The Significance of Frank o'Hara

Author(s): Charles Altieri

Source: The Iowa Review , Winter, 1973, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter, 1973), pp. 90-104
Published by: University of Iowa

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20158007

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The Significance of Frank O'Hara

Charles Altieri

Frank O'Hara's verse play, "Try, Try," provides us the most ready access to
many characteristic qualities of his fictive world.1 On the surface, and the play
is all surface, it appears merely a reminder of how far verse drama has slipped
even from Eliot's not very successful attempts to bring dramatic verse to the
world of contemporary cocktail parties. "Try, Try" presents us with two lovers,
Violet and John, whose delightful provocations of each other are rudely inter
rupted by the return of Violet's husband, Jack, from the war. Jack, though,
proves not much of an obstacle to their love. Asked by Violet to leave, he calmly
accepts his fate and the play ends with the lovers triumphantly in each other's
arms. The play is farce, or better pop art, deliberately refusing Eliot's symbols
and portentous psychological probings; the play, in fact, even refuses the con
ventional means for theatrical action in the love triangle plot. There is no vio
lence, no passionate confrontation, and no insight or recognition of any truths,
profound or otherwise, by the characters?if characters we can call such un
differentiated dramatic agents.
Yet the play is both entertaining in itself and indicative of O'Hara's world
view?precisely in the way O'Hara manipulates absolutely trivial and conven
tional materials. We realize first of all that such materials are a comment on
contemporary reality and on the materials that reality affords the artist. Tradi
tionally verse was called for in drama only when the materials were of the
greatest importance, when the playwright wanted to project the nobility of his
characters or have at his disposal linguistic and rhythmic means capable of
rendering serious and complex materials. In "Try, Try," on the other hand,
verse is required because the material is so slight; only elaborate and witty
language can interest us in such painfully insignificant and typical people and
situations. Like many other pop artists, O'Hara is reminding us that our age
has lost whatever it was that allowed people to think that certain materials
were intrinsically significant and fit material for serious artistic exploration. The
world no longer sustains or inspires powerful language. Yeats once said that
modern tragedy was impossible because modern man, when deeply moved, did
not indulge in emotional outbursts but stared quietly at the fireplace. Now, as
Ionesco reminds us, even the man moved enough to stare at the fireplace seems

1 "Try, Try" is published in Herbert Machiz, ed., Artists' Theatre: Four Plays ( New
York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 15-42. O'Hara's poems and essays are collected in Donald
Allen, ed., The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (New York: Knopf, 1971). The two
works will be cited in the text as AT and CP.

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somehow ridiculous. Powerful language is no longer a response to the intensity
of experience but to its poverty; we need the artifice of witty and elaborate
speech because without it we would have only the pressure of an absurd and
oppressive reality. In one of his poems, O'Hara is eating a cheeseburger in
Juliet's Corner when he fantasizes an association with Giuletta Massina, "?
bell' attrice" (CP, 258). In this situation, "? bell' attrice" is a contemporary
version of Beatrice, now not a light leading us through the world to a trans
cendent informing principle but a goddess of illusion redeeming us only mo
mentarily from the stereotyped trivia dominating our lives (cf. also "Galanta,"
CP, 463-64).
As a poet, O'Hara explores facets of the pop aesthetic which nicely comple
ment and confute the thinking of Bly and Olson. In "Try, Try," the lover, John,
does not win the girl from her husband, Jack, because of any inherent character
traits. The men are almost exactly alike (as the names indicate), and if anyone
were to have moral claims it would be the husband, who is also returning from
service to his country. John wins simply because he has been living with the
girl, wins that is because he has been present, there, while the husband was ab
sent. Here is Violet's rejection of her husband: "I wish you'd/go away and stay
away. All you've done is kept me/looking out windows, wondering what things
were/really like. Get out!" (AT, 39). The lover's seconding remarks are as
philosophical as O'Hara will allow himself to be:

You've got a claim on it, but I've got it

These things don't happen temporarily . . .

