Close Listening
readings and conversations at Art International Radio
Clocktower Studio, New York, November 11, 2009

Program One:Vienna Paradox reading
Perloff  reads from her memoir Vienna Paradox (New Directions, 2004) about growing up in Vienna, and her subsequent move, just before the holocaust, to Riverdale.
Complete Program (26:49): MP3

Program Two: Conversation with Charles Bernstein
Perloff talks about Vienna Paradox, the influence of her experience as a refugee on her literary criticism, her perspective on being a second-language writer of English, the unknown 1950s, her graduate school days with the Christian Brothers at Catholic University of America, irony and Jewish identity, the importance of Karl Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the pernicious influence of Martin Heidegger on postwar thought.
Complete Program (27:21) :MP3

Program Three: Conversation with Charles Bernstein
Perloff talks about a set of schisms that seem to divide 20th century poetry: Yeats versus Futurism; Robert Lowell versus Frank O’Hara; and Wallace Stevens versus Ezra Pound. She reflects on the ongoing legacies of radical modernism for contemporary poetry.
Complete Program (29:27): MP3

Close Listening produced by Charles Bernstein for Art International Radio
Studio Engineer: Jeannie Hooper:
© 2009 Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein

From Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters
new ed. U of Chicago Press, 1997

Marjorie Perloff

When Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters was published twenty years ago, O’Hara was a coterie figure, adored by his New York School friends and acolytes, especially by the painters whose work he exhibited and wrote about–but otherwise regarded (when regarded at all) as a charming minor poet. Herbert Leibowitz, in a largely generous review of O’Hara’s Collected Poems for the New York Times Book Review in 1971, called O’Hara “an aesthetic courtier who had taste and impudence and prodigious energy.” Even the avant-garde poet/novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, whose New York literary world intersected with O’Hara’s through the mediation of Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and his magazine Yugen, described Lunch Poems as “mov[ing] in a world of wry elegance, of gesture, a world made up of a certain kind of strictly New York joie de vivre: slightly down at heels and rumpled, but with the kind of style always a step above current ’style’.”

What is not said in these or the other reviews of O’Hara’s poetry in the late sixties and seventies is that the “style” to which Sorrentino draws our attention was a style recognizably gay. Indeed, neither in the moving memorial essays by John Ashbery or Kenneth Koch nor in the many critiques, from Francis Hope’s dismissal of the “puppyish charm of [O'Hara's] occasional good impromptus,” to Marius Bewley’s bemused characterization of the poet’s “long invertebrate verse lines” as so many “streamers of crepe paper fluttering before an electric fan,” is direct reference made to the poet’s homosexuality. When, for example, Thomas Byrom reviewed my book, along with O’Hara’s Early Writing and Poems Retrieved, in the Times Literary Supplement, he characterized O’Hara as follows:

His aesthetics are from a catalogue of late Victorian camp, a matter of excellent personal taste. He burned hard and gemlike; he drank and talked volubly. Though he tried on later ideologies, the one he lived was a sociable and less frigid version of Paterian pop, and the one he wrote was a subjective impressionism. His syntax has little of the crafty or inspired appositiveness of the Surrealist; it is an articulation of mental chatter and drift, and his style depends for its success wholly on his sensibility. Perhaps he is most like e. e. cummings, the same soft verve, a sentimental eroticism, a certain heart. . . . Casualness, quickness, openness were what he wanted and often got.

“Late Victorian camp,” “Paterian pop.” “mental chatter and drift”– twenty years later we recognize these as code terms for “queer.” But at the time I read Byrom’s review, (which suggested it was bad form on my part to take this playful poet seriously!), I myself wasn’t aware to what extent critiques of O’Hara’s “gifts for buoyancy, spontaneity and fun” (Byrom, TLS, 78), were, consciously or not, critiques of a poetic that generated lines like “Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them too, don’t I?” (CP 196), or “you were made in the image of god / I was not / I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver”(CP 338). Even in the later 1970s, readers didn’t quite know how to respond to such self-exposure. When, in an early draft of Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, I referred to Joe LeSueur as Frank’s lover, Donald Allen suggested tactfully that I use the word “friend” instead. “O’Hara,” wrote Kenneth Koch in his admiring review of the Collected Poems, “had an unusual gift for friendship and for love.” And it is similarly friendship and a shared aesthetic that are central to John Ashbery’s moving account, in his introduction to the Collected Poems, of Frank’s invention of a “vernacular corresponding to the creatively messy New York environment,” with its “scent of garbage, patchouli and carbon monoxide” (see CP x).

I remind the reader of these conventions of the seventies so as to provide the context for my own historical/critical study of O’Hara’s work, a study largely devoid of speculation on the role gender played in O’Hara’s oppositionality. That he was a radical and “different” poet was my premise, but I regarded that oppositionality (to the aesthetic, not only of Robert Lowell, which he criticized openly, but also that of the then counterculture hero, Charles Olson), as a question of individual ethos rather than as, in any profound way, constructed by the poet’s culture or sexual identification. Along the same lines, I paid little attention to the roles race and ethnicity play in poems like “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets”–the heady mix of exoticism, curiosity, and egalitarianism with which O’Hara celebrated “the love we bear each other’s differences / in race which is the poetic ground on which we rear our smiles” (CP 305), and that prompted the poet to remark on the “Puerto Ricans on the avenue today, which / makes it beautiful and warm” (CP 258).

In 1977, the age demanded a raison d’être for O’Hara’s casual, improvisatory, nonmetrical and generally nonstanzaic “I do this, I do that” pieces, pieces that hardly seemed to qualify as poems at all. Hence my attention to poetic lineage (from Williams, from Mayakovsky, from Apollinaire), generic placement (ode? elegy? occasional poem?), and technical device (especially the daring use of line-break). It was important, I felt, to expose an audience accustomed to the well-made ironic lyric of Richard Wilbur on the one hand and the oracular, densely allusive “projective verse” of Olson on the other, to the very different “aesthetic of attention” that is O’Hara’s special signature. The impact of culture and sexuality on that aesthetic was undoubtedly underestimated.

