H _ N G M _ N #3.

poetry, poetics &c.

Daniel Becker

Frank O'Hara and Robert Lowell—Conversation and Confession, Action and Thought

   The differences between O'Hara and Lowell were highlighted in 1962 when they shared the podium at a reading at Wagner College on Staten Island (Lehman, 350).  O'Hara read "Lana Turner has collapsed," a crowd pleaser, still fresh--written that day and revised on the ferry.  O'Hara read for 60 minutes instead of the allotted twenty.  Lowell confessed he had not written anything on the way over and did not plan to read for very long.  O'Hara at the time was 36, physically slight, dynamic, the center of attention at any party.  His poems were smart, often campy and funny, swift, apparently effortless.  Lowell was nine years older and a large, lumbering, bearlike public figure.  He wrestled with serious demons: God, self-hate, abandonment, and ego.  O'Hara seized the poetic impulse and rarely looked back.  Lowell ruminated, rewriting even the galley proofs.  They were both at Harvard after World War ll.  Lowell, a Boston Brahmin, was on the faculty and had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 at age 29 for Lord Weary's Castle. O'Hara, Irish Catholic, small town (Grafton, Massachusetts), middle class, homosexual, had arrived at Harvard after a stint in the Navy which included more than a glimpse of war in the Pacific. He wanted to be a concert pianist, but his hands were too small.  Under the spell of Whitman, Crane, Joyce, Pound, Auden, Stevens, Williams, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Reverdy, Pasternak, and Mayakovsky (whose "intimate yell," according to James Schuyler, was particularly compelling) O'Hara realized he needed to be a poet (Gooch, 107).  After college he followed his Harvard classmates, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, to New York City.
   In his introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, Ashbery outlines the maverick literary tradition that O'Hara joined:
   For his poetry is anything but literary.  It is part of a modern
   tradition which is anti-literary and anti-artistic, and which goes
   back to Apollinaire and the Dadaists, to the collages of Picasso
   and Braque with their perishable newspaper clippings, to Satie's
   musique d'ameublement which was not meant to be listened to.
O'Hara loved ballet and modern dance, modern music, avante-garde theater, movies both good and bad, cartoons and comics, and the visual arts, especially abstract-expressionism.  He wrote for Art News and worked his way up the ranks at the Museum of Modern Art, eventually becoming a curator.  David Lehman described him as "the nearest thing to an action painter in verse" (Lehman, 6).  In "Personism: A Manifesto" O'Hara said "after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies."  The New York School of the 1950s (Koch, Ashbery, Schuyler, O'Hara), with O'Hara as its Apollinaire, set out to re-invent poetry, to push it away from Elliot and Pound but not in ignorance of the literary traditions that were abandoned.
   Unlike the Beats, the New York School was not political.  Unlike the Black Mountain Poets, the New York School was not somber or doctrinaire.  Unlike the confessional poets, including Lowell at the time of Life Studies, the New York School was more interested in happiness than shame, life than death.  And somewhere along the line, O'Hara acquired a Lowell chip on the shoulder.  Marjorie Perloff quotes O'Hara on Lowell's "Skunk Hour:"
   I don't think anyone has to get themselves to go and watch lovers
   in a parking lot necking in order to write a poem and I don't see
   why it's admirable if they feel guilty about it.  They should feel guilty.
O'Hara goes on to disparage the metrics: "every other person in any university in the United States could put that thing into metrics" (Perloff, 13).
   While O'Hara was never tempted by formalism, Lowell could rarely resist.  His poetry seemed to require a strait jacket. Lowell confesses while O'Hara serves as our frantic host, at times charming, at times provocative, and always brilliant.  He sticks to the details and doesn't explain.  In "Lana Turner" the sky is like the traffic, and this is more a casual observation than a cosmic statement.  Lowell is up there at the pulpit.  He intones and moves from experience to metaphor, from symbol to theory.
"A Step Away from Them" by Frank O'Hara--tone and perspective