I suppose I'm the snake-in-the-grass but

I can't say I'm sorry. Someone has to smile
at her as she comes back from the bathroom.
Do you think everything can stay the same,
like a photograph? What for?
(AT, 41)

Presence then is a central value for O'Hara; but what kind of presence is it
he affirms? First and foremost it is a demystified one stripped of the ontological
vestments with which Bly and Olson endow it. For O'Hara the open road has
lost its resident gods capable of mastering and directing the ego. There remains
only the present as landscape without depth, satisfying only by contrast to the
anxiety Violet felt when she tried to refer her condition to the needs and de
mands of an absent master. And if the present is without depth, whatever vital
qualities it has depend entirely on the energies and capacities of the conscious
ness encountering it. Olson had opposed the dangerous tendencies towards
passivity (the merger with the all which is death) in poetics like Bly's by in
sisting that man fulfills himself only in action. Yet this active creative self is
always grounded in a cosmos at once lawful and itself continuously emergent
or creative. With O'Hara, the self must be creative without a ground; value
depends entirely on the vitality with which one engages his experiences:

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 You are of me, that's what
and that's the meaning of fertility
hard and moist and moaning2 (CP, 387)

In "Fantasy," the concluding poem in Lunch Poems, O'Hara tells us, "The
main thing is to tell a story./It is almost/very important," and he ends the fan
tasy with the playful reminder, "Never argue with the movies" (CP, 488).
Literally the lines refer to a movie, Northern Pursuit, which, because it is either
in his memory or on television, keeps intruding into his consciousness as he
prepares medicine for Allen Ginsberg and converses with him. Seen, however,
as figurative comments on the poetry of the entire volume, the lines become
much more resonant. We notice first of all, in this poem titled "Fantasy," the
emphasis on story, an emphasis I take to be a way of summarizing the necessary
and superficial creative intelligence celebrated in "Try, Try" and in the exu
berance of Lunch Poems. The story is only "almost" very important both because
the movie, Northern Pursuit, is a trite one, and more significantly because, given
the centrality of stories or fictions, there are no acceptable structures of value
to define genuine hierarchies of importance. And without terms which can dis
tinguish the important from the trivial, there is a concomitant breakdown in our
sense of the necessary boundaries between fantasy and reality. Why privilege
reality, even if we can distinguish it from fiction? Matters of truth then merge
with matters of the creative imagination, and the imagination itself can no
longer assume its noble form-creating role but tends instead to be conceived as
story-maker whose major medium is the B movie, the public equivalent of
private daydreams. The movies then are at once emblem of contemporary views
on the nature of reality (who hasn't seen his life as a B movie and himself as
seedy director powerless to do more, with the budget and script he's been
given?) and moral witness of our times. It is folly to argue with them for two
reasons: our arguments have no grounds not themselves as fictive and super
ficial as the movies, and (as the poem, "Ave Maria" suggests, CP, 371-72) we
stand to lose more than we would gain if we successfully argue with the movies.
The movies at least engage our imaginations and enliven experience; most of
the forms of argument used to refute movie truth are themselves analytic and
sterile ways of returning us to the poverty of a present emptied of all vitality.3

2 O'Hara's differences from Olson on creativity are analagous to the difference between
pop and dada acts of creativity which endow the objects with importance (Duchamp's
urinal for example) and the abstract expressionist creativity whereby one is both subject
and object of the forces realized in the act of creating. O'Hara though, as I shall show,
often goes beyond pop creativity to merge his own creative acts with the energies of
the city. But even then there is an emphasis on the surface qualities of the object foreign
to Olson and to Pollock.
3 "To put it very gendy, I have a feeling that the philosophical reduction of reality
to a dealable-with system so distorts life that one's 'reward' for this endeavor ... is
illness both from inside and outside" (CP, 495). Nonetheless, my own analysis of O'Hara,
particularly the discussion of story is based on a philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who tries

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 The way out of this emptiness is the story, but story in O'Hara requires care
ful definition since he is in no way a traditional narrative poet. Possible forms
of story, of course, are fantasy, and the witty artifice of "Try, Try," forms
O'Hara normally equates with pop art (see "Poem" on Lana Turner, CP, 449).
But for O'Hara life provides fictions both more superficial and more interesting
than pure fantasy or artifice. The poet keeps his story alive by a loving fidelity
to the specific facts and qualities of his daily experience?seen for themselves
and not as the building blocks of larger, more significant wholes traditionally
called poems:

I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times

when I would rather be dead the thought that I could never write another
poem has so far stopped me. . . . What is happening to me, allowing for
lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don't
think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone
else,. . .
It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and
restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible
quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial.
(CP, 500)

It is in this context of life continually providing materials for the story that
we must understand O'Hara's love affair with New York City (cf. "Steps," CP,
370-71). For the city is a continual source of interesting and engaging details.
Moreover, the city is a perfect metaphor for O'Hara's sense of the value in
these details. Presence in the city is antithetical to presence in nature. City
details after all have neither meaning, hierarchy nor purpose not created abso
lutely by man. And more important, the city is committed to perpetual change;
there are no enduring seasonal motifs or patterns of duration underlying and
sustaining the multiplicity of city phenomena. They exist completely in the
moment. And they exist superficially. In the city, as in O'Hara's ontology, in
teresting and engaging details are continually becoming present. Yet not only
do these momentary apparitions promise no underlying significance or mean
ings to be interpreted, they actually resist any attempt on our part to know
them better. City life offers a series of phenomena to notice, perhaps to play
with in one's own psyche, but very rarely do these phenomena inspire or wel
come any attempt to participate in their lives. O'Hara's analogue for the spe
cific form of presence manifested by the city is his way of naming. His texture
of proper names gives each person and detail an identity, but in no way do the
names help the reader understand anything about what has been named. To

to work out the epistemological and ethical implications of a post-modern reality without
depth and impossible to interpret. I use the term story as literary embodiment of what
Derrida calls "free play," in a world whose givenness is all we can have. And central in
that givenness is our own creative play among the phenomena we encounter. (Derrida
insists far more than O'Hara on the strictly verbal qualities of this given reality. )

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know a lunch counter is called Juliet's Corner or a person O'Hara expects to
meet is named Norman is rather a reminder for the reader that the specific
details of another's life can appear only as momentary fragments, insisting
through their particularity on his alienation from any inner reality they might
possess.
What makes O'Hara so interesting a poet is his sense at once of the necessity
for story, of its superficiality, and of the pain potentially lurking in every mo
ment. The dialectic between presence and alienation we find in his use of
names is more strikingly evident in the larger rhythms of his work. Coexisting
with O'Hara's evident joy in a kaleidoscopic rush of details and encounters
are frequent perceptions of a lurking anxiety ready to seize him if the flow of
events should give it a moment's foothold:

I ducked out of sight behind the saw-mill

nobody saw me because of the falls and the gates the sluice the
tourist boats
the children were trailing their fingers in the water
and the swans, regal and smarty, were nipping their "little"
fingers

I heard one swan remark "That was a good nip

though they are not as interesting as sausages" and another
reply "Nor as tasty as those peanuts we got away from the
elephant that time"
but I didn't really care for conversation that day
I wanted to be alone
which is why I went to the mill in the first place
now I am alone and hate it
I don't want to just make boards for the rest of my life
I'm distressed
the water is very beautiful but you can't go into it
because of the gunk
and the dog is always rolling over, I like dogs on their 'little" feet
I think I may scamper off to Winnipeg to see Raymond
but what'll happen to the mill
I see the cobwebs collecting already
and later those other webs, those awful predatory webs
if I stay right here I will eventually get into the newspapers
like Robert Frost
willow trees, willow trees they remind me of Desdemona
I'm so damned literary
and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of
nothing
I'm so damned empty
what is all this vessel shit anyway
we are all rushing down the River Happy Times

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 ducking poling bumping sinking and swimming
and we arrive at the beach
the chaff is sand
alone as a tree bumping another tree in a storm
that's not really being alone, is it, signed The Saw
(CP, 428-429)