How different is the situation today? In one sense, we have witnessed a total turnaround. The first O’Hara biography, Brad Gooch’s City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (1993), is nothing if not candid about the poet’s love affairs and one-night stands–so candid, in fact, that, after some valuable chapters on the poet’s childhood, navy days, and Harvard years, it becomes an extended (some would say, excessive) portrait of what it was to burn with a hard gem-like flame in the postwar and pre-AIDS decades. The new respectability of Queer Theory, coupled with the breakdown of the High Culture / Popular Culture divide, and the tolerance, even in the Academy, for open forms and improvisatory discourse– these have given O’Hara a new place in the canon. He is, for example, included in the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (1989) as well as in Helen Vendler’s controversial Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985). In each of these, O’Hara gets considerably less space than Robert Lowell or Adrienne Rich or even Allen Ginsberg, but he does get pride of place in three recent large avant-garde anthologies– Eliot Weinberger’s American Poetry since 1950 (Marsilio, 1993), Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry (Norton, 1994), and Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 (Sun & Moon, 1994). By 1995, when the Collected Poems, edited by Donald Allen, was reprinted by the University of California Press, it was safe to say that any treatment of midcentury American poetry would have to take Frank O’Hara into account.

Indeed, at a conference on “Poetry of the 1950s” held at the University of Maine at Orono in June 1996, there were more papers (eleven in all) on O’Hara than on any other single poet, and his name cropped up repeatedly in the various keynote addresses on larger topics. Ten years ago, I would guess, the central figure of such a conference, held as it was in Ezra Pound country, would have been Charles Olson. But at the fin-de-siècle, there seems to be a decided shift in sensibility.

And not just a turn to gay sensibility as such, since the speakers focused on such varied topics as the effect of the Cold War on O’Hara’s curatorial activities at the Museum of Modern Art, the relationship of his poetry to the film culture of the fifties, the crossing of camp and sublimity in the late poem “Biotherm,” and the particular brand of “liberation politics” that links “Meditations in an Emergency” to the “emergence” of formerly subjugated groups.

Thirty years after his death, O’Hara’s poetic has thus come of age. But gratifying as this interest is, we must now be careful not to turn this mercurial and highly individual poet into a mere representative of fifties’ queer sensibility or Cold War politics. In a recent essay for American Literary History, for example, Caleb Crain examines what he takes to be O’Hara’s deep-seated aggression–an aggression that doubles back upon itself since, in the “regime of homophobia” of the “pre-gay liberation 1950s,” it cannot direct itself outward– through the lens of D. W. Winnicott’s object-relations psychology. One needs such an explanatory mechanism, we are told, because, taken in themselves, the “constitutent elements [of the poems] can seem trivial, and their structure as cavalier and casual as telephone gossip or lunch conversation. . . The poems’ elements do not seem amenable to analysis and a new synthesis in the classroom.”

But the “aggression” Crain is at such pains to account for (its exemplar is the wonderfully absurd reference in “Personism: A Manifesto,” to “someone chasing you down the street with a knife”) is taken to be a given of the poetry rather than shown to be present in its actual fabric. And that fabric, the materiality of the poems, is judged to be “cavalier,” “casual” and “trivial,”– a poetic structure not “amenable to analysis,” at least not without an external key like Winnicott’s psychiatric theory. Ironically enough, such assessment echoes that of O’Hara’s early detractors: in “Personal Poem,” for example, the poet, according to Crain, “bobs along on a buoyant gush of detail,” and “an outsider might not ‘get’ the story behind this glib, chatty, undirected monologue” (ALH 301-302). Indeed, the poem’s “laundry list” is redeemed only by the poem’s conclusion, which reveals it as a love 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 (CP 336)

Crain comments, “The happiness that surfaces at the close sheds light backward through the poem, connecting the random narrative into pillow talk, lovers’ gossip at the end of the day. Like baby booties memorialized in bronze, O’Hara’s trivial day is electroplated with the charge of knowing he is loved” (ALH 302).

This reading smooths out the poem’s tensions, missing the force of the poignantly tentative “possibly so” of the last line. Indeed, despite the external evidence that “Personal Poem” was written for O’Hara’s then-lover Vincent Warren, its narrative, far from being “glib” and “chatty,” begins on a note of thinly veiled anxiety:

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 (CP, 335)

Some good luck charms! The poet works hard to cheer himself up: he puns on the “luminous humidity” of the recently completed “House of Seagram with its wet,” and enjoys, as in “A Step Away from Them,” the sight of construction workers on girders, especially when they are wearing silver hats. But once inside the pub, the anxiety comes back:

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

LeRoi’s news that “Miles Davis was clubbed 12 / times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop” (terrifying news for the gay speaker as well as his black friend, given the raids on gay bars so frequent in these years) doesn’t exactly help. Never mind: it’s the hour of friendship and so the two poets, exchange mutual antiestablishment sentiments–”we don’t like Lionel Trilling / we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like / Henry James so much we like Herman Melville”). But how close are “we” really? It is at the moment of saying goodbye to LeRoi that Frank wonders “if one person out of the 8,000,000 is /thinking of me.” Obviously, as James E. B. Breslin notes perceptively, that person isn’t the LeRoi with whom Frank is shaking hands, but then Frank isn’t thinking of LeRoi either. “Friendship,” for those who want “boundless love,” only goes so far, especially when one has that terrifying sense of being only one in eight million.

To suggest that O’Hara’s “laundry list” is made meaningful only by the oblique reference to the poet’s putative lover in the final lines is, I think, to posit closure where O’Hara explicitly denies its possibility. “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. It is the ubiquity of the experience, not its oppressed-gay-man-in-1959 particularity, that makes the poem so memorable.

