CHAPTER II: EPHEMERAL
Frank O’Hara is what Wallace Stevens called “the emperor of ice-cream.”
Facing polymorphous oppression in real life, Frank O’Hara writes carpe diem poetry to stand against the flow of time. Because homosexuals suffer oppression, the reality of surviving in a homophobic society is particularly cruel for them, and O’Hara is aware of the ephemerality of short-lived happiness. Every lunch, every cup of coffee, and every opportunity to have “a coke with you” become a little celebration of the present moment. O’Hara celebrates every immediate moment in his life. In O’Hara’s love poems, as Joe LeSueur suggests, “we are in the recognizable world of going to the movies and ballet, drinking too much coffee and smoking too many cigarettes, sharing a coke with someone, eagerly awaiting the arrival of someone, deciding on a birthday present for someone, and, above all, having strong feelings about someone [. . .]” (237). Thus, we shall witness the celebration of the ephemeral pleasures in O’Hara’s love poems to Vincent Warren. This chapter will be divided into three parts: firstly, I will speak in defense of O’Hara, who is criticized for using too many quotidian details in his poems; secondly, I will define what is a “gay” carpe diem poetry, or O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems, in relation to “straight” carpe diem poetry; thirdly, I will mainly use O’Hara “Personal Poem,” together with a brief discussion of “Steps” and “Sudden Snow,” to demonstrate that O’Hara renovates the carpe diem tradition and that he is already eating, drinking and enjoying the immediate moment of his life. In “gay” carpe diem poetry, the ephemeral moment of love and happiness that O’Hara enjoys will turn out to be an eternal moment of seizing the day.
Before I begin to discuss O’Hara’s “gay” carpe diem poetry, it is necessary to speak in defense of O’Hara, for he is dismissed as a casual poet by people like Robert
Lowell, and his poems, having nothing to do with the carpe diem poetry, are considered by critics like Roberta Berke to be superficial, trivial, and unthought-out.
In what follows, all of these unfair remarks will be rebutted. To begin with, as one of the pioneers of the New York poets, O’Hara uses camp as part of his language strategy and tends to write his poems in a casual way; for example, during his lunch break, O’Hara quickly jots down what he sees, hears and feels in New York City and—voila—it turns out to be his lunch hour poem. Jotting down all the seemingly ordinary details around him, O’Hara paints the immediate moment of ephemeral pleasures. Consequently, Roberta Berke states that “O’Hara in his praise for the Ordinary sometimes seems actually to aim for superficiality, just as the Abstract Expressionist painters aimed for ‘flatness.’ O’Hara wrote casually, often in a room full of people; the result was sometimes merely weak verse” (96). Because O’Hara finds inspiration in part from his ordinary life, he is considered by critics like Berke to be shallow and superficial; his poetry, flat. Moreover, Berke further suggests that the poems of all the New York poets lack depth, claiming, “The New York poets’
emphasis on the present means that their poems are not intensely detailed studies in perspective but that they are wide rather than intense, like the large fields of flat color painted by some Abstract Expressionists” (91-92). Berke is correct in saying that the New York poets emphasize the present moment, but she regards this characteristic as the flaw of the New York poets. On account of this, Berke also implies that when reading the poems of the New York poets, readers should relax and “read in a casual manner, with our critical guard temporarily down” (92). According to Berke, because some New York poets compose their poems casually, readers do not need to take their poems seriously. Roberta Berke even outrageously declares,
Many New York poems will not stand the stress of repeated readings because they were written to capture a moment or a mood rather than
make grand philosophical statements. The reader must also be prepared to find that the conventional signposts that guide him or her into a poem—such as “what is this about?” and “what happens next?”—have been stolen or spray-painted with nonsense. (92)
Take O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems for example, most of them are written to capture the immediate moment of his life and experience, such as “Having a Coke with You.” Following Berke’s cue, one can conclude that because “Having a Coke with You” is written to “capture a moment or a mood,” this poem must be devoid of thoughts, “spray-painted with nonsense.” However, as I have demonstrated in the previous chapter, “Having a Coke with You” is not now, nor has it ever been,
“spray-painted with nonsense.” Like Berke, Caleb Crain is also harsh on O’Hara, describing the poet’s “Personal Poem” as a “laundry list” (302). Later, I shall prove that “Personal Poem” is anything but a “laundry list.” To John Updike, O’Hara’s poetry, often silly and empty, is “a good example of a blague in verse” (Lehman 350).
O’Hara’s poems are nothing more than a joke to Updike. Similarly, according to Perloff’s observation, confessional poet Robert Lowell once implied “that poetry is a serious business and that O’Hara was trivializing it and camping it up” (13, emphasis original). Because O’Hara tends to camp things up, he is usually considered not serious at all.
Likewise, camp is often considered to be silly, empty and not serious at all;
however, camp is not as frivolous as it appears. As Susan Sontag points out, “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious” (116).
No doubt, camp is playful and anti-serious, but that does not mean that camp is not meaningful and serious. As Hilton Kramer puts it, “Against the concept of seriousness, Camp invokes an alternative standard—the facetious” (qtd. in Lehman 354). Camp uses pleasure to defeat anxiety and replaces sorrow with joy. Just
because camp makes people laugh does not mean that it is not serious at all. “The
‘serious’ is, in fact, crucial to camp. Though camp mocks the solemnities of our culture, it never totally discards the seriousness of a thing or individual” (Babuscio 28). Indeed, there is a serious undercurrent running deep at the core of camp.
Like camp, O’Hara can also be serious and playful at the same time. O’Hara’s poetry is not as flat and superficial as Berke implies. As a matter of fact, I find that David Lehman is very perceptive in saying that “poets like O’Hara and Ashbery were playfully serious aesthetes” (354). Indeed, O’Hara is a playfully serious poet, who passionately embraces his life. To O’Hara, the New York City life is very important for the composition of his poetry. Wittily and playfully, O’Hara takes the quotidian details of the modern life as an inspiration for poetry. In an internet article, “Rebel Poets of the 1950s,” Steven Watson comments on the importance of urban life to all of the New York poets—“New York’s environment provided a brilliant backdrop for their poetry, alive with odd juxtapositions, shuttling at top speed between high culture and pop culture. The quotidian details of life and the social activities of friends provided the basis for elegant, witty riffs on modern urban life.” Generally speaking, the New York poets favor city life in New York more than anything else. Especially, O’Hara stresses the immediate moment in his poems. “Poetic language, he believed, ought to come spontaneously to mind under the stress of the immediate experience”
(Feldman 45). Just because O’Hara writes in a casual, playful and spontaneous way does not mean that he does not take his poems seriously. As Christopher Isherwood in his novel, The World in the Evening, says, “You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously; you’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance”
(emphases original, qtd. in Babuscio 29). No doubt, O’Hara is both serious and playful about his life and poetry.
Also a New York poet and a playfully serious aesthete, John Ashbery once wrote, “All poetry is against war and in favor of life, or else it isn’t poetry, and it stops being poetry when it is forced into the mold of a particular program. Poetry is poetry.