   This is O'Hara's first "I do this--I do that" poem.  Written in 1956 it walks us through mid-town Manhattan and then takes us to lunch.  The poet's eye and sensibility are roving.  It is not long before we realize we're not in Kansas anymore.  Yellow helmets and falling bricks, a poet who loves movies: we are following the yellow brick road and should not expect to be surprised.  We are with the kind of man who drinks a glass of papaya juice after eating a cheeseburger washed down with a chocolate malted.  What kind of man is this? A poet of course, and by no accident a poet with Pierre Reverdy's poems in his pocket.
In the preface to Flacques de Varre, Reverdy says:
   I no longer see poetry but between the lines.  It is no longer for me,
   it has never been for me, in books.  It drifts in the street, in the sky,
   in the dismal workshops, above the village.  It hovers magisterially
   over life, at times disfigures it.
O'Hara is hovering, and his presence is magisterial because he is utterly in control of what we see and hear: the people, the weather, the mixture of daylight and city light, the memory and impressions that arrive in the speaker's mind as we stroll.
   There are 49 lines, five stanzas, sort of.  The stanza breaks are not a full line.  They slow the poem down a few beats and give O'Hara time to take a few deep breaths as he walks down the sidewalk.  Stanza length varies.  The longest, 14 lines, is the first; the shortest, 3 lines, is the last.  The lines are short, 6-10 syllables.  Most of the line endings are enjambed.  The meter is irregular except in a few strategic locations.  The poem is punctuated, not a given with O'Hara.  Many of the sentences lack a subject or a verb.  Two sentences are divided in the middle by a colon, and they follow each other at the end of the second stanza, when the poem suddenly needs to stop.  Many sentences are short and declarative.  Others are hung with dependent clauses.  There is one interrogative sentence, taking two lines, and the line break at that point in the poems puts a pause in the middle of six iambs as the poem turns a metaphysical corner.  This sentence, in the middle of the fourth stanza, is the soul of the poem: "...But is the/ earth as full as life was full, of them?"  The heart of the poem, literally, is the last two lines:  "My heart is in my/ pocket.  It is poems by Pierre Reverdy."
   To understand the purpose of pacing, syntax, and meter in "A Step..." we need to start at the beginning of the poem and see what the poet sees, hear what he hears, think about why he chose to provide these sounds and sights and people.  He is not meandering.  The poem has a purpose and we hear it in the title.  In the middle of a typically busy day, O'Hara remembers who has died.  This is not an elegy, but it is a literally moving portrayal of how the dead enter and occupy the minds of the living.
   The lines are short and enjambed.  The poem stops and goes, and the pauses are unexpected, like walking down a busy urban sidewalk and taking care not to bump into anyone.  The first and third lines are end paused, but the pace quickens.  Sonorous and sensual details quickly accrue: "hum-colored," "glistening torsos," "yellow helmets," "falling bricks," "skirts are flipping/above heels and blow up over/ grates" (recall Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch), "the sun is hot," "cabs stir the air," and "cats are playing in sawdust."  While there are no similes that overtly heighten meaning, the descriptive details are not as simple as they seem.  They are loaded with connotation.  Cats have nine lives, unlike the friends O'Hara will remember in three more stanzas.  "Bargains in wrist watches" reminds us time is cheap, but was time cheap for the lost friends that dwell in the poem?
   Life throbs or purrs on.  Cabs are mentioned twice, humming and stirring.  The scene is busy and hungry, warm and ripe: "laborers feed their dirty/ glistening torsos sandwiches/ and Coca-Cola."  There is an allusion to Oz, allusions to time.  By the end of the first sentence and second line, the unexpected slips into the poem.  What is a "hum-colored" cab?  A sound is transformed synesthetically to a color that no one has seen before, but we can imagine the shimmering yellow of cabs waiting in traffic under a full sun.  I imagine O'Hara walking down the sunny side of the street.  He is sweating.
   So far there are no aural tricks. No rhyme or patterns with vowels or consonants.  The tone depends on the short lines which suggest a quick pace, the enjambments which interrupt the expected pause at the end of the line, some tension created by his stop and go discourse, the simple yet strange images, and at times only the implicit presence of the narrator.  The subject and its transitive verb, e.g., "I go" is omitted in the second and fourth sentences.  The diction is simple.  The syntax is not--it surprises and serves the unexpected.  For example, the clause "with yellow helmets on" dangles from the end of a sentence, like a final dash of color in a painting.  In 14 lines there are only four words longer than two syllables.  This is not fancy talk. We can connect the voice to a guy with an eye for sensual details and a sense of time passing.  The voice is urban, sophisticated, and pedestrian, both in diction and kinetics.  The speaker sees more than he is telling us.  Later in the poem we get a peek, just a peek, into the lyric heart that organizes this cityscape.
   But first on to Times Square where the weather is smoky, wet, and neon.  We see a Negro "languorously agitating," an image which brings back those "hum-colored cabs" both in its unexpected pairing of words and through the sensual connotations of "hum" and "agitate."  The scene is full of energy: thermal, kinetic, potential, sexual.  Smoke is rising, water is falling, men and women notice each other.  The chorus girl "clicks" like the shutter of a camera.  Then the world honks and time stops:  "it is 12:40 of/ a Thursday."  The moment is noted in O'Hara's signature fashion.  The dangling "of" rushes past the moment to the next line.  This is action painting in words.  We see where the poet was, but he has moved on.  The pauses, marked by colons, are dramatic.  From the languorous rhythm of the preceding line, we now hear the alliterative staccato of "blonde chorus girl clicks," then iambic anticipation ("he smiles and rubs his chin") as the image registers and our hearts beat.  As a man and woman connect, time stops.  This is not a dirty joke, but it is sexy, human, and evocative.