Similar questions are raised by Andrew Ross’s provocative essay on “The Day Lady Died”. The essay argues, quite rightly I think, that O’Hara’s fabled “culture of surface” is not without its own political resonances, its implicit critique of a consumerism, dependent upon the sharply defined gender roles of the fifties and the dilemma they posed for the gay man. But Ross’s case seems curiously overdetermined:

Looking back over O’Hara’s poem we can see how it tends to accept what might have been stereotypically regarded as the social contours of gay masculinity in 1959, the obsession, for example, with trivia, with feelings, with discriminations of taste, and, of course, with the fine arts. The tone of the poem marks its obvious distance from the voice of legitimate masculinity; O’Hara’s is not the voice of the public sphere, where real decisions are made by real men and where real politics is supposed to take place. In fact, the hectic itinerary followed by his poet could just as well be that of a genteel lady about town, if you substitute a hairdresser for the shoeshine, the Russian Tea Room for the soda parlor, Rizzoli’s for the Golden Griffin, and so on.. . . In fact, “the ‘day lady died’ is an account of a lady’s day, played out by a man through an imagined lunch hour that is the very opposite of the power lunches being eaten in restaurants in the same few blocks by the men who make real history (SE 388-89),

The difficulty with this argument is that Ross has to posit a “voice of legitimate masculinity” against which O’Hara’s own homosexual one may be seen to position itself. But whose voice in 1959 (or, for that matter, at any other time) would this be? Did “straight” poets of the fifties–say, Robert Lowell or Robert Creeley–present themselves as “making real history” over their business “power lunches”? Or weren’t they also outsiders by their very status as lyric poets?

The relation to women is even trickier. Ross’s argument is that “the social contours of gay masculinity of 1959,” which O’Hara’s poem supposedly embodies, allow the poet no choice but to assume a feminine role: “the hectic itinerary followed by his poet could just as well be that of a genteel lady about town.” O’Hara’s elegy (see below pp. 179-82 below) begins with the lines:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me (CP 325)

“Genteel” lady shoppers are hardly likely to go out to the Island on a summer Friday afternoon without knowing with whom they are going to have dinner. “The people who will feed me,” moreover, is an odd way of referring to one’s hosts: who knows what unladylike things that “feeding” is to include? Again, the sense of immediacy and improvisation is underscored by the reference to getting a shoeshine. Ross’s suggestion that we need only substitute “hairdresser” for “shoeshine” for the day to reveal itself as a “lady’s day,” curiously misses O’Hara’s nuance. Ladies’ visits to the hairdresser are scheduled and regular–part of the routine of putting oneself together, rather like brushing one’s teeth and putting on make-up in the morning. But one doesn’t schedule a shoeshine or make an appointment to have one: one does it (or rather, a man does it) on the spur of the moment so as to “look good,” to make an immediate impression, especially when one doesn’t know “the people who will feed me.” And the further irony is that, what with the drinking and the partying that could be anticipated at Mike and Patsy’s, no one would notice Frank’s shoeshine anyway. It is merely a way of (literally) putting one’s best foot forward.

Or consider the lines in the following stanza: “I go on to the bank / and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) / doesn’t even look up my balance for once in my life.”

This seemingly casual and irrelevant reference, far from linking the poet to genteel lady shoppers with their “busy social schedules,” has precisely the opposite effect. What bank teller would confront a Madison Avenue matron by looking up her balance? What matron would give so much as a thought to the teller’s name? The implication of the lines is that the poet is always self-conscious about being “different”: polite and friendly as he is at the bank, Miss Stillwagon evidently perceives him as just a bit queer, and besides he is evidently prone to overdrawing on his account. The routine withdrawal of money thus becomes an incident worth reporting. The name “Stillwagon,” moreover, with its oxymoronic conjunction of whiskey still and being on the wagon, anticipates the crisis of Billie Holiday’s last days.

It is charged language of this sort (a good bit of which I missed the first time I discussed the poem) that makes O’Hara’s work so fascinating. As for “consumerism,” it should be noted that every item the poet buys (or contemplates buying) is bought for someone else. Intense friendship, which is the gay poet’s alternative to the family networks that determine the largely routine purchases made by the typical New York lady shopper, depends upon the careful discrimination and choice of gifts: Frank knows Patsy’s taste for Verlaine and that Mike especially likes to drink Strega. And , in the larger sense, it is the set of choices of the poem’s maker that provides us with a catalogue of items, all of which (as I suggest in Chapter 5), relate, like Miss Stillwagon, to Billie Holiday herself. In line 17, for example, the poet contemplates buying “Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres / of Genet.” Behan, who drank himself to death at a young age, anticipates Lady Day’s death from a drug overdose, while the mise-en-scène of Les Nègres sets the stage for Lady Day’s climactic appearance at the Five Spot. As for Genet himself (and the characters in Le Balcon), the motif introduced by the invocation of the gay, ex-convict author is that of the artist punished for his or her deviance–punished, in Lady Day’s case, by premature death.

To say that the poet’s itinerary is conceived as the daily shopping round of a genteel lady thus glosses over precisely those images and phrases that make “The Day Lady Died” the bitter-sweet, poignant elegy it is. “Totally abashed and smiling”

(CP 406), fearful and funny, self-possessed and yet profoundly vulnerable, the poet who makes his Manhattan rounds on a Friday (with Bastille Day soon to come!), is the Frank who was given to referring to New York as “Sodom-on-Hudson,” the Frank who had written in his Harvard Journal, “I often wish I had the strength to commit suicide, but on the other hand, if I had, I probably wouldn’t feel the need. God! Can’t you let us win once in a while?” (10/17/48, EW 100). If the sensibility here is indeed “gay,” we must remember that not all gay sensibility of the period– Allen Ginsberg is a case in point– strikes the note of comic pathos, of humor laced with tough common sense, and especially of complex verbal play, that is O’Hara’s legacy to poetry.