Protest is protest” (qtd. in Lehman 309). Although Ashbery’s assertion of art for art’s sake is debatable, one thing is for certain—the New York poets are not particularly interested in moral or political issues. Unlike the Beat poets of the 1950s, the New York poets tend to put less emphasis on social protest, and they seldom directly head-on confront the homophobic society and its domineering ideologies, nor do they bluntly protest against all the conventionality. As Lehman remarks, “Preferring heterodoxy to orthodoxy, wit to solemnity, joy to melancholy, the experience or enactment of our moment in time rather than the moral castigation of it, the New York poets were aesthetes in revolt against a moralist’s universe” (358).
Passionately embracing life, the New York poets are also “against the politically committed didacticism of the Beats and the poets of political protest” (Lehman 358).
According to Lehman’s observation, O’Hara, as well as other New York poets, does not like to instruct readers to do what is beneficial to the society and the humanity, neutralizing the moral and socio-political issues in his poems.
However, that does not mean that O’Hara’s poetry is frivolous and trivial. To do O’Hara justice, I find that the poet deserves Parker’s fair and just remark:
Far from being merely chatty, “chic,” gossipy, trivial, sophisticatedly obscure, or being only a reflection of Abstract Expressionist aesthetics in poetry, much of O’Hara’s canon is a concrete manifestation of his conscious, deliberate, intense, and continuous creative involvement with even the most minute details of his daily experience in the worlds of art and homosexuality. (21, emphasis original)
Most of O’Hara’s poems have an intense relationship with the minute details of his
everyday experience and personal feelings. O’Hara puts everyday details in most of his poetry, the Vincent Warren poems included, for the purpose of remembering that he lives in the immediate present and that he is able to have feelings and express them in the form of art. “At times, O’Hara’s poetic speech is the ‘queertalk’ of homosexuals; when it is not, it is still, more generally, the language of a man who cares more about his feelings and relationships than about moral or societal conventions” (Feldman 46). In the relationship with Vincent Warren, O’Hara uses the language of camp to express his spontaneous feelings about Vincent Warren in the immediate moment of ephemeral pleasures. As Alan Feldman points out, “For O’Hara the task of the artist was not to try to be a moral force or to influence society but to rescue something of the ephemeral and personal, to transform the energy of his own life into the enduring energy of art” (19). Since O’Hara attempts to transform his personal ephemerals into “the enduring energy of art,” such as poetry, why does O’Hara seldom publish his poetry? O’Hara’s long-time roommate and friend, Joe LeSueur explains,
As to his being indifferent about publication, it made perfect sense: it allowed him to embrace life, not careerist concerns, and it was through his everyday experiences that a poem might come to him, not through reading over, thinking about, admiring, or castigating something he’d already written, something he has finished and done with. (276)
To O’Hara, poetry itself is a way of embracing life. Poetry is not meant to be a political protest or moral castigation. Rather, poetry itself is an experience of life.
Writing poetry spontaneously allows him to embrace life passionately. As a passionate lover of life, O’Hara is anything but a frivolous poet.
Moreover, in his own life, O’Hara seizes the day. In a letter written to his parents from the Navy, O’Hara at the age of eighteen already expressed his attitude of
embracing his life: “Our religion [Catholicism] rather encourages us to picture death as a relief and a refuge, it seems to me as I think of it; and I can’t help but think that that is not healthy and wholesome. . . . why prefer the shadow to the sunlight, water to land? Life with its trials has a zest that a Utopia would never have” (qtd. in Gooch 82-83). O’Hara’s life, replete with many trials, shows its glory so bright that many people would feel ashamed, for they barely live. O’Hara is so completely in the moment mostly because of his personality and outlook on life. When O’Hara died, the epitaph engraved on his tomb reads: “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible”—a line adopted from his poem “In Memory of My Feelings,” and this is the way people remember the poet: passionate about life and full of vitality. A few weeks after the funeral, O’Hara’s long-time friend, Kenneth Koch, asked his wife,
“Why does it seem so impossible to believe that Frank is dead?” Janice Koch replied, “Maybe because he was so full of life” (qtd. in Gooch 5). O’Hara is so full of life that he even becomes a hero in the eyes of his friends. “If I have a hero it is Frank O’Hara,” O’Hara’s painter friend Joe Brainard says,
Because Frank really lived life. Which, as you know, is not so easy.
You can get hurt that way. It’s very time consuming. And, at least for me, it’s hard to be that uninhibited. When Frank got mad at somebody he lost his temper. When Frank was unhappy he cried. If Frank loved you you knew it. Frank had a natural gift (I assume it was natural) of being able to be himself. (qtd. in Lehman 72, emphasis original)
Frank O’Hara really loves and lives life, never spending a minute persuading people to do things they do not like, for time is too precious for him to waste.
In his personal life, O’Hara is a true practitioner of the carpe diem spirit.
Traditionally, however, readers seldom associate Frank O’Hara with the poet of carpe diem poetry. People tend to regard Andrew Marvell or Robert Herrick as the
representative poet of carpe diem poetry, and there are certain characteristics in the traditional carpe diem poetry that readers can recognize at a glance. “Its guiding principle is usually understood to embody the admonition ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die’; and it is thought to concern itself primarily with the pleasures of love and wine as solace for the shortness of man’s life” (Wellington 1). Carpe diem poets, like Marvell and Herrick, often persuade readers to eat, drink, and be merry, “aware of the transient character of life, with existential anxiety” (Ku 29). It is this anxiety about the lapse of time that forces the poets to exhort readers and even themselves to live in the immediate moment. “In its general and original form, the carpe diem motif is an existential cry under the threat of the fleeing time. This may be put in the form of a formula: human transitoriness → awareness of this transitoriness → anxiety → seize the day” (Ku 44). Under the threat of the fleeting time, poets often use images like the morning dew, a drop of rain, or the wilting rose to warn the readers against the silent passage of time and then persuade them to seize the day. Hence, I find it true that “carpe diem poetry is persuasion-oriented [. . .]” (Ku 42). Poets of the “straight” carpe diem poetry repeatedly emphasize the importance of seizing the day and tell readers to have fun while they can.
For example, in Andrew Marvell’s famous carpe diem poem—“To His Coy Mistress,” the poet uses a logical syllogism to persuade the lady to seize the day and above all to fall in love with him. Most carpe diem poems eliminate social contact by ostracizing the lovers and separating them from the society, and so does “To His Coy Mistress.” In this “straight” carpe diem poem, the tension between the speaker and the addressee leads readers to put emphasis on seizing the day. As Robert W.
Halli, Jr. points outs, critics generally assumed that “the basis on which the speaker persuades the mistress to yield is the physical pleasure of sexual activity” (57).
