Frank O'Hara: Summing Up

Frank O’Hara: Summ(er)ing Up So, O’Hara is our first ‘personal’ poet and he is personal in a number of different ways. His life, day-to-day, with all its ups and downs is the grist of his mill. But he insists he’s not a confessional poet, like Robert Lowell, about whom he said once, that being confessional ‘lets him get away with things that are just plain bad but you’re supposed to be interested because he’s so upset’ (campy voice). And although we talked the other day about ‘projective verse’ (Black Mountain poetics) as a possible paradigm for O’Hara, I have my doubts about that connection. Certainly there are some points of contact: the importance of the physical body and of the body’s rhythms, especially it’s erotic or sexual rhythms – the ‘composition by field rather than received structures’ is important (as in p. 224 about the sonnet form), though here we would need to make a distinction between what this means for O’Hara and what it means for the Black Mountain poets. For Black Mountain, breath is the basis for poetic measure, for the projection of the line and the placing of line breaks. In ‘Personism’ O’Hara seems to suggest a different physiological basis for the main compositional unit of a poem, the line with its accompanying line-break. O’Hara: I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep’. (again campy voice) You just go on your nerve. This is the difference – the deep rhythms of the body, such as the upwelling of sexual energy or just breathing, the line of breath, the measure which the breath generates is quite different from a body running on its nerves -- and whereas the poetry of Charles Olson has a formidable gravitas emerging from those deeper rhythms of the body radiating out into the field of composition, O’Hara’s work is nervy, jumpy, nervous, a little frantic at times (which is why I think he has come into his own in our time, because we’re living an age of anxiety, a nervous age, running on our nerves, and getting on our nerves) and that is no more evident than in O’Hara’s wit, his humour, his campiness, self-protective and always running in fear of sounding too pretentious, too campy, exposing too much of one’s difference, of being glib and yet being aware of one’s own glibness and the ease with which that glibness comes to one’s lips. His punchlines and undercuttings are the flip side of his fears, the darkness, his insecurity. O’Hara’s seriousness is often masked by his irreverence aimed as much at himself as others. self-deprecation is both a serious honesty and a mask. So, we’ve said a lot about O’Hara poems, but we haven’t really said anything about what is a pervasive nervy-ness or nervousness that runs through his work. There is a difference of course between being nervy, having nerve (as in ‘damn it, you’ve got lot of fucking nerve!’) and being nervous – I think that O’Hara has all three in full measure. I take him at his word when he writes that his poems just go on his nerve. Think about having nerve, being nervy, and being nervous – what are its sources? There are the traumas of childhood – of the weirdness of the family that you’re born into and it’s obvious difference from the images of the ideal or utopian family that advertising and media represent as an ideal and from the 1950s on taking a kind of totalitarian character The fantasy utopias of advertising are the capitalist equivalent of the so-called communist utopia the Soviet propaganda machine projected for its increasingly skeptical subjects see Mad Men. There’s also the self-doubt that may be one of the sources of being nervous. And then there’s fear – the fear of being assaulted because you’re gay (p. 224 ‘If I thought you were queer I’d kill you’). Then there’s the nervousness of performing, of being ‘on’, of having to perform, to be seen . . . And having the nerve to throw all caution aside and just do it, get on with it. And who isn’t nervous in a massively conformist culture like the 50s and early 60s in the USA, the Eisenhower Years, the grey flannel years? who isn’t nervous when one knows that one is different – that it’s that difference which defines one’s life? Now let’s think a little about thinking. There are different sorts of thinking and logics to different parts of your body (Cooper’s first law of thinking). -- your brain thinks in a certain way (we know about this because there are massive institutions like this massive University heavily invested in brain thinking). -- the circulation of your blood thinks in a quite different way (it’s a pumping action, the muscular logic of squeeze and release, and a contained flow, what is the logic of the flow – the engineering of the circulatory system has a thought structure to it which is not that difficult to understand which is why perhaps there are so many engineers and physicians in the world and so few great poets). -- the pulses and surges of your bowels embody yet one more process of thinking – D. H. Lawrence is our guide here – p. 167. -- your genitals think in yet another way (the penis for example has an exceedingly simple logic, a matter of ‘hardness and softness’ to quote O’Hara in ‘St. Paul and All That’, giving rise to ‘anxious pleasures and pleasurable anxieties’ (p. 213) – you see, nervousness is never far off (especially perhaps when it comes to male sexuality) – and for Black Mountain poetics, drawing breath provides the inner thinking and logic of a whole school of poetic composition. But how do your nerves think? If you can answer that question, you’re part way there to understanding Frank O’Hara’s poetry. And there is no more nervous or nervy poem than ‘Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)’ (1962), pp. 218-233 . If ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ is O’Hara’s Waste Land, ‘Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)’ is his Four Quartets. Biotherm – is a sun lotion, a sun screen made by L’Oréal. It goes on the skin when you go to the beach, and the beach (Long Island) is one of the locales of the poem. You rub it into your skin, you spread it over your whole body. I think this is a nervy poem (possibly even nervous) – just as in Eliot’s Four Quartets there is an undercurrent of nervousness under the professorial calm, the grave deportment of the sage cannot entirely obscure the nervous wreck underneath (see part 2 of ‘Little Gidding’). You may have Exhibit A standing before you. The nervy-ness rises out of the experience of difference – and I don’t mean the word ‘experience’ to mean some particular experience, such as visiting your aunt is an experience here experience is a word that means the total sense of being in place and being someone in a place the experience we have for example when we’re in the street and are aware of the whole street and being in it as a total experience, not of any one particular thing in the street but of the whole space and of all the activity that animates it. O’Hara’s experience of