***

“What would Frank have thought of gay liberation? I asked John Button. “Oh, he would have thought it was silly,” came the reply, “but he would have loved the dances.”

Stuart Byron, Real Paper (SE, 64).

It has taken a long time for such campy irreverence to be taken seriously. In a brilliant review essay for Parnassus (1977), Thomas Meyer put it this way:

However intricate the underpinning gender arrangements, we are still convinced the opposite of all that is authentic, expressive, and profound remains the light, quick, casual though deft gesture. And when considering greatness the absolute enemy is camp, best exemplified by the urban, loose, and high-living male homosexual. . . . Then, too, the material O’Hara worked with looks too often on first glance chi-chi, dizzy, piss elegant, and faggoty. Or else his poems seem adolescent, their exuberance and excitement made embarrassing by what appears a lack of emotional maturity. . . . The qualities of emotion he wrote about, and from, are the hardest to admit: breathlessness, excitement, anticipation and expectation.

Breathlessness, excitement, anticipation: in the first wave of criticism of O’Hara’s work, my own included, these qualities were related to what was then called “Action Painting,” the painting of Jackson Pollock and his fellow Abstract Expressionists in which, as Harold Rosenberg put it, “the canvas becomes an arena upon which to act rather than a space in which to reproduce” (see below p. 85). In tracking the Pollock–Kline–de Kooning connection, critics were, of course, drawing on O’Hara’s own extensive commentary on these painters and his exhibitions of their work. Yet here is an instance when considerations of gender are surely relevant.

In Chapter 3, I observed that O’Hara “was really more at home with painting that retains at least some figuration than with pure abstraction” (below, p. 85), but what I failed to see is that when one actually reads O’Hara’s poems against, say, Pollock’s drip paintings or de Kooning’s erotic images of women, one becomes aware of more difference than similarity. The discourse of male power and authority characteristic of Pollock and de Kooning–a discourse comparable to that of Charles Olson, whom O’Hara overtly criticized as too grandiose, too bent on making “the important utterance” (see below, p. 15), could hardly have been all that congenial to a poet whose signature was “the light, casual though deft gesture.” And further: although I paid close attention to O’Hara’s collaborations with Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, and Norman Bluhm, I now feel I slighted a relationship more significant than any of the above–namely O’Hara’s affinity to Jasper Johns.

O’Hara and Johns first met in 1957. At least five of O’Hara’s poems refer to or are dedicated to “Jap,” including the seminal “Joe’s Jacket.” (see below, pp. 148-52). Johns for his part has made a number of works that refer to O’Hara, of which the best known is probably Skin with O’Hara Poem of 1963-65. The relationship between the two artists deserves a full study; here I merely want to say a few words about Johns’s In Memory of My Feelings–Frank O’Hara (1961),which provides an especially interesting visual analogue to O’Hara’s poem by that title, written in 1956, as well as the many related poems that foreground ordinary objects.

In the lower right-hand corner of Johns’s painting (see above, p. ii) next to the stencilled title “In Memory of My Feelings,” and all but hidden behind the thick blue-gray brushstrokes, we find the outline of a skull and the words “DEAD MAN.” The phrase may be glossed by a citation from one of Johns’s sketchbooks, as reproduced by John Cage in his essay-poem “Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas.” The note reads: “A Dead Man. Take a skull. Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull against canvas.”

“With this DEAD MAN,” writes Fred Orton, “Johns returns, albeit referentially, to figuration after years of painting flags and targets, numbers and letters.” For at left center, silhouetted against a network of blue and greyish abstract forms, is an ordinary silver spoon, with a fork behind it, the two bound together and suspended on a wire screwed to the top of the painting. These utensils, which reappear, together with a knife, in Johns’s illustrations for the MOMA commemorative volume In Memory of My Feelings, appear frequently in his work. Ordinary domestic objects, they are curiously stripped of their normal associations by their placement and context. Spoons and forks are to eat with, not to hang suspended from a wire. Spoons and forks are to be held by a human being, using both hands, not bound together as they are here. The empty spoon behind which the fork “hides” thus has no use value; its conventional shape, moreover, seems to have no relationship to what Leo Steinberg defines as Johns’s “M-W brushstroke that looks and functions like the corrugated staples carpenters use,” nor to the unpainted lower edge of the canvas, and the familiar New York School drip above it. Rather, the spoon, with its shadow aureole, intersects the black line that seems to separate the greyish rectangle above it from the larger blue-white rectangle in which it is embedded. Is this inner rectangle a window? A window-shade? A mirror? Or just an area of the larger rectangle painted in different colors?

The notion of mirror image is further suggested by the hinges that divide the painting in half. But again, these hinges are deceptive: the left half of the painting, far from mirroring the right, does not quite correlate with it. The abstract field (blue, white, blue-gray, a tiny bit of red) on the right provides no match for the image of the hanging spoon and fork or the light gray rectancle on the left, nor to the blue drips on white background beneath it. In Memory of My Feelings thus produces a curious disorientation for the viewer. Halves don’t match, a spoon is not to eat with but hangs, so to speak, by a thread like a corpse, and the “skull” associated with “DEAD MAN” has been “covered with paint” and “rubbed against canvas” according to Johns’s prescription.

“Metonymy,” Fred Orton observes in his discussion of Johns’s technique, “is based on a proposed continuous or sequential link between the literal object and its replacement by association or reference. It is the record of a lacuna, of a move or displacement from cause to effect, container to contained, thing seen to where it was seen, goal to auxiliary tool. The metonymic processes are reduction, expansion, and association. . . . {Metonymy] represents not the object or thing or event or feeling which is its referent but that which is tied to it by contingent or associative transfers of meaning” (FF 172). It is precisely such “associative transfers” that characterize O’Hara’s “In Memory of my Feelings”(see below pp. 140-46). “My quietness has a man in it”: the opening shift from container to contained sets the stage for the insistent role reversals, the split-second displacements of the poet’s “transparent selves” –a mobility (“to love is to move”) that is finally life-threatening:

and I have lost what is always everywhere

present, the scene of my selves, the occasion of these ruses,

which I myself and singly must now kill

and save the serpent in their midst. (CP 257).