   In the first stanza the camera moves and pans the streetscape.  In Times Square the camera pauses and zooms in.  There are people in the poem other than the speaker, who would be smiling, registering the public and private joke.  If orchestrated, "everything suddenly honks" would be a sudden crescendo, brass and strings.  Tone is largely what we hear in a poem, and the second stanza, with its clicks and honks, with the polysyllabic innuendo of "languorously agitating," is meant to arouse.  The speaker has paused, and he is listening as well as looking.
   The pause is extended into the third stanza, where the neon and light bulb quality of the weather is made explicit.  "Light" and "write" are rhymed, not quite randomly.  "Light" is mentioned three times in the first three lines.  The poem is tightening up.  More characters enter, and they are real:  Edwin Denby, the poet and dance critic, Giulletta Masina, Fellini's wife and the waif in La Strada.  Lunch is served. Then a detail that seems superfluous, "a lady in/ foxes on such a day puts her poodle/ in a cab."  We already know it is hot.  This image makes it seem as if O'Hara is determined to be detached, disinterested, taking in the scenery.  But it is also a set-up, a head fake, the runner's pause before a sudden change in downfield direction (recall "Personism" and O'Hara's injunction to run, not argue, if someone is chasing you with a knife.)  Or it is the deep breath, the slight poetic repression, before facing the inevitable "Them" in the title.  The speaker needs to keep a step away.  
   The fourth stanza is more than a few steps down the social ladder from the "lady in foxes."   It is also an elaborate series of half steps toward the poem's crucial shift in the midst of the stanza, a tonal pirouette that moves us from both the flat and objective description and the subjective reaction, to surprising declaration (who is dead), to metaphysical question, to emotional distance by narrative shift (not "I" but "one"), and finally to summation which connotatively links, sex, death, and art ("nudes," "BULLFIGHT," "Armory Show").  First, O'Hara tells us what he sees and how he reacts.  "There are several Puerto/ Ricans on the avenue today, which/ makes it beautiful and warm."  The startling logic of this proposition makes us stop and wonder.  Which "it" is "beautiful and warm"--the day, the avenue, the poem?  This statement, by the way, is the poem's first and only aesthetic pronouncement.  It is camouflage, a sensual ruse before O'Hara allows himself to arrive at the center of the poem, the death of friends.  He presents Puerto Ricans, beauty, warmth, and death in that order.  All the individuals mentioned by name in the poem are artists, but only the Puerto Ricans conjure up beauty.   They are abstractions at the crucial metaphysical juncture in the poem.  O'Hara states who died almost parenthetically.  There is no suspense, no spooky music.  "First/ Bunny died" (Bunny Lang, a playwright and friend from Cambridge), then "John Latouche" (librettist and friend), "then Jackson Pollock."  Pollock, O'Hara's artistic hero, comes last.  Bunny was a dear friend, and O'Hara tells us only her first name.
   The tone at this serious moment is almost inquisitive, as if the speaker suddenly remembered Bunny et al.  It may be easier to think of death in the plural.  We weren't prepared for dead people to appear the way Puerto Ricans did.  Our eyes were on the street and sidewalk, trained by the poem to be cinematic, and suddenly, without much warning, three dead friends enter the poem.  We aren't shocked and afterall what's so shocking about death?  Like birth, it happens to everyone, sooner or later.   The question is when.  The title of the poem suggests what is coming, but the arrival of dead friends is not preceded by fanfare.  After the title O'Hara is guarded.  He offers sights, noises, innuendo, strange logic, and a constantly shirting perspective.  He is sensual but not emotional until the dead are introduced.  Then the view point shifts inward, and so does the tone with that causal but terrible eschatological question put forth as a broken iambic hexameter (epic meter?): "But is the/ earth as full as life was full, of them?"  After asking that question, the speaker is depersonalized, a third person: "one has eaten and one walks."  The change in speaker is an inclusive gesture.  People will die and each of us will be a witness and a victim.  We are "one."  However, until it is our turn we pause briefly and then go on living.  As does O'Hara, who remembers the dead then begins walking and seeing: "the magazines with nudes/ and the posters of BULLFIGHT."  Sex and death, O'Hara reminds us, are embedded side by side in our culture and our humanity.  Next he sees the "Manhattan Storage Warehouse,/ which they'll soon tear down."  O'Hara not only points out what is temporal but also what is misapprehended.  "I/ used to think they had the Armory/ Show there."  He can't help blending life and art, as he blends life and death.  After remembering the dead he needs to re-orient himself.  The Armory Show of 1913, which brought European modern art to the United States, including Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," is magnetic north for a poet and art critic helping to redefine modernism 40 years later.
   The last stanza is the shortest, with the amazing glass of papaya juice.  And then casually, O'Hara links heart to poetry, there in the pocket of his pants, the pants worn tight so people will want to go to bed with him (see "Personism").  The last three metrics of the poem go anapest, amphibrach, anapest, as if the speaker is skipping back to work.
   O'Hara joins the mundane details of lunch hour with the spiritual--what he sees, what he eats, who he knows, and also who died.  In his 1959 monograph on Jackson Pollock, O'Hara talks at length about the spiritual state necessary for Pollock to enter one of his action paintings.  Lehman described O'Hara's tone as two parts melancholy, three parts joy (Lehman, 168).  That blend is a step away from spiritual expression, and for O'Hara art is a means for understanding infinity.  As the critic Alfonso Osorio said of Pollock:  "We are presented with a visualization of the remorseless consolation--in the end is the beginning" (O'Hara on Pollock, 31).
   For most of "A Step..." O'Hara's feelings are outside the poem.  Instead of gradations of tone, O'Hara offers visual and aural details.  There is no emotional logic.  One thought follows the other the way one cinematic frame follows another.  There is no build up of tension to prepare us for the dead friends, just the Puerto Ricans making it beautiful and warm.  Reportage turns to wonder as O'Hara ponders the afterlife.  Rather than write an elegy for lost friends, O'Hara gives them cameo roles in his wandering sensibility.  They are dead but not gone.  Who knows, and besides, "is the/ earth as full as life was full, of them?"  That crucial comma after "full" is both benediction and lamentation (Lehman, 168).

