and captain of the boat: “with the metallic coils of

the tide/ around my fathomless arms” (the arms as ship’s

screws? He sounds a little like Inspector Gadget), “or I am hard

alee with my Polish rudder/ in my hand and the sun sinking“ he

is comically at a loss, with his penis useless in his hand: it is too

late, too late for anything, he is unable to understand the forms

of his vanity, and by that word he does not mean self-conceit,

but the essential triviality of human affairs, vanitas vanitatem.

The rhetoric of this poetry subsumes the jokes and the slightly

grotesque images in a quiet yearning despair.

After the sun has started sinking, the poem is able to accom-

modate even the offer of his will to the Harbormaster. But who

is the Harbormaster? Before I read Brad Gooch’s book, I

couldn’t make out if the poem was addressed to a lover or to

God. Gooch tells us it is to the painter Larry Rivers, but that

still does not eliminate the presence of other possibilities: it is

spoken, after all, to one who is in charge, or seems to be, the

lover with whom he can find no repose, lover as god, rather

like the addressee of Rochester’s poem “Absent from Thee”

(his wife, perhaps, spoken in terms of a God from whom he

has estranged himself through his vanity).

All of which sets us up for the admirable stoicism of the

ending—sturdy, brave and truthful:

Yet

I trust the sanity of my vessel; and

if it sinks, it may well be in answer

to the reasoning of the eternal voices,

the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Waves are the medium for a ship as the air is the medium for

a human being. They exist in an eternity different from

God’s, and different again from the life-span of the ship or

the man, and opposed to both, in a sense. That is the way

things are, and O’Hara had better trust in the sanity of his

body. “Sanity”—what a great word! It appears that both the

light-hearted hedonism of other poems and the stoicism of

this are equally based on this common sense, this steady

health of mind.

To The Harbormaster

I wanted to be sure to reach you;

though my ship was on the way it got caught

in some moorings. I am always tying up

and then deciding to depart. In storms and

at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide

around my fathomless arms, I am unable

to understand the forms of my vanity

or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder

in my hand and the sun sinking. To

you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage

of my will. The terrible channels where

the wind drives me against the brown lips

of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet

I trust the sanity of my vessel; and

if it sinks it may well be in answer

to the reasoning of the eternal voices,

the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

—

11

A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A

The Transparent Man1

T H E L A S T I N G A P P E A L

O F F R A N K O ’ H A R A—Brad Gooch

When I was an aspiring teenage poet skulking in my

bedroom in sixties suburban America—Wilkes-Barre,

Pa.—there was only Bob Dylan and T. S. Eliot. Then all of a

sudden there was Frank O'Hara. His admission into the little

pantheon I kept on my shelf was accomplished by The New

American Poetry, an anthology of post-war, anti-academic

poets edited by Donald Allen—re-issued a few years ago with

the less shiny title, The Postmoderns. Of all the poets

represented—including such innovators as Charles Olson,

Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer—O’Hara puzzled me the most.

From that puzzlement grew fascination and eventually,

full-blown, adolescent literary love.

Being a teenager, I was selfish. I didn’t read anything twice

that didn’t speak somehow to my cornered existence. I’d been

perfectly happy to sit at the diner with Dylan and Ginsberg,

ordering up frothy milkshakes of poetic prose and wolfing

down hamburgers spiced with the ketchup of radical politics.

But with O’Hara I felt as if I’d been invited to a more adult

restaurant—French?—where the cuisine wasn’t immediately

recognizable, but was invitingly complex, beautiful even. I

heard a poetic voice I couldn’t quite identify, but which in

retrospect was filled with ingredients I craved—Manhattan

slang, delinquent liberty, French surrealism, gay romance. I

would roll the line “My quietness has a man in it, he is

transparent” around in my head like a smooth, clear marble.

I also read in a biographical note that Kenneth Koch, a friend

of O’Hara’s, taught at Columbia College, so I resolved to

make my way somehow into his class, which, in 1971, I did.

By assigning written imitations of Rimbaud, Pound, Stevens,

and Williams, Koch freely spilled to us all the secret

ingredients of his and O’Hara’s poetry. He talked of the

grand permission O’Hara gave to include your own most

trivial daily thoughts and experiences in poetry—the “I do

this, I do that” aesthetic. He made a few dark comments

about O’Hara’s life at which my antennae shot up. “Avoid

masochistic love affairs,” he counseled us. “They interfere

with your poetry.” (I’m still not so sure about that one.)

Kenneth was indeed the toggle switch between the poetry and

the life. At a loft party for Allen Ginsberg, he said to me,

“Who do you want to meet?” “John Ashbery,” I answered

ambitiously, and soon John and I were talking. Then one

night at The Ninth Circle, an innocuous dance bar in the

West Village that attracted college students, Ashbery

introduced me to J.J. Mitchell, a boyfriend of O’Hara’s,

who’d been with him the night of his fatal accident.

The line between life and art was

more dotted by him than by any

poet. All information was at once

gossip and aesthetic illumination.