The “occasion of these ruses” is not unlike Johns’s staging of the empty spoon as the stick figure of a man about to be hung by the wire around his throat, even as the brushstrokes that make up the painting’s ground remain resistant to such translation. “Metonymy,” Orton remarks, “permits the utterer to bypass obstacles of social censure including those which are consciously or unconsciously self-imposed” (FF 172). In Johns’s painting as in O’Hara’s poem, erotic energy becomes the property of objects and utensils, of words and brushstrokes, so that its autobiographical connections remain obscure. “So many of my transparencies,” as O’Hara puts it, “could not resist the race!” (CP 253).

I don’t want to overplay the identity between poet and painter: Johns’s work is much cooler than O’Hara’s, less campy and droll, more conceptual and austere. But what has become apparent with the passage of time is that O’Hara’s aesthetic is closer to the conceptualism of the John Cage–Merce Cunningham–Jasper Johns–Robert Rauschenberg circle of the fifties and sixties (a circle of gay, if notably closeted and discreet, artists) than to the openly emotive and expressive gestures of Action Painting or Black Mountain or Beat aesthetic. “The secret,” as Clark Coolidge put it in his contribution to Homage to Frank O’Hara, “is that flamboyance can be so exact. (discrete?) And the word “discreet” can be used for something more precise than prudence if you move one of those e’s to that end.” “It’s after all,” Coolidge notes, “a matter of movement and the standing objects. The dream of starting to speak and the words all coming to you for once in the right order, surprises . . . . “An inclusion of vectors inexplicable to syntax” (BB 183-84).

***

. . . naming things is only the intention

to make things.

O’Hara, “Memorial Day 1950″

“An inclusion of vectors inexplicable to syntax”: Coolidge’s notes on O’Hara, published in 1978 within a year of my own book, signaled a shift in the understanding of the poet’s work, perhaps even more important than the shift in gay politics I discussed above. For in 1978 a new mimeograph magazine called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, made its first appearance, and some important reconfig-urations of the literary map began to take place.

In his own lifetime and for more than decade subsequently, O’Hara was known as a “New York Poet,” and his progeny have been taken to be the poets who deliberately adapted his forms and styles: Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Jim Brodey, Michael Brownstein, , John Perreault, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and a host of other younger poets loosely associated with St. Mark’s Poetry Center in the Bowery. Clark Coolidge’s own poetry, for that matter, was first disseminated in Ron Padgett and David Shapiro’s Anthology of New York Poets (1970). Yet even in this early appearance, Coolidge was writing a very different sort of poetry from, say, the Jim Brodey, whose “Poem (‘Woke This A.M.’)” begins with the lines “Woke this A. M. / radio signals in the sunshine at my sleepy door.” Consider the following six-line poem (NYP 38):

prune acrylic whose

dives

marls pays loops watts

lock mix deem

white apart

sass

Here word play, asyntacticality, radical ellipsis, and visual configuration point toward the work (Coolidge’s own included) soon to be published by such West Coast journals as This (1971) and Hills (1973), and, more prominently, in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. It seems a far cry from O’Hara’s “Personism,” with its jaunty assurance that “you just go on your nerve.” But perhaps it took a New York Poet manqué like Coolidge to understand that O’Hara’s “discreet” / “discrete” language (as opposed to the O’Hara mystique), far from sanctifying the “natural,” the casual, and the unique speaking voice, was actually providing a groundwork for the newmaterialist poetics.

“Note,” cautions Charles Bernstein in “Stray Straws and Straw Men,” “that O’Hara’s word ‘personism’ is not ‘personalism’: it acknowledges the work to be a fronting of another person–another mind, if you will, as much as another nature. O’Hara’s work proposes a domain of the personal, and not simply assuming it, fully works it out. His remarkable use of voice, for example, allows, through a musing whimsy in that voice, for fantasy as wild as any surrealist imagines, contained, still, within his proposed boundaries.”

Another way of saying this is that for O’Hara, “voice,” far from being a given, is, as Bernstein says, with comic bombast (referring to poetry in general): “constructed, rule governed, everywhere circumscribed by grammar & syntax . . . designed, manipulated, picked, programmed, organized, and so an artifice, artifact–monadic, solipsistic, homemade, manufactured, mechanized, formulaic, willful” (CD 40-41). Bob Perelman, in his witty spoof of O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” points at the same construction of “voice,” when he has Roland Barthes interrupt O’Hara’s recitation of “A Step away From Them,” with the comment:

“Langurously agitating: Frank, I detect a poetic phrase–even an elaborately sounded structure.”

And Perelman’s own “Alphabet of Literary History” is testimony to the influence O’Hara’s “elaborately sounded structures,” with their daring mix of “high” and “low” and their predilection for pun and allusion, have had on the next generation. Here is a snatch from the “B” section of “Alphabet”:

I ply my needle, ply over

ply. As you word each line,

reader, and examine the lineaments of

the phrases, feel as well the

body reading, its present weather. I

am mad for it to be

in contact with us. But we’d

better skip the finer points, or

we won’t get a good spot

to watch the march of literature,

a.k.a. the triumph of criticism. We’ve

missed the first floats already. Look! (Mar 145)

The O’Hara who wrote “The Critic” (see pp. x,xxxi-xxxiii) would have enjoyed this parodic “Alphabet,” although, it must be said, his own work always contained more pain. Take the first four lines of “Ode (To Joseph LeSueur) On The Arrow That Flieth by Day” (CP 300, see below pp. 117-20):