Readers can clearly see the poet’s syllogistic logic in three distinct stanzas: (1) If we had all the time in the world, I could wait forever; (2) However, the fact is that time is limited and that we do not have all eternity; (3) Therefore, let us love now and seize the day. In the most quoted stanza, we can best see Marvell’s persuasion:
Now, therefore, while the youthful glue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one ball:
And tear our pleasures with rough strife, Thorough the iron grates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
(Marvell 51)
The logic and rhetoric, to use Anne Ferry’s words, “are designed by a lover to exploit the ephemeral quality of experience for more immediate and self-serving ends.
Rather than intending to arrest time, his argument to this point means to insist that it is rapidly passing” (195). Clearly, Marvell does not intend to arrest time, nor does he live in the moment. Rather than enjoying and living the present moment, Marvell
argues that time is swiftly passing by and that the beauty of the lady will disappear in no time as the “morning dew” soon vaporizes. While the “morning dew” suggests
“the moistness of the woman,” the “instant fires” suggest “her warmth” (Halli 61).
That is to say, the mistress is already sexually mature. Seeing that time is ripe, the speaker further invites the lady to enjoy the sexual pleasure with him, saying, “Now let us sport us while we may.” At the moment that the speaker speaks the line, he is not yet “sporting.” Then, lines 6 to 8 recall “the belief that each sexual act shortened a life span by a day” (Halli 62). The speaker lures the coy mistress to take delight in a little death, inviting the lady to have sexual intercourse with him. The lines—“Let us roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball”—suggest the coming union of the lovers; the two will become one. After copulation comes procreation of the offspring. Hence, the penultimate couplet of the stanza clearly offers the description of childbirth. Finally, in the final couplet, the speaker plays on the word
“sun,” which works on two levels. On the one hand, the speaker puns on the “sun,”
which sounds like the “son,” the son of the speaker and the mistress, who will run in the near future. On the other hand, the sun literally refers to the sun in the sky. The speaker triumphantly claims: “Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.” As Donald M. Friedman points out, “If the sun cannot be made to stand still, as Joshua made it do, and as Ovid and Marlowe’s Faustus pleaded unsuccessfully that it do, Marvell’s lover will blunt the threat of time by making it run faster, loosening its grip by interrupting its relentless rhythm with human intensity”
(295). In other words, the speaker believes that his love toward the mistress is so intense that it will even outrun the sun. However, the fact that the speaker uses the auxiliary verb “will” indicates future predications. The speaker “will” make the sun run, but the fact is that he is not doing it when he speaks. The speaker is persuading the mistress that he “will” make her happy in the future. As Friedman puts it, “‘To
his Coy Mistress’ is, after all, an act of persuasion, and persuasion depends as much on ethos as it does on logic” (294). The poem itself is not a celebration of ephemeral pleasures but “an act of persuasion.”
No doubt, Marvell is good at persuading the reader to seize the day. However, is Marvell really seizing the day or is he merely philosophizing about the need to seize the day? Halli believes that “there is no reason to read ‘To his Coy Mistress’
autobiographically” (59). That is to say, the presence of the speaker in the poem is not identical to that of the poet. Even if Marvell is the speaker, the poet still fails to live the immediate moment. “He acknowledges, as all carpe diem poetry must, the unique importance of the present moment—the thrice-repeated now is significant in this respect—but he refuses merely to be victimized by time” (Wellington 203, emphasis original). Marvell at most “acknowledges” the significance of the present time. The poet does not actually seize the day, for he is still wasting time persuading his lady to make the best of her life with him instead of living it. Straight carpe diem poets like Marvell often persuade their ladies to pursue pleasures, preferably sexual pleasures. Do they eventually enjoy the (sexual) pleasures that they long for?
Maybe, maybe not. If they fail to have sexual intercourse with their mistresses, all of their persuasive arguments and reasoning come to nothing. Isn’t that a waste of time? While Marvell says, “Now let us sport us while we may,” O’Hara is already taking one step further. He is completely in the moment, sporting and having a coke with Vincent Warren. In “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell persuades the lady addressee to seize the day with him, whereas O’Hara resents exhorting his lover, himself, and even readers to do things they do not like. In “Personism: A Manifesto,” O’Hara writes, “Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive
thinness (effete)” (Collected Poems 498). To me, Marvell is in part like that middle-aged mother attempting to let the reader absorb the idea of carpe diem and carry out its spirit.
Likewise, Robert Herrick is somewhat like another middle-aged mother in the eyes of O’Hara. In “Corinna’s Going a Maying,” Herrick becomes a more gregarious lover asking Corinna not to loll in bed lackadaisically but to get up and go a Maying with him, continually trying to wake up the lass by beginning the poem with exhortation: “Get up, get up for shame, the Blooming Morne / Upon her wings presents the god unshorne” (Herrick 72). This sounds like what the middle-aged mother that O’Hara describes would do—admonishing the lazy girl to get up.
Getting up early seems to be the right thing to do for Herrick; therefore, he asks Corinna to do the same thing. The poet’s admonition goes from the beginning to the concluding stanza of the poem.
Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime;
And take the harmlesse follie of the time.
We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty.
Our life is short; and our dayes run As fast away as do’s the Sunne:
And as a vapor, or a drop of raine Once lost, can ne’r be found againe:
So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade;
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drown’d with us in endlesse night.
Then while time serves, and we are but decaying;
Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying.
(Herrick 73-74)
The speaker keeps on telling Corinna to “come” to celebrate the festival of May Day. Although some might regard the word “come” as an invitation to love, to me, however, “come” is more like touting. Like a street vendor annoyingly touting his wares, Herrick is attempting to “sell” the idea of carpe diem to Corinna and maybe to the reader. Like “To His Coy Mistress,” “Corinna’s Going a Maying” is not an autobiographical poem, either. The “I” in the poem is not Herrick. As George Walton Scott observes, “The poets who have written on this theme [of carpe diem]
have tended to stand aside from the events or symbols they describe, detached from time, in full control. Herrick is no exception. He may pretend he is Catullus or Ovid, and that Corinna is a pagan nymph, but he remains an onlooker” (136). Like an omnipotent god detached from time, Herrick attempts to fully control every event in the poem. Like an all-seeing god, Herrick still remains an onlooker, watching the speaker persuading Corinna to enjoy the beauty of morning. The speaker cries for the shortness of human life: “Our life is short; and our dayes run / As fast away as do’s the Sunne.” It is a truism to state that time flies and that life is transient. Not only does Herrick say so, but he further elaborates, “And as a vapour, or a drop of raine / Once lost, can ne’r be found againe.” These lines tell us that our life is as brief as a drop of rain and that once we are dead, we are dead forever. Again and again, traditional carpe diem poets like Herrick and Marvell tend to use the image of raindrop or morning dew to indicate the transience and helplessness of life. If our life suddenly vanishes, there is nothing we can do about it. Such cry for human existence is almost omnipresent in every traditional carpe diem poem. Now let us
return to the poem—“Then while time serves, and we are but decaying; / Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying.” According to Herrick, although we cannot stop decaying, we can make the best of our life. “In the final couplet Herrick has sought to recapture a trace of the gaiety with which the poem began, to brush aside the momentary cloud with an urgent restatement of his admonition to be up and doing”
(Wellington 185). Partly like an interfering mother, Herrick again and again nags at the addressee for being lazy and lolling in bed. While Herrick is spending his breath persuading Corinna to get up and go a Maying with him, that “drop of raine” Herrick mentions in his poem is already “lost, can ne’r be found againe.”