Lowell versus O'Hara--Size versus Speed

   If O'Hara was private and pleasure seeking, able to discover poetry in casual conversation or cheap entertainment, Lowell was the poet historian of his generation, the great public figure inserting poetry into political discourse (Mariani, 24).  The O'Hara poems look easy but aren't.  Lowell is compelled to be difficult.  If O'Hara has a microscope trained on the moments of his day, Lowell has a telescope aimed at the night.  The differences between these poets are apparent even when Lowell unfolds a day in his life, often the starting point for an O'Hara poem.  Unlike the intimacy of O'Hara, which reveals who and what he is connected to, Lowell's intimacy verges on narcissism: it gives away secrets, betrays insanity, and buffers bathos with irony.
   Lowell, in his confessional poems, needs to talk about himself.  He is intimate yet formal, like someone paying for sex.  O'Hara never seems self-conscious or self obsessed.  His poems don't need a soapbox.  They are not ponderous, while Lowell, weak and weary from his struggle with mental illness, ponders too much.  O'Hara, like the painters he admired and wrote about, is a paradox of carefully ordered disorder.  He is the converse of Lowell, whose formalism needed to be loosened and disordered.  O'Hara's poetic end is not the content of the conversation, but the act of conversing.  Lowell goes deep, searching for answers.  Is Lowell's pain like ours?  Is O'Hara's pleasure and wonder like ours?  Questions about emotion are questions about tone.  How does Lowell's tone complicate and reward our reading and listening?  How do his images serve tone?    
   In Life Studies for the first time, Lowell tried to develop a less formal and more personal voice.  He was consciously moving away from his first teachers, Ransom and Tate, while moving towards Williams and Bishop.  He wrote Williams that he was experimenting with "mixing loose and free meters with mixed in order to get ... accuracy, naturalness, and multiplicity of the prose" (Mariani, 258).  Later in life Lowell told Bishop that confession and irony were his staples (421).  Lowell's attempt to loosen up is like those Chinese handcuffs that slip over your fingers and get tighter and tighter the harder you pull.  A little formalism goes a long way.  In "Waking in the Blue" from Life Studies, Lowell is learning how to mix confession and irony, how to loosen if not escape the straitjacket of formalism.