Still a student, I was soon attending parties at the poet

Kenward Elmslie’s townhouse. These were Frank O’Hara

parties—just without O’Hara, who’d been dead for five years

by then. I could hear snippets of that “voice” I’d first heard

on the page in “The Day Lady Died” or “Poem (Lana Turner

Has Collapsed!)” emerge ventriloquially from the mouths of

Alex Katz, or Joan Mitchell, or Joe LeSueur, or Patsy

Southgate. All I could bring to the table was the accidental

distinction of being one of the first of a generation who

hadn’t known O’Hara personally, yet was steeped enough in

the poems to be able to identify LeSueur as the owner of the

seersucker jacket of “Joe’s Jacket,” or Freilicher as the Jane

of “Chez Jane.” (The revelatory Collected Poems didn’t

appear until the end of 1971.) One night at a dinner party at

LeSueur’s my ears burned as dishy tales were told of O’Hara

over cognac and joints. I remember naively thinking, “I’d like

to write his biography,” never considering that I was a

twenty-year-old poet who could barely string five pages of

prose together for an academic essay.

12

A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A

1This article emerged from an interview with Rebecca Wolff, PSA’s Programs Associate.

Fifteen years later my life had become more prosaic. I had a

literary agent, and, soon enough, a publisher, and the kind

permission of O’Hara’s sister, Maureen, to write an author-

ized biography. While I was sympathetic with W.H. Auden’s

famous distaste for the exposure of poets’ lives, I felt that

part of O’Hara’s exceptionalism was that his poetry was a

teasing invitation to biography. While the footnotes—possum

prints or not—to Eliot’s The Waste Land sent the reader off

in search of St. Augustine’s Confessions or the libretto of

Wagner’s Tristan, O’Hara’s poems provoked the reader to

skim black-and-white snapshots of painters and poets clus-

tered in the Cedar Tavern. The line between life and art was

more dotted by him than by any poet. All information was at

once gossip and aesthetic illumination. O’Hara’s attitude on

the page made all traditional distinctions between minor and

major, life and art, seem hackneyed and fake—and so

emboldened a sympathetic biographer.

Writing a biography requires some method acting. You try to

imagine yourself in the head of the protagonist. (Having

worked my way through O’Hara’s childhood and the “letters

home” of his Navy years, I felt that I was perhaps coming at

his adult years differently from many of his contemporaries,

whose attitude about family and past, as Grace Hartigan

explained to me, tended to be, “You leave that!”) My own

social life picked up as I found myself attempting to channel

O’Hara’s buoyant, friendly, chatty demeanor at parties. I was

always memorizing one or another poem, running through it

on the subway. The words inevitably would ricochet with the

words of an O’Hara letter I was reading, or an interview, and

suddenly two dots would be connected. For instance, I read

how Daisy Alden discovered O’Hara crying at his own

thirtieth birthday party thrown at Grace Hartigan’s studio,

and saying, “Because today I am thirty years old and have so

little time left,” and I realized that this was the date he began

“In Memory Of My Feelings,” a poem written over four

days, which included the double-entendre, “Grace/to be born

and live as variously as possible.” Whatever mental light

bulbs were lit during the writing were switched on by

memorizing the poems, with the help as well of O’Hara’s

crammed date books.

One tired literary axiom is that biographers are inevitably

disillusioned by their subjects. O’Hara defied this rule as

well. For when I came to the end of City Poet: The Life and

Times of Frank O’Hara, I felt reassured that O’Hara had

pretty much been going on his nerve, just as I’d always imag-

ined he had, creating a life that perfectly fit the writer of

those intensely, achingly lyrical, yet oh so smartly urbane and

modern poems. In that sense, O’Hara’s life was an inspira-

tion. He was just a bit more complicated than even I’d

imagined. But how could he have had, as Larry Rivers

tabulated in his eulogy, “at least sixty people in New York

who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend,” and not

be complex?

Now when that line rolls through my head occasionally—

“My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent”—I can’t

help but continue with the nuance of the ensuing three lines,

which I didn’t understand so well before writing the biogra-

phy: “and he carries me quietly, like a gondola through the

streets./ He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like

numerals/ My quietness has a number of naked selves.”

13

A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A

What’s WithModern Art?1

THE ART REVIEWS

OF FRANK O’HARA—Michael Price

“What matters is not eternal life but eternal vivacity”—Friederich Nietzsche

It seems as though lately we can’t stop talking about

.Frank O’Hara. How fortunate! For O’Hara’s genius is,

as Charles Olson once advocated, to make the private act

public, and that private world we see in O’Hara’s varied

and spontaneous oeuvre is a public world of wonder.