Certainly, time is limited for everyone, gay and straight alike. “Straight”
carpe diem poems, say, “To His Coy Mistress” and “Corinna’s Going a Maying,”
involve persuasion to seize the day. Like street vendors touting their wares, straight carpe diem poets like to promote the products of ephemerality, that is, the idea of carpe diem to their readers. They tend to cajole, persuade, and sometimes threaten their addressees to “buy” what they are selling. Marvell goes out of his way to persuade the coy mistress to pursue sexual pleasures, while Herrick almost grabs Corinna’s hand and hurries her to attend the May Day festival. Under normal circumstances, the more street vendors tout, the less people wish to buy their products.
Besides, as O’Hara puts it, “how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along?” (Collected Poems 498). Writing a poem to persuade people to seize the day does not actually ameliorate their life. That is why O’Hara never makes an assertion to tell people to seize the day. To O’Hara, this kind of persuasion per se is a waste of time, which is against the spirit of seizing the day. In “gay” carpe diem poetry, however, the gay poet Frank O’Hara focuses on his personal ephemerals.
O’Hara never wastes his time persuading, exhorting, or admonishing his beloved,
himself and even readers to seize the day, let alone force them to do things they do not need to. As the poet says, “Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them” (Collected Poems 498). Carpe diem, which literally means “seize the day,” (dare I even say) could be forgotten in the gay carpe diem poems. Eating, drinking and enjoying living in the immediate moment are already realized in O’Hara’s poems. O’Hara is already seizing the day instead of crying for the shortness of his life and philosophizing about the need to “seize the day.” O’Hara is completely in the moment, giving a twentieth-century sense of carpe diem into the carpe diem tradition.
Like Marvell and Herrick, O’Hara also needs to confront his personal
“existential anxiety” as Ku phrases it (29). In seventeenth-century England, partly because of the outbreak of the civil war and its subsequent turmoil, carpe diem poetry was very popular. Poets at that time tended to persuade people to seize the day, wishing people to feast as if there were no tomorrow. Likewise, it was also difficult for gay men in the 1950s and 1960s to survive in New York. A gay poet, O’Hara is fully aware of his “existential anxiety.” Unlike the traditional carpe diem poets, O’Hara does not persuade his readers to seize the day and stops crying about the lapse of time. Unlike straight carpe diem poems, the gay carpe diem poems written by Frank O’Hara are never persuasion-based. O’Hara transforms his anxiety about the lapse of time first into the energy of life and then into the energy of poetry, eagerly pursuing pleasure in his anxious life. For O’Hara, anxiety is always lurking in the shadows, ready to attack him unexpectedly. O’Hara cannot be oblivious to anxiety.
Hence, I find it debatable when Ku explains why the Chinese carpe diem poetry declines—“On reflection, I come to think that the carpe diem anxiety might be eventually driven into oblivion when men became totally indulging themselves in the pleasure, although the anxiety itself was the original cause of their pursuit of the
pleasure” (32). Since “the anxiety itself was the original cause of their pursuit of the pleasure,” how come the carpe diem anxiety can be “eventually driven into oblivion”?
Instead, the anxiety for O’Hara is internalized both in his life and his poetry. O’Hara is so aware of the anxiety about the lapse of time that he wants to beat time, instead of crying, “My life is as brief as a morning dew.” Such self-pity is useless. Instead of pitying himself, O’Hara not only gets a life but also lives an abundant life.
Living a colorful life, O’Hara celebrates every immediate moment of his life by writing “gay” carpe diem poems, for he is fully aware of the irreversible nature of time. Once time passes by, it is gone forever. In a traditional carpe diem poem, time is often compressed by the speaker to persuade and in part to intimidate the addressee to seize the day; in O’Hara’s poetry, however, it is the addressor who feels the lapse of time and who is seizing the day. The pain and anxiety of being a gay man in New York City make the poet aware of his evanescence in this world, cause his anxiety, and thus force him to live in the moment. Conventionally, poets in carpe diem poetry tend to use an imperative tone of voice that has to be obeyed, such as Herrick’s repeated saying—“Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying.” The poets admonish their addressees to eat, drink, and be merry, but they seldom eat, drink, and enjoy the immediate moment in their carpe diem poems, simply coaxing people to do things they do not want to. (If the coy mistress wants to die as a virgin, let her.
When Corinna wants to get more sleep, for God’s sake let her sleep.) While Marvell and Herrick are still nagging, O’Hara, however, is already eating, drinking and enjoying his life in his love poems to Vincent Warren. As Geoff Ward puts it,
“O’Hara’s poetry, so often written against the clock, strives to beat time at its own game” (60). According to my observation, O’Hara’s strategy at this game is his writing of the “I do this I do that” poems, which also include the lunch hour poems.
At lunchtime, O’Hara is temporarily exempt from the mundane daily routines. As
James E.B. Breslin puts it, “He [O’Hara] keeps moving, taking things in with the speed and precision of a movie camera; the poetic self seems a transparency—again, like a movie film—and experience is absorbed with a kind of evenly suspended attention that does not permit discrimination, emphasis, or even interpretation” (260).
Like a cameraman, O’Hara photographs what is happening around him in the present moment, and when it comes to lunchtime, people eat, drink and chat, having fun with their friends, and so does O’Hara. He eats, drinks and enjoys his life with his friends, celebrating the wonderfulness of life. O’Hara takes down all these details in his lunch hour poems, which, I think, are not only the manifestation of his passion for life but also the evidence of his gay existence. By writing “I do this I do that” poems, O’Hara is certainly seizing the fleeting moment of his life, attempting to stand against the flow of time. O’Hara not only realizes the evanescence of happiness he has in life but also translates this ephemerality into his poetry. This brings us to my contention that in his “gay” carpe diem poems to Vincent Warren, O’Hara is capturing the immediate moment, never wasting time persuading his beloved or himself to enjoy the immediate moment and thus injecting a twentieth-century sense of carpe diem into the tradition. Indeed, O’Hara is the best example of “the emperor of ice-cream” (as Wallace Stevens phrases it). O’Hara not only cherishes every moment in his life but also puts the ideal of “here and now” into practice as we can see in “Personal Poem.”
Before I analyze O’Hara’s “Personal Poem,” I feel obliged to define what O’Hara means by “personal.” O’Hara has an ambivalent feeling about his personal ephemerals. The poet tends to utilize his personal experience as part of the ingredients of his love poems, but paradoxically, the more personal his love poems are, the more abstract they are or seem to be. It is therefore understandable that Berke says, “Certain New York poems seem to be ‘abstract’ in the sense that they lack one
definite subject or narrative sequence. Their flow of ideas and images does not stop long enough for us to see the outlines of the poets’ personalities behind them; the poets themselves are abstract” (92). Although some of O’Hara’s love poems are quite abstract, we do not need to understand O’Hara’s personality to feel the poet’s passion about life planted in the Vincent Warren poems. In a poetic statement written for Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, O’Hara states that “I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it [. . .]” and that “What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems”
(Collected Poems 500). That is to say, O’Hara mainly captures what is happening to him and allows his personal ephemerals to go into his poems. Reading the poem itself allows us to enter the kaleidoscopic world of the poet.