difference is like being in that street a whole defining of the self, of action, and the setting for the action, and of the always possible dispersion and fragmentation when we are out in the open, exposed and vulnerable. Most of us think of ourselves as different (don’t we?) because of this or that thing about us who wants to be a faceless non-entity in a faceless mass? so yes we do acknowledge that we are, to some extent, unique beings, different from others but most of us don’t want to feel that we are that different, i.e. so different that we stand out as freaks. We are not hideous grotesques in a crowd of others who seem normal. I mean, really? Being seriously different might (and perhaps often does) set up conditions of conflict. Conflict has its own kind of thinking the logic of conflict is relatively simple the outsider, the bandit, the renegade, the rebel stand over and against the norms (O’Hara’s fascination with James Dean). these are limiting cases of ‘difference’ but what if we know we are different yet don’t want to be outsiders, rebels, misfits. And isn’t that word ‘misfit’ a very good word, not fitting in, missing the fit. Early modernist culture was all about missing the fit. Marketing has changed all that. How is it possible to be different and yet not in opposition – in perpetual conflict. Sometimes O’Hara is reminded of his difference in that adversarial, conflicted way (when he overhears the man say, ‘speaking of faggots’ on the train): but his difference is not limited to or defined by conflict and opposition. His difference is not cast as black or white, the logic of the on-off switching system, it's not ‘either/or’, it’s more like the logic of ‘both/and’, or the thinking that goes into ‘not only/but also’ and is expressed as plural, sensual, and textual, i.e. deeply verbal and made of language, where language is the open field, not language as a set of received codes or a set of clichés, but always over-flowing, slipping, pleasurably dispersed, always ‘coming’ or ‘to come’ in all the many meanings of that word. He is not over against the norm, not opposed, not confrontational, but encroaching, over-flowing, over-lapping, a matter of skids and shifts and slips. It is a genial difference, avoiding anger – it is about pleasure and desire and yet alert to the dangers of a culture that is also violent (Miles Davies being clubbed by the cops), hard-fisted (O’Hara himself was assaulted and beaten badly at one point) confrontational, a society obsessed with punishment and the administration of pain as state policy. ‘Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)’ is the great O’Hara poem of this uniquely different state of being. And of course it’s difficult for us to understand (just as difficult for our massive obtuseness when we try to understand how our nerves think) In O’Hara’s poems, and this one in particular, there is at work a democratic temper in which all things are created equal – one pays equal attention to all things. Aesthetic of inclusion. It’s one way of expressing difference – the other way in poetry is to work to exclude, to exclude by making the poem a special terrain in which only a limited number of things are permitted to enter. And the poet works to put them in some kind of hierarchy of value – with the spot of time (Wordsworth) or moment of vision or moment of being (V. Woolf) as the topmost value. ‘Biotherm’, O’Hara writes in a letter to Donald Allen (20 Sept. 1961) ‘is a marvelous sunburn preparation full of attar roses, lanolin, and plankton ($12 the tube) which Bill’s mother fortunately left around and it hurts terribly when gotten into one’s eyes. Plankton it says on it is practically the most health-giving substance ever rubbed into one’s skin.’ And of the poem he writes in the same letter, ‘I’ve been going on with a thing I started to be a little birthday poem for BB and then it went along a little . . . and I am still going day by day (middle of the 8th page this morning). I don’t know anything about what it is or will be but am enjoying trying to keep going and seem to have something. Some days I feel very happy about it, because I seem to have been able to keep it ‘open’ and so there’s lots of possibilities, air and such.’ How much openness can a poem bear? It is a bit of a riff isn’t it? Witty improvisation – witty conversation among friends, punning, full of in-jokes, phonetic games, allusions, catalogues, little parodies, anecdotes and always the return to the scene of the occasion a day at the beach daubing oneself in Biotherm. The beach setting comes in and out of the poem at regular intervals. The brief beach sightings provide a sense of continuity. The poem preserves that day at the beach for Frank and Bill as a birthday present for Bill, like the fragrance of the rose is preserved in Biotherm. It provides a cornucopia of memories: of fantastic menus of burlesque film scenarios (Practically Yours) of comic word games of disfigurement of languages, German in this case. of serious moments, ‘speaking of faggots’. of catalogues of parodies All this may seem pure slapstick, but it isn’t it’s a day at the beach and everything that seems to be mentioned casually is picked up again in an altered context, in the same way that certain kinds of music especially perhaps the jazz that New York was listening to in the 1950s and early 1960s – Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Thelonius Monk were playing. Or the music compositions of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. This is music, the improvisations that make the jazz of the bop era so unique – ‘Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)’ has all the assurance and nervy-ness and chanciness of a Coltrane riff. It’s open, it could go on for hours, it goes on for O’Hara for 13 pages and then when he runs out of ideas or of time or his day job means he has to forgo these pleasures, he stops. This is a musical structure, not Eliot’s well-regulated sonata form in composing Four Quartets, but open-ended, riffing, improvising, taking the musical phrase and turning it around, finding all the variations, but always returning to the phrase, that lovely day at the beach with Bill, and taking off again on a new variation keeping it going on his nerve, the nerve of it, yet full of contentment because the creativity seems endless, imagining is endless – it is freedom in an unfree world yet never losing sight of the violence and horror (hence the nervousness) out there somewhere beyond this lovely day on the beach with Bill. ‘Biotherm’ consistently plays off the intensities of personal emotion against the vagaries of everyday events and everyday talk. Playful and yet still full of anxiety – it goes on his nerves. And it may even get on your nerves as a reader – and that is partly O’Hara’s intent. Not always nervy in the good sense, having the nerve to actually carry it off, but getting nervous as well for the reasons already mentioned. 21