To be "alone" is also to be all one, but again like city life O'Hara has only the
unity of mad process trying to make up in motion what it lacks in meaning.
The self threatens always to dissipate into the surfaces it contemplates, to be
come merely a "skein of lust" (CP, 403) unwinding in time. Yet one need only
recognize the dangers to overcome them, to reaffirm his commitment and love
of the processes he's engaged in: one must maintain, he tells us in his essay on
Nakian, "a kind of despairing sensual delight" by achieving "a relation with
physical truth that is both stoic and sybaritic."4 Notice how in the poem I've
quoted, O'Hara never dwells on the problems but keeps turning instead to the
details of the scene or his own fantasies of future possibilities. "Naphtha" offers
an even better example of a conclusion nicely capturing both the underlying
sterility of his experience and the rich union of stoic and sybaritic he makes
of it:
how are you feeling in ancient September
I am feeling like a truck on a wet highway
how can you
you were made in the image of god
I was not
I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver
and Jean Dubuffet painting his cows
"with a likeness burst in the memory"
apart from love (don't say it)
I am ashamed of my century
for being so entertaining
but I have to smile (CP, 338)
He "has" to smile?because he has no alternative, but also because his and his
century's absurd situation are genuinely entertaining. O'Hara has to smile, not
to laugh, and in that small difference we can realize the distance between his
genuinely sybaritic stoicism and the less humane anguish of the black humorist.
Ontologically, O'Hara's demystified sense of process is very close to the tragic
Lowell of Notebook, but there are two major differences. First there is O'Hara's
exuberance; his awareness of lurking emptiness generates neither a constant
sense of how forced pleasure is nor the limited ego context which is all Lowell
can trust. All O'Hara's poems are intensely personal, but they retain, even cele
brate, the necessary public dimension and shared quality of the surfaces which

4 Quoted in Richard Howard's fine essay on O'Hara in Alone With America ( New
York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 403.

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constitute his story.5 The more important contrast lies in O'Hara's treatment of
anxiety. For O'Hara the tragic themes so celebrated by the existentialist tradi
tion are both ridiculous and dangerous. The tragic seems ridiculous because of
its exalted and probably false sense of the heroic embattled ego?even if the
ego is in the kathartic process of learning cosmic pity: "The strange career of a
personality begins at five and ends/forty minutes later in a fog the rest is just a
lot of stranded/ships honking their horns full of joy-seeking cadets in bloomers"
(CP, 392). The goal is not meeting or defying fate but "avoiding it" (CP, 365),
and tragic themes are dangerous because they encourage us to think we can
turn on our anxieties and successfully wrestle them to the ground. But we are
more like Actaeon than Hercules, more prone to be devoured by anxiety than
to conquer it in direct conflict.
"Adieu To Norman, Bon Jour To Joan and Jean-Paul" summarizes most of
O'Hara's poetic strategies and makes evident the differences from Lowell:

It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering

if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch
ah lunch! I think I am going crazy
what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up
at excitement-prone Kenneth Koch's
I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems
at Joan's studio for a new book by Grove Press
which they will probably not print
but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night
wondering whether you are any good or not
and the only decision you can make is that you did it

yesterday I looked up the rue Fr?micourt on a map

and was happy to find it like a bird
flying over Paris et ses environs
which unfortunately did not include Seine-et-Oise
which I don't know
as well as a number of other things
and Allen is back talking about god a lot

5 Derrida, in his essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play," in Richard Macksey and Eugenio
Donato, eds., The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins, 1970), pp. 247-265, distinguishes between the "nostalgia" of most Western
poetry and metaphysics seeking a center or source of reference and value which can
define and interpret the value of specific phenomenal experiences and a kind of
Nietzschean free play which, rather than lament the continually displaced quality of
phenomena, accepts and revels in the freedom of their lack of external or referential
definition. Lowell is a poet of nostalgia, while O'Hara keeps us aware of the potential
nostalgia but refuses to submit to a suffering which seems even more purposeless than
the phenomena he possesses. (To see how close O'Hara is to Derrida on this theme
consult his refutation of Lionel Abel's "nineteenth century" expectations that Pasternak
should exhibit the "grief-expression of the romantic hero," CP, 504. )

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 and Peter is back not talking very much
and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth's
although he is coming to lunch with Norman
I suspect he is making a distinction
well, who isn't