Moreover, according to Joe LeSueur’s long-time observation, O’Hara’s poetry tends to be “autobiographical” (xi). In an internet article, “Interrogating Culture:
Critical Hermeneutics in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara,” Mark Tursi points out,
“although he [O’Hara] is telling his story or someone else’s story, he seems to exhibit few elements of what is commonly regarded as ‘confessional,’ especially in poetry.”
As a matter of fact, O’Hara is anti-confessional. Perloff partly explains why O’Hara can never be a confessional poet: “although his own poetry stems directly from his personal experience, he disliked Confessionalism, the baring of the recesses of the soul” (13). O’Hara’s poems tend to be personal, but they are by no means confessional. Confessional poets like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath bare their souls and strip off their selves naked in front of their readers. Such extreme exposure of the recesses of selfhood does not fit with the poetics of the gay poet O’Hara. How could gay poets in the 1950s unreservedly confess their sexual preference when the public was keeping gay men under round-the-clock surveillance?
No wonder, almost all of the confessional poets are heterosexual. Frank O’Hara is
never overtly exhibitionistic in his own poems, although he jokingly calls them “the by-product of exhibitionism” (qtd. in Lehman 73).
When O’Hara publishes his personal poems and reveals them to the public, he is actually playing a “hide-and-seek, show-and-tell-nothing” game with the reader.
(Herring 426). As Terrell Scott Herring observes,
At a time when the public sphere was becoming increasingly postliterary and gay men and women were increasingly becoming invisible in it, O’Hara’s personal poetry points to a critical moment in the transformation of public and private (sexual) identities. In his attempt to renegotiate what could and could not be said in this literary public sphere, O’Hara reinterpreted the dominant literary codes of his day, effectively appropriating the mechanisms of mass media intent on silencing queer voices. Revising the doctrines of New Criticism, O’Hara made his most intimate activities available to the public by recording in the personal poem the minute details of everyday life. (425)
Although O’Hara’s presence is ubiquitous in the poetry, readers seem to feel abstract about his poems, especially his love poems. O’Hara’s poetry, like Elaine de Kooning’s painting on the poet, echoes the paradox that Herring observes—“The more visible the poet becomes, the greater his invisibility; the greater this invisibility, the closer we get to the essential O’Hara” (414). When de Kooning painted her good friend Frank O’Hara, she found that O’Hara’s presence was captured with his face off, and this probably would make people feel as if the painting were not finished.
Elaine de Kooning wrote, “When I painted Frank O’Hara, Frank was standing there.
First I painted the whole structure of his face; then I wiped out the face, and when the face was gone, it was more Frank than when the face was there” (qtd. in Lehman 166).
As Herring observes, “Showing all but disclosing nothing [to the majority], de
Kooning’s painting encapsulates the closeted openness integral to O’Hara’s personal poetics” (414-15). O’Hara’s poetry is showing everything to his readers, but only a few can realize what is going on. This enables the poet to reveal his love toward Vincent Warren and conceal the homosexual content from the heterosexual public.
O’Hara himself also states that “I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else; they are just there in whatever form I can find them. What is clear to me in my work is probably obscure to others, and vice versa”
(Collected Poems 500). While O’Hara’s most intimate and personal experiences are spontaneously presented in his personal poems, O’Hara does not bother to revise his poems, which are thus somewhat obscure and abstract to most readers. Like an athlete running down an emotional highway, O’Hara just goes on his nerve as he proposes in his poetic statement, “Personism: A Manifesto.”
In “Perosnism,” O’Hara reveals that “Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it” (Collected Poems 499). A playfully serious aesthete, O’Hara wittily argues that personism is all art. Perloff says, “What he [O’Hara] means is that the poet does not use the poem as a vehicle to lay bare his soul, to reveal his secret anxieties or provide autobiographical information” (26). I would like to modify Perloff’s statement a bit:
Refusing to bare his soul, O’Hara reveals his anxieties and provides autobiographical information in a secret way, which I have partly demonstrated in chapter one. As Mark Tursi puts it, “O’Hara’s Personism, suggesting life for art’s sake, anti-personal and anti-intimate, yet entirely and wholly experiential, and having ‘everything to do with love’ is at the center of his postmodern sensibility.” Although personism has nothing to do with personality or intimacy as O’Hara claims, O’Hara’s personal poems are not entirely anti-personal and anti-intimate. “‘Personism’ means the illusion of intimate talk between an ‘I” and a ‘you’ (sometimes ‘we,’ ‘he,’ ‘they,’ or
‘one’), giving us the sense that we are eavesdropping on an ongoing conversation, that we are present” (Perloff 26-27, emphases original). Herring also states that
“O’Hara’s personism is personal in form but impersonal in content” (417). “But to give you a vague idea,” writes O’Hara,
one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.
That’s part of Personism. [. . .] While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. (Collected Poems 499)
O’Hara’s personal poem is put squarely between the poet and his lover, addressing itself to Vincent Warren. The poem itself evokes the overtone of love, allowing the poet to remain detached in a homophobic society. Therefore, the personal poem is abstract to the majority. Furthermore, O’Hara also states that “Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet” and that “Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry” (Collected Poems 498). A synthesis of contradictions, O’Hara once again contradicts himself.
According to O’Hara, I infer that the more personal and intimate O’Hara’s love poems are, the more abstract they are.
O’Hara’s “Personal Poem,” written on August 27, 1959, is one of the most personal and intimate in the oeuvre of the Vincent Warren poems. In this poem, O’Hara captures the immediate moment of pleasures and translates it into poetry.
Thus, the temporary moment of love that O’Hara enjoys turns out to be an eternal moment of seizing the day as we can see in “Personal Poem.” For the sake of convenient reference, the poem is quoted in full.
Now when I walk around at lunchtime I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case when I was in Madrid the others never brought me too much luck though they did help keep me in New York against coercion but now I’m happy for a time and interested
I walk though the luminous humidity passing the House of Seagram with its wet and its loungers and the construction to the left that closed the sidewalk if I ever get to be a construction worker I’d like to have a silver hat please and get to Moriarty’s where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and shaker the last five years my batting average is .016 that’s that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12 times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible disease but we don’t give her one we don’t like terrible diseases, then
we go eat some fish and some ale it’s
cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like Henry James so much we like Herman Melville we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in San Francisco even we just want to be rich and walk on girders in our silver hats
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go back to work happy at the thought possibly so
(Collected Poems 335-36)
Everybody has lunch, but people tend to let the ephemerality of happiness slip away. O’Hara, however, aims to “rescue something of the ephemeral and personal, to transform the energy of his own life into the enduring energy of art” (Feldman 19).