To humble yourself before a radio on Sunday

it’s amusing, like dying after a party

“click” / and you’re dead from fall-out, hang-over

or something hyphenated (CP 300)

It seems nothing if not natural and direct: Frank, hung-over and grouchy, sounding off to his roommate Joe, the poem hence “between two persons instead of two pages” (CP 499),. But beneath the bravado of “Personism” is, as Perelman’s Barthes points out, an “elaborately sounded structure.” First, the complexities of genre: the ode evidently alludes to Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” in which the woman’s “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” replace the expected Sunday church-going ritual. The poet’s own Sunday morning ritual is to “humble [himself] before a radio” rather than before the “altar” of his Catholic boyhood. Casual as the reference seems, it thus immediately sounds the note of an alienated Sunday. What we don’t yet know is that it also happens to be Mother’s Day–a double whammy for this particular prodigal son. The sense of pain soon to be introduced–”do we really need anything more to be sorry about / wouldn’t it be extra, as all pain is extra”– is foreshadowed by the sardonic modulation of “it’s amusing” into “like dying after a party.”

Indeed, the memory of last night is reduced to a “‘click’” (with its ambiguous reference to camera–the “party shot”–and gun) and, absurdly, “you’re dead from fall-out, hang-over, / or something hyphenated.” Here the poem condenses into eight words the relationship of Frank’s own situation (“hang-over”) to the public sphere (the fear of atomic fall-out), as well as the anxiety of dealing with the unknown, unnamable. “Something hyphenated”: it must be one of those diseases you read about in the papers but whose name you can’t pronounce.

To read these lines is to see how thoroughly, if obliquely, the naturalistic” ode has internalized the political and sexual discourses of its day. At the time of writing (the poem is dated 11 May 1958), the Soviet Union had just completed the first operative ICBM (see the allusion in line 20), thus prompting the belligerent U.S. reaction to a supposed “missile gap.” From Frank’s point of view, the missile hysteria marks a kind of moral “death of a nation” (see the film allusion in line 25), a nation which is “henceforth to be called small.” In this newly “small” nation, the advent of AIDS was still decades away and yet the talk of death from “something hyphenated” now seems like a curious anticipation of HIV. And yet, the use of the second-person implies, “you” musn’t take it all too seriously: “it’s amusing”–”‘click’”– just as it’s amusing to make up absurd Mother’s Day messages and send them to a “Russia” that no longer exists. Amusing, “except I will never feel CONTEST: WIN A Dream Trip pertains to / me, somehow.” Even here, though, the defense mechanism kicks in: “(Joe, I wouldn’t go, probably).”

O’Hara’s language in these mock-odes and elegies (rather than the O’Hara mystique) has provided an important bridge to the language poetics of the 1980s and 90s. Indeed, just as it is no longer enough to read O’Hara’s poetry as the verbal counterpart of New York abstract expressionist painting, so it no longer seems satisfactory to view him primarily as a founding father of New York Poetry, a school allied, in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (1960), primarily with Black Mountain, the Beats, and the so-called San Francisco Renaissance. Rather, we can now see that this “master of peripheral vision,” as Coolidge refers to O’Hara (BB 184), devised linguistic structures that anticipate the poetics of our own moment, from Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman and Kathleen Fraser down to Peter Gizzi and Kenneth Goldsmith, Cole Swensen and Susan Wheeler.

It has taken a long time to understand that those “streamers of crepe paper fluttering before the electric fan,” as Bewley called them, are actually the most intricate of language games. One artist who did see it, early on, was John Cage, who wrote the following memorial “mesostic” (internal acrostic) on the poet’s name:

hurtFully

Rolls

footmArk

reduciNg

negative feedbacK

kOlomna

hart’s tongue

Ho chi minh

huelvA

fancieRs

eusebio frAncisco kino (BB 182)

Here it is Hart Crane’s tongue that provides, via John Cage’s tribute, that small apostrophe (not even a full-fledged letter!) for the name “O’Hara,” and “frAncisco” (Frank) is linked to “kino”–the film art that was his special love. The flow of poetry, Cage suggests, depends upon such expanding tributaries.

Footnotes

1. Herbert A. Leibowitz, “A Pan Piping on the City Streets: The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara,” New York Times Book Review, 28 November 1971; rpt. inFrank O’Hara: To Be True to a City, ed. Scott Elledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), p. 24. This excellent collection is subsequently cited as SE.

2. Gilbert Sorrentino, “The New Note” (review of Lunch Poems), Bookweek, 1 May 1966; rpt. in SE 15.

3. Francis Hope, review of Lunch Poems, in New Statesman, 30 April 1965, p. 688.

4. Marius Bewley, review of Love Poems (Tentative Title), in New York Review of Books, 31 March 1966,; rpt. in SE 17.

5. Thomas Byrom, review of Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters, O’Hara’s Early Writing, and O’Hara’s Poems Retrieved, in Times Literary Supplement, 27 January 1979, p. 78. Subsequently cited as TLS.

6. Kenneth Koch, review of The Collected Poems, The New Republic, 1 and 8 January 1972; rpt. in SE 34.

7. The first edition (Alfred A. Knopf, 1971) supposedly remained in print but prospective readers had a hard time locating copies and it never came out in paperback. The California edition of 1995 has accordingly filled a real need: to date, according to Donald Allen, it has gone through three printings and sold over 5500 copies.

8. Carroll Terrell, a professor of English at the University of Maine and the founder of the Ezra Pound Society, the Pound journal Paideuma, and the two-volume Companion to the Cantos, organized, for many years, an annual Pound conference at Orono. His successor Burton Hatlen, who put together the fifties conference, is the editor of Sagetrieb, a journal devoted to poets of the Pound-Williams-H.D. tradition.