I wish I were reeling around Paris

instead of reeling around New York
I wish I weren't reeling at all
it is Spring the ice has melted the Ricard is being poured
we are all happy and young and toothless
it is the same as old age
the only thing to do is simply continue
is that simple
yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do
can you do it
yes, you can because it is the only thing to do
blue light over the Bois de Boulogne it continues
the Seine continues
the Louvre stays open it continues it hardly closes at all
the Bar Am?ricain continues to be French
de Gaulle continues to be Algerian as does Camus
Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb
and Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher (I think!)
and Irving Sandier continues to be the balayeur des artistes
and so do I (sometimes I think I'm "in love" with painting)
and surely the Piscine Deligny continues to have water in it
and the Flore continues to have tables and newspapers
and people under them
and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy
we shall be happy
but we shall continue to be ourselves everything
continues to be possible
Ren? Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn't it
I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don't believe it

Just as one has no grounds to measure adequately good and bad and so must
look only at the qualities of his life as process (11. 10-11), the poem can only
counter the anxieties which continue to oppress by turning time and again to
the details and possibilities to which we can keep saying yes, even if we don't
believe them. O'Hara's characteristic strategies are clearest in the fourth stanza.
In the initial line he tries to encounter his present sense of emptiness with an
escape into fantasy and a possible future, but the escape doesn't work. By the
third line he is returned to a dangerously static vision of himself as object (in
stead of as actor playing a creative role in process), one he only escapes by
completely changing his vision and his theme to an awareness of the weather.

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And even here O'Hara is careful to avoid any illusion of depth. He swiftly
metamorphoses spring's melting ice into the ice at cocktail parties so that none
of spring's traditional symbolic overtones can emerge. For to admit spring as a
symbolic entity is to remain on the symbolic generalized level of discourse where
the problem of rootlessness is most pressing. While symbolic solutions might
convince one for the moment he's overcome a philosophical problem, they also
tempt his consciousness to continue operating on levels where further anxieties
are inevitable. Symbolism perpetually promises qualities of experience which
are not present and hence problematic.
O'Hara himself is one whom other poets love for saying yes but do not ac
tually believe. His influence and popularity are considerably greater than his
achievement?a phenomenon attributable to many factors including his sheer en
tertainment value and the notoriety of his pathetic and unexpected death. But
most of all I think his popularity stems from his sybaritic stoicism, or perhaps
affirmative skepticism, and from his articulation of strategies, attitudes and val
ues which other poets find themselves momentarily sharing. In addition, many
of O'Hara's strategies can be adapted to qualities of experience less camp and
aggressively superficial. While O'Hara reduces the present to sheer surface and
the creative play of the individual consciousness, he also points to materials
and attitudes which might constitute a genuine moral vision free of the systematic
and abstract distortions of most philosophical attempts to define value.
Let us take as an example of O'Hara's centrality the question of how poets
can handle moral materials within a philosophy of radical presence no longer
able to lean on Bly and Olson's ontological crutches. Given the insistence on
the open road and the denial of referential moral systems, it is impossible for
the poet to affirm a morality stressing contents. The poet cannot recommend
specific actions to be universally imitated, nor even propose very specific moral
criteria individuals can use in defining their own rights and wrongs. All he can
do is offer a set of moral attitudes. The poet illustrates and exemplifies modes
of engaging whatever experiences a person might have, and his work becomes
testament to the kind of effects these attitudes might have.6 This sense that
poetry is moral through the attitudes it embodies permeates contemporary poetry,
and O'Hara is an influential example of both a specific strategy and the gen
eral framework supporting such an emphasis: think for example of poets like
Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Bly and W. S. Merwin, who seek to embody
modes of consciousness which one can or must inhabit to intuit moral truths;
or consider others like John Logan, Bill Knott, David Ignatow and John Ash
bery (O'Hara's close friend whose ironic and disembodied voice suggests a mode
of living almost exactly opposite O'Hara's, though the two share the same on
tology) whose attitudes are more directly moral, more concerned with ways of
acting in relation to suffering and to other people, than they are with leading us
to ontological truths. What all share, though, is a tendency to expand tradi
tional lyric modes so that they become existential strategies. Lyric poetry has

6 This is precisely what Robert Motherwell does in O'Hara's collection of his work and
his reflections, Robert Motherwell (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1965), p. 53.