The poet writes lunch hour poems in order to stand against the flow of time. As Herring puts it, “Recounting the minute details of a lunch hour spent meeting a friend and gossiping, ‘Personal Poem,’ too, adopts the immediacy of a newspaper or tabloid”
(423). Like other “I do this I do that” poems, “Personal Poem” also focuses on the
immediate moment of ephemeral pleasures. The poem begins: “Now when I walk around at lunchtime / I only have two charms in my pocket.” In a sense, the poem starts in medias res, which refers to the middle of a day. As John Lowney points out,
“‘Now’ implies a past that differs from the present, while ‘only two charms’ implies a sense of depletion, of loss” (119). The word “Now” has nothing to doing with the carpe diem persuasion. In “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell says, “Now let us sport us while we may.” Marvell acknowledges the importance of the present moment and urges the coy mistress to seize the day with him. In “Personal Poem,” however, O’Hara is completely in the moment of the “Now,” enjoying the leisure of his lunch break. Walking around in New York, O’Hara has “only two charms.” As usual with O’Hara, charms can work on two levels. On the one hand, “only two charms”
could mean that O’Hara becomes less charming in New York. Partly because he is
“exotic” in Madrid, he is more charming in the eyes of Spaniards. The tone here is very playful. On the other hand, charms, like amulets, are not something material but spiritual, showing O’Hara’s desire to transcend the physical body. Bringing the charms with him could also suggest that the poet is spiritually insecure or emotionally vulnerable or both. O’Hara needs his good-luck charms to bring him luck and to shield him from potential coercion in New York City. The poem thus “begins on a note of thinly veiled anxiety” (Perloff xv).
What are the charms? O’Hara has “an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me / and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case.” A Japanese friend gives O’Hara, an American poet, an old Roman coin. As a token of spiritual connection, the old Roman coin does not have any exchange value now. O’Hara is not able to buy commodities in America with that coin. Endowed with more personal nature, the old Roman coin represents a way of maintaining friendship. As for the other charm, it is
“a bolt-head that broke off the packing case.” A bolt-head, often described as a
symbol of the whole, is used to connect different parts of a mechanism, but now it does not actually have connective function, for the poet uses it as a charm. Besides, a packing case that is used to hold and to reserve is now broken off. O’Hara’s charms—an old Roman coin that has no commercial value and a bolt-head that loses its connective function—really give the reader a sense of futility. However, the charms are not merely useless. “Their magical powers will appease the anxiety that occurs once he [O’Hara] enters the public sphere of Moriarty’s, a latter-day version of the eighteenth-century salon, where individuals come together as a we to discuss politics or, here, Lionel Trilling” (Herring 424). Like everyone else, O’Hara is walking around on the street with his anxiety temporarily away from him.
Then, in lines 5 to 8, O’Hara retreats to the past—“when I was in Madrid the others never / brought me too much luck though they did / help keep me in New York against coercion.” As Herring puts it, “While the personal poem links two people [O’Hara and Warren] across the estranging sea of the metropolis, the charm not only connects the poet to his friend Mike Manemitsu but also conjoins New York City with Madrid” (424). Even with his charms, O’Hara does not feel well in Spain, “being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona” (Collected Poems 360).
Despite this, the charms “did help keep me in New York against coercion.” At lunchtime, people eat, drink and have a good time with their friends. Lunchtime is a time to relax, but even at the time of relaxation, O’Hara still needs to remind himself of the coercion of the sexual conformity in the 1950s. Everyone is coerced into being a heterosexual or at least acting like one.
Coming back to the present moment, O’Hara chooses to ignore his anxieties and concentrates on the immediate moment of happiness at lunchtime, saying that
“but now I am happy for a time and interested.” The phrase, “for a time,” points out the transience of happiness, giving readers a sense of being limited. O’Hara knows
that it is impossible to live happily forever, but what matters to him is that he is happy now. As Perloff observes, “The rapid cuts from one spatial or temporal zone to another, moreover, give the poetry its peculiar sense of immediacy: everything is absorbed into the NOW” (135). The transience of happiness and the anxiety about the pressure of time do not stop the poet from seizing the day. The twice-repeated
“now” in the first stanza of “Personal Poem” indicates that O’Hara is actualizing the ideal of “here and now.”
Returning to the second stanza of “Personal Poem,” O’Hara is still strolling in New York as he phrases it: “I walk through the luminous humidity.” Because O’Hara is now madly in love with Vincent Warren, everything becomes so beautiful in his eyes that the tarmac after rain is shining with “luminous humidity.” Likewise, in “Steps,” because O’Hara is infatuated with Vincent Warren, even the annoying traffic jam becomes wonderful as the poet claims, “and even the traffic halt so thick is a way / for people to rub against each other” (Collected Poems 370). When O’Hara is stuck in the terrible traffic of New York, he thinks of this awful experience as a way for New Yorkers to express intimacy. Coming back to “Personal Poem,” we see that O’Hara continues his journey “passing the House of Seagram with its wet / and its loungers and the construction to / the left that closed the sidewalk.” With the almost realistic description of the New York streets, O’Hara presents that everything is wonderful in his life, fantasizing “if / I ever get to be a construction worker / I’d like to have a silver hat please.” (Whom is O’Hara talking to?) Here we can best see what Perloff describes as “quirky line breaks” in O’Hara’s poetry (135). In free verse, even the run-on lines have emphasis on the final words, but O’Hara goes against the formal syntax and prosody. The poet does not use normal line breaks—“if I ever get to be a construction worker.” O’Hara’s line breaks are quirky and unconventional, for the poet is actually resisting the coercion of our grammatical
sense of the formal sentence structure in a natural speech. O’Hara skillfully rebels against what we consider as normal.
When O’Hara enters a public confined domain, such as Moriarty’s, “the anxiety comes back” (Perloff xvi). O’Hara describes, “and [I] get to Moriarty’s where I wait for / LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and shaker.” Entering a public place like Moriarty’s, O’Hara hears the gossips from nearby tables, which foretells the horrible news told by his friend LeRoi Jones. Before LeRoi Jones changes his name to Amiri Baraka, he is still suave. Although Jones’ metamorphosis, as LeSueur phrases it, “from mild-mannered, assimilated Negro to embittered, out-of-control revolutionary” (247) is not predicted in O’Hara’s “Personal Poem,” we are at least able to see “LeRoi Jones, in the years before his transformation into the angry, combative Amiri Baraka, as warm, outgoing, and engaging as anyone on the downtown scene” (LeSueur 242). In “Personal Poem,” we see three of O’Hara’s friends respectively in three stanzas: first, Mike Kanemitsu; second, LeRoi Jones;
third, Donald Allen. As LeSueur puts it, “It is their presence in the poem that makes it warm and personal, and lends support to Frank’s hope that at least one of New York’s eight million is thinking of him as he heads back to work, ‘happy at the thought possibly so’” (243).