"Waking in the Blue" by Robert Lowell--confession and irony

   This poem describes the start of another day at a psychiatric hospital where the poet is a patient.  Unlike the speaker in "A Step..." this speaker does not move until the last stanza.  Before that, he is inert but watchful.  He grins once, struts after breakfast, and in the last line "holds a locked razor."  He is sitting in judgement.  O'Hara did not judge, he watched and asked questions.
   There are six stanzas, 1-11 lines with variable line length, 3-15 syllables.   The syntax varies, from strict to undisciplined.  There is no fixed meter. Sentence length varies from one word to eight lines and an entire stanza.  Almost every line is end stopped or end paused.  Images are repeated and gain significance.  The speaker's attitude is not clear.   Of course, one is entitled to mixed feelings after being committed to a locked psych ward.
   The poem opens with the night attendant, a B.U. sophomore, asleep with a philosophy tome as pillow (The Meaning of Meaning by C.K. Ogden, a disciple of Wittgenstein).  The student "rouses from the mare's nest of his drowsy head" and "catwalks down our corridor."  Such movement suggests balance and control.  Lowell, manic and thus inside his own "mare's best," is neither balanced nor controlled.  Outside the window we see an emotional landscape:  "Azure day/ makes my agonized blue window bleaker./ Crows maunder on the petrified landscape."   This is one of the few enjambed passages, and both rhythmically and emotionally it gets lower and lower with a series of dactyls (agonized, petrified) and trochees (azure, bleaker).  Azure is a Persian word, from lapis lazuli, the sky blue gem.  Then, a melodramatic iambic and rhyming flourish:  "Absence!  My heart grows tense," and after that the strange image of the speaker about to be harpooned like a whale.  Lowell wrote a play based on Melville's story Benito Coretto, and at this point Moby Dick comes to mind.  At the end of the stanza there is a parenthetical statement of place:  "(This is the house for the mentally ill)."  This statement is both confessional and public, a stage whisper.
   In the first stanza the tonal effect of end stopped lines, assonance, rhyme, varied diction, varied meter, and animal imagery varies from comic to somber.  The net effect is irony.  Lowell told Bishop he used irony to be "amusing, or worse, acid, about what we can't understand" (Mariani, 425).  Irony hints at Lowell's struggle, and in the next stanza he asks "What use is my sense of humor?"  He answers the question by describing Stanley in mixed metaphors:  "ramrod," "muscle of a seal," "urinous," "kingly," "crimson" (as in Harvard) "golf cap."  The seal image brings back the harpoon and the whale.  The patients at MacLean's are at sea.  The syntax is complicated, and this serves the mixed tone.  Stanley, subjected to Lowell's ironic gaze, becomes, ironically, a sympathetic figure.
   In the third stanza we are given specifics of location, without parentheses, and another inmate.  Bobbie is rich, Porcellian (an exclusive finals club at Harvard), parodic--a replica of Louis XVI, the last king of France who went bravely to the guillotine in 1793.  He is "roly-poly as a sperm whale."   Moby Dick was never roly-poly.  The syntax is again complicated, an eight line compound sentence with a semi-colon and six lines of dependent clauses describing Bobbie, what the "hooded night lights bring out."  The next effect is once again ironic, arraying Monty Python-like images of upper class twits against sperm whale menace and the heart breaking promise of daybreak.
   The fourth stanza is one line, 14 syllables, the longest line in the poem.  "Ossified" at this point follows "petrified" in the first stanza and Stanley's "granite profile" in the second.  At MacLean's people turn to stone.  The tranquilizers used in those days, for example Thorazine, did in fact have a zombie effect on gait.   The petrifying effect of imposed psychiatric treatment recalls the Medusa "mare's nest" image from the beginning of the poem.   
   In the fifth stanza time passes, nothing happens, and the irony thickens: "hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts/ and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle/ of the Roman Catholic attendants."  Bachelor catholic men in crewcuts don't twinkle nonsensically enough.  Then a parenthetical and editorial comment: "(There are no Mayflower/ screwballs in the Catholic Church.)."  Lowell was not only a Mayflower screwball but also a convert to Catholicism.  The line break after "twinkle" is one of the few enjambed passages in the poem.  I hear that brief pause as Lowell's wink.  It is hard to be crazy, but the state of twinkle-less-ness also sounds difficult.