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always had as its primary function the invention and testing of attitudes toward
experience, and persona was a primary critical category for critics of the fifties.
But within the tradition attitude was always supplementary to the moral quali
ties of the experience itself. Thus critics and poets could conceive persona iron
ically and contemplate the gap between ideal modes of response suggested by
the experience and the specific moral or intellectual failures of the specific voice
in the poem. Contemporary poets cannot afford to be ironic about their persona
because they cannot trust, either in the poem or in reality, that the experience
itself provides norms for judging the response. Rather only the response itself?
its appeal for the reader and the possibilities it offers for keeping him open to
the reality of his own experiences?can be the measure of the poet's moral value.
O'Hara's specific attitude is also very influential?not only to those New York
poets who continue in the pop art tradition but to others more taken by his hu
mility and affirmative skepticism. The qualities of skepticism and humility in
fact often go hand in hand, for it is always tempting, if not always possible, to
extend one's skepticism about external values to skepticism about the self. And
O'Hara's poetry does just that: one so aware of the arbitrary creativity he re
quires to keep the present vital is not apt to take either himself, his poetry, or
his world view as possible salvation for everyone. So O'Hara presents us with
demystified views of both the reconciliation of opposites and the poetic image.
The high Romantic doctrine of the form-creating imagination unifying and
reconciling opposites promises a solution at once unlikely without distorting ex
perience and undesirable. For what makes life interesting are precisely the facts
of confusion, contradiction, and the constant presence of alternatives. O'Hara
approaches Olson's contention that only the multiplicity of the real can recon
cile images, but he remains aware that this multiplicity will always seem con
tradictory to human consciousness. Yet like Donald Barthelme, his counterpart
in prose fiction, O'Hara celebrates just this ironic reality of human experience.
In a similar way O'Hara presents a skeptical view of the poetic image: it is
neither means for capturing the Gott-natur nor collocation of topos, typos and
tropos. Most often it is merely topos, the accurate and engaged description of
interesting facets of experience, but when topology is not creative enough the
poet self-consciously creates startling images and metaphors. O'Hara never al
lows himself, or us, to confuse will and perception, to mistake careful rhetorical
construction for discovered ontological or psychological truth.7

7 We might distinguish four attitudes towards the image-imitation, two traditional

views and two versions of expressive immanence. Almost no contemporary poet
has an imitative aesthetic; poetry for them is an act in experience, not copying of it.
Nor are many poets self-expressive, in the sense of the Romantic or religious lyric. But
many have a slightly different attitude towards expression: in expressing himself the
poet presents an event in which the energies of experience find definition, form, and
resonance through the poet's language. Poetics of immanence usually exhibit this concep
tion of the poet as at once subject and object, as creative medium for the immanent
qualities of experience always there but only brought to consciousness in poetic language.
The danger of this conception, however, is that the poet often confuses his own will
with genuine immanence. Self-expression masks itself as expression of the world, a

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 O'Hara's resultant universe may be superficial and impoverished, but it is
also fun?and fun with a strong measure of truth. The second of O'Hara's "2
Poems from the Ohara Monogatari," with the skeptical attitude towards created
images and monistic world views, exemplifies both the truth and the fun:

After a long trip to a shrine

in wooden clogs so hard on the muscles
the tea is bitter and the breasts are hard
so much terrace for one evening

there is no longer no ocean

I don't see the ocean under my stilts
as I poke along

hands on ankles feet on wrists

naked in thought
like a whip made from sheerest stockings

the radio is on the cigarette is puffed upon

by the pleasures of rolling in a bog
some call the Milky Way
in far-fetched Occidental lands above the trees
where dwell the amusing skulls (CP, 213)

The poem is never really meditative, but given its oriental setting and religious
overtones the first two stanzas could be a slightly cranky version of modish
Western poems about Eastern religion. Even the transformation of the wooden
clogs into stilts need not yet suggest an equation between humble Eastern re
ligions and Yeats' self-conscious creative poet on his stilts. It is only in the
tliird stanza that the irony takes over and reminds us that religion, Eastern or
Western, is a creature of the fictive imagination. At the moment when the medi
tative state seems realized ("naked in thought"), O'Hara introduces the meta
phor of a whip made of sheer stockings. The metaphor is high camp, at once
completely arbitrary and an ironic reminder of how out of tune urban Western
man is with whatever natural and religious energies he hopes to experience in
the setting. Finally, this intrusion of self-consciousness leads to the last stanza's
presentation of the pain and death we willfully overlook in turning to Eastern
monistic visions of cosmic unity?a unity mocked, one might add, by the obvi
ous way the poet's mind cannot satisfactorily merge into the scene.

phenomenon we find recurrent especially in deep image poetry where often the most
arbitrary images are proposed as dynamic experiences of creative objective energy
coursing through the poet. The fourth approach to the image accepts, and often revels
in, the self's freedom to endow experience with imaginative significance. O'Hara, like
few other contemporaries, uses both the expressive and created images without confusing
the two.