“Personal Poem” is in part a gay carpe diem poem with a smack of social concern. Traditionally, carpe diem poets isolate the lovers from social contact, and therefore carpe diem poems do not deal with social issues. O’Hara, however, humorously and somewhat annoyingly relates his batting average in love life to the beating of Miles Davis. The poet reports that
the last five years my batting average is .016 that’s that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12 times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
(Collected Poems 335)
At first, O’Hara uses a baseball jargon to mock at his bad luck in love. The poet seems very obsessed with his low batting average in love, which is only .016. The tone here is very playful, for he is very precise in telling the exact number. O’Hara’s batting average is not .356 but .016. However, “that’s that.” There is nothing O’Hara can do about it. Then, O’Hara suddenly critiques the violence of baseball by insinuating that a law enforcement officer uses a bat to hit a black man. In fact, almost all of the popular sports in the United States are violence-based, such as football, basketball and baseball. A bat that is used to play in a baseball game can become a deadly weapon for a policeman to play the bully on a black jazz musician.
Within four lines, the tone changes from playful to serious. It is interesting to see that O’Hara playfully makes fun of his bad luck in love, but the clubbing of a black musician is a serious matter. Hence, I find Breslin perceptive in stating that
“‘Personal Poem’ creates an interplay of playful and serious tones in a quick, light movement” (264). According to Sontag, “Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness” (118). Camp is also a solvent of political protest. Like a photographer, O’Hara films a true-life racist assault on a black man in this poem, but he merely presents it without a howling protest. Breslin states that “no periods (rests) are to be found in ‘Personal Poem,’ which comes very close to a language of pure parataxis, of ongoingness” (265). The poet just goes on presenting what he sees, hears and feels.
The low batting average in love and the clubbing of Miles Davis are playfully but somewhat disturbingly presented together through the use of “ands.” As Perloff
points out, “When these syntactic and prosodic devices are used in conjunction, we get a poetry of great speed, openness, flexibility, and defiance of expectations” (135).
No one expects O’Hara to present the bad luck of a gay man and the attack of a racist on a black man together. Juxtaposing them together, O’Hara uses parataxis to glue all these catalogs. Parataxis, which means putting things together without hierarchy or subordination, refers to the placement of images in the construction of equal importance, such as the use of coordinating conjunctions. In total, there are sixteen coordinating conjunctions: thirteen “ands” and three “buts.” Like adhesives, these coordinating conjunctions connect together all of the films that O’Hara photographs in the immediate moment. Like movie snapshots, each item in the catalog resonates, having connections. The city montage is quilted according to O’Hara’s design.
Just because “Personal Poem” is presented in the paratactic style does not mean that it is random and unthought-out. Charles Altieri states that “parataxis calls attention to the rush of time piling up details united only by sequential time alien to specifically human patterns of relationship” (205). Having a sudden twist in the poem, O’Hara indeed calls our attention to the assault on Miles Davis. We readers in the twenty-first century are able to have a glimpse of the social reality in the late 1950s.
“Social realities are not transformed into social issues; instead, they are simply presented, given equal weight and emphasis along with all the other items in the quick play of the poet’s attention” (Breslin 266). Poetry for O’Hara is not meant to be social protest. Although the 1950s and 1960s were cruel to gays and blacks, O’Hara just kept on going on his life in the world without rests.
O’Hara’s world is not constructed but presented through catalogs and parataxis as it is presented in “Personal Poem.” Unlike Marvell and Herrick, O’Hara is not omnipotent in the poetry. O’Hara is not able to construct the world according to his will. He cannot put the chaotic world in order, nor can he fully control the problems
in the society. O’Hara merely presents the chaotic world that he sees in the poems.
As Alan Feldman comments, “The swift, unpunctuated flow of his experience goes on, not ignoring his or the world’s problems, but not dwelling on them either, insisting on the comic principle of continuation rather than the tragic principle of disaster [. . .]”
(148). In the light of this viewpoint, O’Hara is not a bacchanalian hedonist.
O’Hara does not merely indulge himself in eating, drink and pursuing pleasures. He really does pay attention to the beating of a black musician, and he is aware that the beating could also happen to gay men like him.
Moreover, O’Hara does not overtly judge. Seeing that “a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible / disease,” O’Hara simply feels that “we / don’t like terrible diseases,” so “we don’t give her one.” Without being judgmental to the lady, O’Hara goes back to enjoy his lunch as the poem tells us—“then // we go eat some fish and some ale.” Unlike O’Hara, Marvell does curse the coy mistress to rot in the “marble vault” (Marvell 51). Unlike O’Hara, Herrick is being very judgmental to Corinna, shouting, “Get up, get up for shame, the Blooming Morne / Upon her wings presents the god unshorne” (Herrick 72). Without being acerbic and judgmental, O’Hara merely presents social issues in his poem, such as the beating of a black man and the notorious disease in mid-twentieth-century America. O’Hara wishes that his readers, like construction workers, can construct the images of the 1950s and the 1960s in America.
Returning to the third stanza of “Personal Poem,” we see that O’Hara and Jones have their lunch at a “cool but crowded” restaurant, saying that “we don’t like Lionel Trilling / we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like / Henry James so much we like Herman Melville.” I find that Breslin is correct in stating that “the childish insistence with which these attitudes are expressed makes them seem playful and theatrical [. . .]” (266). Playful and theatrical, O’Hara insists that he likes his editor
Donald Allen better than the over-serious critic, Lionel Trilling. O’Hara does not like Henry James so much that he chooses Herman Melville instead. In “Personal Poem,” we are given seven names. Lehman believes that “the names mentioned in the poem are not merely gratuitous; from our distance we can see how much they tell us about the world in 1959” (200). O’Hara’s use of name-dropping not only brings us into the world of 1959 but also brings the society at that time into a carpe diem moment. O’Hara is having a good time talking to Jones, gossiping about the literati.
The temporary moment of O’Hara’s literary gossip turns into an eternal moment of seizing the day in the society. Unlike Marvell, O’Hara does not isolate him and Jones from the society. Unlike Herrick, O’Hara does not urge his poet friend to seize the day, for O’Hara and Jones are already seizing the day. Indeed, O’Hara is completely absorbed in the moment, that is, “here and now” in 1959.
In his poems, O’Hara tends to drop many names as if he were writing a diary.
Some of the names are well-known figures, but most of them are O’Hara’s friends and acquaintances, little-known to the public. In “Personal Poem,” for example, O’Hara mentions a constellation of literati; many of them, such as Mike Kanemitsu, LeRoi Jones, Lionel Trilling and Don Allen, are little-known to most readers. Thus, the poem becomes esoteric. As Lehman also points out,
It was O’Hara who initiated the policy of dropping names in his poems, a habit that became a New York School trademark. O’Hara peppered his work with references to his painter friends—Freilicher, Rivers, Mike Goldberg, Joan Mitchell, Norman Bluhm, Grace Hartigan, Al Leslie—with perfect indifference to whether readers would recognize their names.