9. These are, in order, “Timothy F. Waples, “Frank O’Hara’s Nerve: The Individual Artist’s Stake in Cold War Cultural Politics”; Andrew Epstein, “‘The Inexorable Product of My Own Time’”: Frank O’Hara’s Poetry and the Cinema”; Scott Penney, “Camp and the Sublime in Frank O’Hara’s ‘Biotherm’; and Steve Evans, “Frank O’Hara and the Politics of Emergence.” Evans’s remarkable paper focused on “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets”; another excellent paper on race issues was Benjamin Friedlander’s “‘The Most Difficult Relationship’”: Frank O’Hara on Race in the 1950s.” Friedlander has also written an intriguing poetic text called Jetting I Commit the Immortal Spark: Sixty-nine Parts of an Essay on Frank O’Hara for a new series of volumes on poetics to be published by SUNY Press, under the auspieces of the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program.

10. Caleb Crain, “Frank O’Hara’s ‘Fired’ Self,” American Literary History, 9, no. 2 (Summer

11.1997): 287-308, see p. 287. Subsequently cited in the text as ALH.

12. Crain is again relying on “Personism,” which, according to O’Hara “was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roy, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person” (CP 499).

13. James E. B. Breslin, “Frank O’Hara,” From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 222. Breslin’s chapter on O’Hara is one of the best treatments of the poetry to date.

14. Andrew Ross, “The Death of Lady Day,” Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 68-77; rpt. in JE 380-91.

15. In the mythology of the fifties, moreover, as Robert Davidoff has reminded me in conversation, “shoeshine” designates male glamour, as in the popular Fred Astaire song, “There’s a shine on my shoe / And a melody in my heart,/ What a wonderful way / To start the day. . . .”

16. In an eerie sense, “stillwagon” also anticipates the Fire Island beach buggy that was to kill Frank O’Hara.

17. See Stuart Byron, “Frank O’Hara: Poetic ‘Queertalk’,” review of The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, Real Paper, 24 April 1974, 20-21; rpt. SE 64-69; p. 67.

18. Thomas Meyer, “Glistening Torsos, Sandwiches, and Coca-Cola,” review of O’Hara, Early Writing, Poems Retrieved, and Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, Parnassus 6 (Fall-Winter 1977): 241-57; rpt. in SE 85-102; see p. 86.

19. It is interesting that O’Hara’s fellow curators at MOMA , his art gallery friends, and the painters themselves have largely accepted the connection. See, for example, Waldo Rasmussen, “Frank O’Hara In The Museum,” and Renee S. Neu, “With Frank At MOMA,” in Homage to Frank O’Hara, ed. Bill Berkson & Joe LeSueur (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1980) pp. 81-90, 91-92. Subsequently cited in the text as BB. And even Rudy Kikel, in “The Gay Frank O’Hara,” takes the poet’s concern for the immediacy of Action Painting as a “characteristic outgrowth of an accepted gay self,” Gay Sunshine, 35 (Winter 1978), rpt. SE 334-49, p. 336.

20. See pp. 148-52. The other poems are “What Appears to Be Yours” (1960, CP 380), “Dear Jap” (1963, CP 470), “Poem (The Cambodian Grass is Crushed)” (1963, CP 472), and “Bathroom” (1963, CP 473).

21. See pp. 109 and figure 12 on p. 112. The other art works are In Memory of My Feelings–Frank O’Hara, 1961, 4 the News, 1962, Memory Piece (Frank O’Hara), 1961-70, and Memory Piece (Frank O’Hara), 1961. The latter is a plan and elevation view in ink, graphite, and pencil of a sculpture (Memory Piece) containing a rubber cast of O’Hara’s foot, constructed in South Carolina from a cast made in Johns’s New York studio . In “For Jap” (see note 17 above), O’Hara wrote, “when I think of you in South Carolina I think of my foot in the sand.” See Marla Prather, Nan Rosenthal, Amy Mizrahi Zorn, “Catalogue,” The Drawings of Jasper Johns, ed. Nan Rosenthal and Ruth E. Fine (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1990), p. 166. Both the drawing and sculpture are reproduced here.

22. John Cage, “Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas,” A Year From Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), p. 84.

23. Fred Orton, “Present, the Scene of . . . Selves, the Occasion of . . . Ruses,” in Foirades / Fizzles: Echo and Allusion in the Art of Jasper Johns, ed. James Cuno (Los Angeles: The Grunewald Center for the Graphic Arts and Wight Art Gallery at UCLA, 1987), pp. 179-80. Subsequently cited in the text as FF.

24. Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford, 1972), pp. 17-91, see p. 44.

25. Ron Padgett and David Shapiro (eds.), An Anthology of New York Poets (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 297. Subsequently cited as NYP.

26. Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream. Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986), pp. 45-46. Subsequently cited in the text as CD.

27. Bob Perelman, “A False Account of Talking with Frank O’Hara and Roland Barthes in Philadelphia,” The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 156-65, see p. 161. Subsequently cited as MP.

Rereading Frank O’Hara

Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems, ed. Mark Ford. New York: Afred A. Knopf, 2008), 265pp. $30.00

By Marjorie Perloff

Published in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion, 1, Fall 2008

Song

Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that’s what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirty
that’s what you think of in the city
you don’t refuse to breathe do you

someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very
he’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes

that’s what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that’s not a thought that’s soot

and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don’t refuse to breathe do you (158)

Fifty years have passed since Frank O’Hara wrote this seemingly casual and droll little poem about sexual desire—fifty years in which O’Hara’s reputation has continued to rise steadily. Who would have believed in 1959, or in 1966, the year of O’Hara’s tragic death at the age of forty, or in 1974, when Donald Allen produced the first Selected Poems, with Larry Rivers’ notorious nude portrait of Frank on the dust jacket, that by 2009, O’Hara would have come to be regarded, not only in the U.S. but around the world, as one of the great poets of our time? Robert Lowell, who famously dismissed as mere fluff the lyric “Lana Turner has collapsed” (1962), written, so O’Hara claimed, in the course of a Staten Island ferry ride that took him and Lowell to a joint poetry reading, is no longer much favored by les jeunes, even as so many other notable poets of mid-century, from W. S. Merwin to Adrienne Rich, have found themselves inevitably eclipsed by a younger, cooler generation.