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 There is, however, another sense in which O'Hara's materials are at least as
important as his attitudes to his influential position, not in their camp specifics
but as indications of areas in human experience not often mined by poets. For
O'Hara is quintessentially a poet of the domestic and the quotidian, and few
poets, thank God, share his sense of what the domestic and quotidian entails.
But the success of any domestic poetry encourages others to look freshly at the
immediate experiences which matter to them and to ask poetically why they
matter. As John Ashbery asks, "Have you begun to be in the context you feel?"
Moreover, the philosophy I've extracted from O'Hara can be used to rediscover
the moral content of domestic experience. For we need not believe in numinous
forces in order to recognize specific values in the present scene. We are, in fact,
continually creating not only stories but values in all sorts of pre-reflective and
pre-philosophical ways?in our choices, our commitments, and even in our com
promises and acceptances.8 If we can become aware of how important these
energies, desires, and commitments are to our enjoyment of life, we can realize
how fully we in fact do live in a present charged with value contexts we can
define philosophically only with great difficulty. In effect, O'Hara encourages
us to take Olson's admonitions about use and our necessity to recover the fa
miliar without the ontological, cosmic, and epic perspectives Olson cloaks them
in. These grand ideas, as much of Olson's poetry unfortunately indicates, tend
to lead us away from what they encourage us to recover. We need instead the
joyful, confident humility and honesty so fully witnessed in O'Hara's poetry.
Paul Carroll is the first critic I know to claim a really influential role in con
temporary poetry for O'Hara. My argument complements and extends his,
which deals primarily with the aesthetic aspects of the themes of domesticity
and the process of continual creation. O'Hara's influence, he says, stems from
three related factors in his work. He makes clear for poets how the dada and
expressionist doctrines of creation can work for them, for his poems continually
insist that they are not representations of reality but the enactment by the artist
of certain attitudes and choices within that reality. Consequently there are no
canonical or privileged subjects for poetry: "Anything, literally, can exist in a
poem; and anything can exist in whatever way the poet chooses." O'Hara then
shows how the poet need no longer feel committed to organic unity as a prin
ciple of poetic construction. His details need not be chosen because they en
hance a specific lyric point or attitude; the objects chosen can embody the mul
tiple facets of experience, only some of which might be essential to the lyric

8 Kenneth Rexroth, in Assays ( Norfolk, Conn., 1961 ) and The Alternate Society ( New
York: Herder and Herder, 1970) is the poet and critic most conscious of how significant
the contemporary emphasis on domestic materials can be. Opposing Williams to the
poetic defenders of "civilization," he reminds us that the true "power" and "almost
inextinguishable life" of civilization "consists of things like your cats stepping over the
window sill." Williams had so much to give because he knew what he had already
(Assays, 204). Few of us, Rexroth points out, are called to imitate the lofty actions of
the world's great books, but "we are all called to be human" and can imitate a poetry of
attention and reverence ( Assays, 207 ).

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feeling. This anti-organicist aesthetic Carroll defines as the aesthetic of the "im
pure poem."9
The idea of the "impure poem" is both helpful and dangerous. It is helpful in
so much as it calls our attention to the materials and attitudes the contempo
raries try to give poetic expression, but it oversimplifies the texture of relation
ships in the best poems using such materials. The organic poem need not be
the singleminded evocation of simple emotions; "organic" simply means that all
the aesthetic choices contribute to the complex effect of the poem. It is true that
many of O'Hara's poems do not aim at single lyric effects but focus instead,
like Duchamp's urinal and Warhol's Campbell's soup cans, on celebrating the
powers of artistic choice and thus reminding us of the simple levels at which
value experience continually takes place. But O'Hara's best lyrics employ details
both as specific references to an impure, discontinuous texture of experience
and as carefully related elements in a complex lyric feeling.
"The Day Lady Died" is Carroll's example of the archetypal impure poem; but
that poem to me is one of the finest examples of the rich poetic possibilities in
the domestic lyric O'Hara encouraged. The poem not only captures the vitality
of pre-reflective experience but arranges that experience so it participates in and
evokes for consciousness a complex, satisfying and relatively traditional lyric
emotion:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les N?gres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and