(73)
Take “Sudden Snow” as another example. O’Hara brings up a number of old movie stars and choreographers; many of them are only known to moviegoers and
dance-lovers. “Sudden Snow” begins:
While a company of dancers hoots whistles stomps
carries on
in front of a palatial TV set with crystalline cobalt goblets surmounting it about Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis, Jack Cole, Busby Berkeley, Marc Platt
snow is falling on the sidewalk
(Collected Poems 354)
In an e-mail written to me, “Re: Vincent Warren: ‘Dance is my life,’” Warren makes it clear that he is not the one who “hoots whistles stomps.” Warren says,
Frank was with me and some of my dancer friends to watch a musical film on tv. we were hooting and whistling at the outrageous choreography by Jack Cole, it sounds like we were watching “Tonight and every night,”
which stars Rita Hayworth with Marc Platt, but I don’t remember for sure.
we were hooting, etc. about what we were watching, the artists were not represented on the goblets, which were on the TV. [. . .] by the way, I was a classical ballet dancer who also performed with serious avant-garde modern choreographers. we did not Hoot and whistle when we rehearsed.
Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis, Jack Cole, Busby Berkeley, Marc Platt—all these names are falling from the sky like snowflakes, but the significance of these names is not as light as snowflakes. “The names in O’Hara’s poetry are not only autobiographical markers, chronicling his taste and sensibility, but also a form of news and cultural commentary” (Lehman 184). For instance, Lucille Ball, who is considered by the poet as a successful actress, also appears in “Sudden Snow”—“all of us understand
why Lucille Ball is such a success” (Collected Poems 355, emphasis original).
Although O’Hara likes the dizzy Lucille Ball, she is disliked by many, for she acts like a modern day Pollyanna and tends to console people, always too cheerful to be genuine. The appearance of Lucille Ball in “Sudden Snow” not only tells the reader the taste and sensibility of the poet but also reminds the reader of the tabloid television in the early1960s.
Coming back to “Personal Poem,” we now get to the “climax” of this gay carpe diem poem.
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go back to work happy at the thought possibly so
(Collected Poems 336)
While O’Hara is having lunch with LeRoi Jones, not only does O’Hara not think of Jones as he shakes hands with him, but O’Hara actually dives into his own imaginary world, wondering “if one person out of the 8,000,000 is / thinking of me.” As Breslin observes, “O’Hara is not thinking of Jones so there’s no reason to suppose that Jones is thinking of him” (267). When people are in love, they tend to think of their beloved, and so does O’Hara. What O’Hara has in mind at this moment is his beloved, Vincent Warren, and the poet is wondering if Warren is doing the same thing.
The phrase, “possibly so,” kindles O’Hara’s hope, playfully leading the poet’s doubt to a possible answer—at least, it is possible for Vincent to think of him. Thinking of this possibility, O’Hara goes back to work with pure happiness. Thus, I cannot agree with Caleb Crain, who says, “An outsider might not ‘get’ the story behind this glib,
chatty, undirected monologue. He might not understand that he is reading a love poem—that waiting at the end of this laundry list is a lover’s ear that unifies O’Hara’s I” (302). As an outsider when first reading this poem, I also feel that “Personal Poem” is so personal that it verges on being merely abstract. However, the more I read, the more I find the experience universal. Knowing that someone you love might be thinking of you is not particular but universal. At this moment in time, maybe someone is also thinking of you. Isn’t that wonderful? Hence, far from being merely glib, chatty, and undirected, “Personal Poem” clearly offers a message of love. “Personal Poem” cannot be interpreted as a “laundry list.”
O’Hara’s “Personal Poem” is a gem hidden under the seemingly chaotic details.
Those quotidian details in the poems mean that “O’Hara values his everyday life and work in New York—provided that this life also offers the possibility of love”
(Feldman 148). Perloff also states, “‘Personal Poem’ doesn’t make a point; it presents what it feels like, at a fairly bad time, to go to lunch with a friend (who is not a lover), and, in the face of a persistent sense of anxiety, to draw on one’s basic reserve of humor and optimism” (xvi-xvii, emphasis original). Whatever that anxiety comes from, O’Hara still feels optimistic, believing that Warren might be thinking of him. Perloff claims, “It is the ubiquity of the experience, not its oppressed-gay-man-in-1959 particularity, that makes the poem so memorable” (xvii).
To me, however, it is O’Hara’s particular experience in 1959 that makes “Personal Poem” so enduring. Looking at O’Hara’s experience from a heterosexual view does not allow Perloff to imagine the preciousness of O’Hara’s optimism when he is forced to deal with the pain of being gay in a homophobic world. It is exactly the optimism of the oppressed gay man in 1959 that makes the poem glow with history. O’Hara rescues his personal feelings and experiences of 1959, on the one hand, bringing the historical American coercion and oppression into the poem and on the other hand,
resisting that coercion by showing the optimism of a gay man in love. The temporary moment of love that O’Hara enjoys turns out to be an eternal moment of seizing the day. That is why O’Hara’s gay carpe diem poetry is so precious.
Facing polymorphous oppression in life, O’Hara is not controlled by these coercion and oppression; rather, he embraces every immediate moment in his life as we have already witnessed in “Personal Poem.” As a matter of fact, we should feel amazed that O’Hara can still remain so alive when living in New York “against coercion” of the 1950s and 1960s.
Another example of aliveness can be found in “Steps,” where O’Hara says,
How funny you are today New York like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left
here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days (I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there and you in it
(Collected Poems 370)
Like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in the 1936 musical Swingtime, O’Hara and Warren also dance a waltz gracefully in the world of love. Following their dancing steps, we see that O’Hara is vivaciously welcoming the beginning of a new day—“How funny you are today New York.” The poet is so exuberantly in love with Warren that even “St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left” can become
“funny” in O’Hara’s eyes. Feeling that life is wonderful, “here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days.” The word “jumped,” as well as “swing” in Swingtime, have strong sexual connotations; both words imply that the poet is sexually triumphant. As Feldman puts it, “The poem portrays a mood of triumph and victory (O’Hara’s days with Vincent are called ‘V-days’), and O’Hara succeeds in buoyantly recasting the city according to his own feelings” (132). V-days could also mean Victory-days, days that the lovers win their victory over time. O’Hara is so infatuated with Vincent that he yells, “all I want is a room up there / and you in it.”
Like any other lover in love, O’Hara can sit in a room and watch Warren all day without feeling fatigued.
In “Steps,” O’Hara is alive when he is with Warren, saying “the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won / and in a sense we’re all winning / we’re alive”
(Collected Poems 371). Full of carpe diem spirit, O’Hara’s shout of joy rocks the world and breaks the equilibrium of time, for he just makes time stand still—a miracle that Marvell’s speaker never achieves in the poem. In a celebratory mood, O’Hara enjoys living in the moment. “In all, ‘Steps’ is a kind of gleeful celebration like the joy of the victorious baseball team in front of the TV cameras” (Feldman 132). It seems to me that O’Hara successfully “pirates” time and wins the battle.
Furthermore, O’Hara once again embraces life in the most intense way:
oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much
(Collected Poems 371)