How does this wonder figure into art reviews? With O’Hara,

it is the push magus. The poem meets the blurb meets

criticism. And what could be more earned and rewarding

than words from a poet who is so very much the movement

or impetus of the painter, of the gesture to make art, in his

life and in his poems? So it can be said that O’Hara is not a

critic. He is a poet first and also a great art mind. (Baudelaire

used to say that the best criticism of a work of art would be

another work of art). Craft and technique as concepts have

no place in an O’Hara review. Instead, thinking of his

famous quip from “Personism: A Manifesto,” O’Hara goes

on his own crepuscular nerve. His art writings are checkered

with off-hand one-liners, beautiful word-play and bona-fide

cognitive leaps that are genius. Take for example this from

“Blanche Dombek”:

They wipe from one’s mind some of their more graceful

contemporaries in the way that a gust of wind obliterates a

phrase of music when it is played in a stadium.

One thinks of Keats’ revelatory maxim “Beauty is truth,

truth beauty” in this excerpt from “Salvador Dali”:

...the artist himself, nude, conducts you into a beautiful candy-dream

where your faithful dog is asleep at your feet and the sea purrs at

your fingertips. There are sweet vapors and the rich revelatory grain

of woods and the vastly impressive passivity of megalomania, but it

is not exactly a revolutionary’s dream. He calls forth the minor or

repressed admirations, sexual, tactile sybaritic, technical—the subject

is no longer of paranoiac importance—and makes a monument.

The tradition of poet as art critic

has rich company in the twentieth

century: Stein, Yeats, Stevens,

Pound, Moore and Auden to name a

few. O’Hara takes an important

place in this lineage...

There is, as well, much of O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that”

sensibility in the art writings. His charm lies in his ease at

jumping from information (him telling you something you

can use) to prescience (his leaps into the unknown). Perhaps

the place this is most evident is in his comments titled David

Smith: Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing, which ran on

WNDT-TV (November 18, 1964):

It is the nature of sculpture to be there. If you don’t like it you wish

it would get out of the way, because it occupies space which your

body could occupy. Smith’s sculptures are, big or small, figurative or

abstract, very complete, very attentive to your presence, full of

interest in and for you. As an example, they have no boring views:

circle them as you may, they are never napping. They present a total

attention and they are telling you that that is the way to be. On

guard. In a sense they are benign, because they offer themselves for

your pleasure. But beneath that kindness is a warning: don’t be

bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial and be proud. The slightest loss

of attention leads to death. The primary passion in these sculptures is

14

1What’s with Modern Art?, edited By Bill Berkson (Mike and Dale’s Press, 1999).

A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A

to avert catastrophe, or to sink beneath it in a major way. So, as with

the Greeks, it is a tragic art.

O’Hara would famously make poems in the midst of a party.

He could also convey deep insight on visual arts on cue,

seemingly to anyone interested. His Q & A exposé in

Ingenue (December, 1964) with a group of high-school

students is at once a lesson on humor, particularity,

compassion, wit, and beauty. Take this exchange as example:

Q: Is it in poor taste to admire and like an artist who is still

alive and near to the art world, especially if what he paints

appeals to teen-agers in style and color? Jane Cee Salmy,

Morristown High School, New Jersey

A: It is never in poor taste to admire anyone, except possibly

someone like Hitler. It is especially important to admire an

artist while he is alive, so that he may have some pleasure

and comfort as a result of his efforts. If what he paints

appeals to teenagers, it should hardly be held against him

since teens are the future and an integral part of his

audience.

The tradition of poet as art critic has rich company in the

twentieth century: Stein, Yeats, Stevens, Pound, Moore and

Auden to name a few. O’Hara takes an important place in

this lineage, especially given that the shift of consciousness

that emerged within the Abstract Expressionist phenomena in

New York could be seen, from a Western historical

perspective, as the most substantial shift in the movement of

visual art since cave etchings. And with our own dearth of

synergy (I speak for myself and you) between the two genres

today (on the West Coast there isn’t a poet and a painter

living within 400 miles of each other), O’Hara’s example

becomes particularly poignant. His is a historical model, and

my generation would do well to take heed and study it, say,

like auto mechanics or method acting.

Of course, one could just leave off with any analysis of his

prowess as a critic and simply enjoy the particular wit and

confidence in the reviews that typify an O’Hara poem. One

could just read the book. Or one could call up Bill Berkson

for a quick tutorial or the inside story, as his knowledge of

O’Hara’s life and writings is second to none. I’ve had the

luck of doing both.

15

A T R I B U T E T O F R A N K O ’ H A R A

Back row, left to right: Lisa de Kooning; film director Frank Perry and his wife, script writer Eleanor Perry; John Myers; Anne Porter; Fairfield Porter;

interior designer Angelo Torricini; pianist Arthur Gold; Jane Wilson; Kenward Elmslie; painter Paul Brach; Jerry Porter (behind Brach, Nancy Ward;

Katharine Porter). Second row, left to right: Joe Hazan; Clarice Rivers; Kenneth Koch; Larry Rivers. Seated on couch: Miriam Shapiro (Brach); pianist

Robert Fizdale; Jane Freilicher; Joan Ward; John Kacere; Sylvia Maizell. Kneeling on the right, back to front: Alvin Novak; Bill de Kooning; Jim Tommaney. Front

row: Stephen Rivers; Bill Berkson; Frank O’Hara; Herbert Machiz. Water Mill, Long Island, 1961.

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