9 The Poem In Its Skin (Chicago: Follett, 1968), 157-165; quote p. 163.

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 then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the John door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing (CP, 325)

One way of seeing how the poem is impure, Carroll suggests, is to recognize
that twenty lines are devoted to the casual events of O'Hara's day and only four
to the ostensive subject of the poem. He goes on, though, to offer two insights
which help explain how the artist's apparently free creative selection of details
really creates a single complex lyric emotion:

I wonder how touching that beautiful final memory . . . would be if

O'Hara had preceded it with emotional tributes and 'props' customary in
most traditional elegies. . . .
In another sense, 'The Day Lady Died' isn't about Billie Holliday at all.
It is about the common but sobering feeling that life continues on its
bumbling way despite the tragic death of an important artist or some loved
one.10

But it is not only the general configuration of details, the contrast between
bumbling life and the suddenness of death which unifies the poem. The actual
particulars by which the poem captures the vitality of life at the same time con
stantly call attention to their own contingency and perpetual hovering on the
brink of disconnection. O'Hara has plans for dinner but doesn't know the people
who will feed him; he is divorced in space and attitude from the Ghana poets, in
time and habit from the writers mentioned in the third stanza (one usually does
not "sleep with quandariness"?one sleeps from boredom and the lack of choice?
but O'Hara wants to suggest connections between multiplicity, lack of connec
tions guiding choice and forms of death); he encounters probably for the
hundredth time a bank teller he has no communication with, yet who also dis
proves his expectations; and even the apparently most arbitrary item, the refer
ence to Bastille day, has a curious appositeness in a poem so thoroughly about
death, separation, and the fragility of established order. Moreover, the "and"
rhetoric so pronounced in the poem further enhances one's sense of the tangen
tial and problematic links between particulars: parataxis calls attention to the
rush of time piling up details united only by sequential time alien to more dis
cerning, spec?Fically human patterns of relationship. The rush of life then em
bodies also a process of continual death leading to the climactic stoppages of
life and breath in the last four lines. But the initial twenty lines also allows the

10 Carroll, p. 160.

103 Criticism

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poet to find a meaning in Billie's death, to see in her art and his memories of
it the experience of connection which counters and helps mollify the pains of
discontinuity. What he remembers about Billie is a moment of stasis that is at
once death and very intense life?death because it so divorces him from the nor
mal (and insignificant) activities of his daily life, and intense life for precisely
the same reason since it has been that life which is really involvement in con
tinual deaths. The moment he remembers is one of absolute communication
when Billie controlled the entire audience and led them to a single ecstasy
("everyone and I stopped breathing"). And O'Hara's poem is itself an act like
Billie Holliday's; the full elegiac effect depends on our union with his memory.
Like her singing the poem also can claim at least for a moment to transcend the
contingent multiplicities of daily experience and, through the poem's deliberate
slowing in these last lines, allow a brief space where we all stop that rushing
breath always associated with process in O'Hara and realize how art and memory
can console us in the face of recurrent death.
O'Hara is not often so good; but neither are any other contemporary poets.
Nonetheless, Carroll is correct in insisting that "The Day Lady Died" is a cru
cial touchstone for contemporary poetry. The poem exemplifies how post-modern
literature can thrive, though oppressed on the one side by philosophical nihilism
and on the other by the oppressive burden of literary history always reminding
us of how little room there seems to be for meaningful originality. Literature
can remain honest and "de-mystified," without succumbing to self-pitying nos
talgia or refining away its content in the self-conscious acrobatics of what Barth
has called "the literature of exhaustion." Not only poetry, but even some of the
basic values of civilized life can be discovered by pushing further than the past
into the manifold particulars and the texture of domestic contemporary life.

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