    The first person speaker returns in the sixth and final stanza.  We also get to know what he weighs, what he wears, how he walks.  He describes himself then sees himself in the shaving mirror.  No, he is not turned to stone, instead he sees "the shaky future grow familiar/ in the pinched, indigenous faces/ of these thoroughbred mental cases."  Shaving and holding a "locked razor," the speaker at last identifies with the patients.  They are no longer caricatures, and he seems more human.  They are not statues, but they are like him.
   Formalist techniques wander in and out of the poem, like lucid intervals during Lowell's heavily medicated state.  There are three sets of rhymes or near rhymes in the last seven lines:  "mirror" and "familiar," "faces" and "cases,"  "weight" and "razor."   The ironic tone drops an octave.  The poem opened with rhyme ("sophomore," "corridor," "azure") and closes with the chilling image of the locked razor.  There is a sonic link between azure and razor which helps the poem click shut, like a cage.  The inmates, including the speaker, are not to be trusted.  Despite the meandering tone, meter, and rhyme, the poem ends neatly.  The speaker's ill mind wanders but finds its course.
   In a confessional poem the speaker must ultimately tell the reader about the reader, otherwise the poem works like a self-basting turkey.  Lowell's irony allows him to stand back in order to get close.  By the end of the poem he identifies with the other patients.  With the shift to the first person, the reflected images of the other patients, and the implications of the locked razor, Lowell sees the future.  "We are all old timers," and that "we" includes the reader.
Lowell gets to "we" by the end of "Waking...."  The "we" in O'Hara is like a one sided telephone conversation.  The difference between "personism" and "confessionism" is that Lowell explains and O'Hara does not.  Lowell's art is representational, a man in pain.  O'Hara is provocative.  He is not a public poet; he does not need to rally readers or listeners to a cause.  He is private, easily excited, abstracted, and speaking to one person, the ideal reader.  He was less interested in publishing than sharing poems with his friends. O'Hara's spontaneity is a lesson in trusting tone (voice, diction, syntax, pacing) to establish meaning.  Logic is less important than detail, questions matter more than explanation, and meaning does not need to be inflated with metaphor.  O'Hara's poems turn corners, pause at intersections, jaywalk when they can get away with it, doze, daydream, and awaken with a start.  His poems also flirt with the unknown.  He breezily yet somberly contrasts life and death.   He is ready for lunch, and he is ready to let his heart be broken.  
   If O'Hara is the jaunty boulevardier, Lowell is caged and pacing, not quite safe, not quite making sense.  Oscar Wilde said that "all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling" (Lehman, 34).  Lowell, the poet scientist, researched his pain and published the results.  The poems in Life Studies are about Lowell.  O'Hara was more concerned with happiness than angst, process than outcome.  The poem can be about the writing about the poem, and the action painting is about the making of the painting.  His lunch poems are more than an invitation to lunch.  They reveal a poetic sensibility that relies not on ideas or theories but the world and the delights of language.  For O'Hara the next corner or city block is a mystery, and we are ready to follow him.


References
1.   Gooch, Brad.  City Poet  The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
2.   Lehman, David.  The Last Avante-Garde  The Making of the New York School of Poets.  New York: Doubleday, 1998
3.   Lowell, Robert.  Selected Poems.  New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1977.
4.   Mariani, Paul.  Lost Puritan  A Life of Robert Lowell.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.
5.   O'Hara, Frank.  The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara.  ed. Donald Allen.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995
6.   O'Hara, Frank.  Jackson Pollock.  New York: George Braziller, 1959.
7.   Perloff, Marjorie.  Frank O'Hara  Poet Among Painters.  New York: George Braziller, 1977.

« pr_vi_us. c_nt_nts. n_xt. »

th_ gallo_s. cur_ent i_sue. ar_hive. s_bmissions. merch_ndise. ed_tor_al off_ces.

H_NGM_N b _ _ ks.


©2005 H_NGM_N. poetry, poetics &c.
editor@h-ngm-n.com