But O’Hara? Not only is he now widely taught here and abroad (the editor of the Selected Poems is the British poet-critic Mark Ford, a professor at University College, London); he has found an unexpected popular audience as well. On YouTube, at this writing, you can find three short video performances of “Is it dirty,” made by Joseph Fusco (fuscofilm 2006), each with a different reader (Fusco himself, Dylan Chalfy, Janet Shaw), the first, read to music by Brahms, the second Artie Shaw, the third Eric Satie—all containing distinctive Manhattan imagery from Harlem fire escapes to flashing neon signs. Each gives an intriguing window on the poem, placing before us the signature style that makes O’Hara so unique and inimitable.

Is it dirty? The question is almost rhetorical for Manhattan dwellers, whose habitat—street corners, dumpsters, construction sites, subway platforms, park benches, back alleys—is dirty by definition. But that dirt is taken for granted: what really interests the questioner is mental dirt: dirty jokes, films, novels, and pictures, “dirty” as in mild expletives like “You dirty rat!” And why is the city especially conducive to dirty thoughts? Well, presumably, those who breathe in the dirty air, think dirty too. The logic here is of course specious, but in the context of “Song,” it makes perfect sense. The poem, moreover, immediately sets itself apart from the urban nightmare poems of its time: unlike Lowell’s nerve-wracking New York of “chewed-up streets” or Ginsberg’s “supernatural darkness of cold-water flats,” O’Hara’s “city hung with flashlights” (19) is the American counterpart of what James Joyce called “dear dirty Dublin.”

The key to “Song” is what Aristotle called in his Rhetoric the pathetic argument—the characterization of speakers by their modes of second-person address. In O’Hara’s lyric, meditation or description generally give way to overheard conversation: the address to a “you,” whether overt or not, shifting in the course of a given poem even as it everywhere controls the discourse. Is it dirty? does it look dirty? does it just seem dirty? The insistent and intense questions may be posed to a friend, a lover, or even to the poet himself; then, too, in the case of the refrain “that’s what you think of in the city,” “you” may be equivalent to “one.” What the form of direct address manages to do, in any case—and none of O’Hara’s countless imitators has quite matched this strategy—is give the poem an astonishing immediacy: the reader, confronted by the lines “is it dirty / does it look dirty,” is instantly drawn into the conversation. For what is “it” anyway—the “it” that may just “seem dirty” of line 4? And how does “it” morph so readily into the “attractive” he of “very bad character” in the third tercet?

Ordinary and colloquial as the language in that tercet is, the staccato conversational rhythm—“is he really. yes. very / he’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes” heightens the intimacy of the discourse. And also its mystery: who’s speaking here? Do we read “is he really” as genuine question, confirmation, or sardonic response to the previous assertion? It all depends on pitch as the video versions attest. Are there two people debating the issue or even three? Or is the poet daydreaming in a taxi? The ambivalence of pronouns is reinforced by the surreal slide from physical to mental in “run your finger along your no-moss mind,” with its sexual (masturbatory?) connotations—connotations confirmed by comic line that follows: “that’s not a thought that’s soot.” You don’t refuse to breathe do you?

O’Hara called the aesthetic that governs this process “Personism.” The widely known 1959 manifesto by that name is so playful, so filled with declarations like “You just go on your nerve,” “I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures,” or “While I was writing [the poem] I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead,” that readers often miss the import of a passage that come at midpoint:

Abstraction in poetry . . . is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction . . . involves personal removal by the poet. . . . [Personism] does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of feelings toward the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. (248)

The demand is for personal address on the one hand, depersonalization of the addressee on the other. The poet talks, even here in his manifesto, to a you, he familiarly confides in you, he is sensitive to your responses. But the particulars of the addressee’s identity remains opaque, even when “you” is “me” or “us.” Thus, despite the well-known campy explanation that Personism “puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style and the poem is correspondingly gratified,” O’Hara mythologizes his “characters” by regarding them less as individuals than as players in particular language games.

Such distancing is enhanced by formal control. “Song” is built on a sequence of repetition with variation (“Is it dirty / does it look dirty . . . does it just seem dirty”), refrain (“that’s what you think of in the city”), and off-rhyme, with the first five lines ending respectively on “dirty,” “dirty,” “city, “dirty,” “city.” Once the dirty city motif is established, the poem introduces a new motif: “someone comes along. . . .” followed by the clipped dialogue of the next three stanzas with its “yes, no” banter and absence of all punctuation except for periods. The poem’s musical development comes full circle with the repetition, now in a different context, of “you don’t refuse to breathe do you.”

Despite its seeming ease, then, O’Hara’s is not an easy poetry. In making his new selection, Mark Ford plays down the more clotted, surrealist experiments of the early fifties (e.g. the long “Second Avenue”) as well as most of the charming but slight later poems that O’Hara never intended to publish (e.g., “The Sentimental Units” or “Bathroom,” both from 1963). Rather, the volume’s focus is on the great odes, the “I do this, I do that” “lunch poems,” and the short lyrics and songs in the vein of “Is it dirty.” As such, this new Selected contains almost no wholly negligible poems, although it does include the campy—and to my mind, slight—early verse play Try! Try! Indeed, the O’Hara who produced such brilliant conversation poems, faltered when he had to write actual dramatic dialogue. One problem, of course, was that, given the conventions of the fifties, O’Hara had to code as heterosexual the gay love affair between his three principals. More important, the necessity of simulating what people might actually say in a given situation prevented the imaginative transformation that lyric permits.

Take the following untitled poem, also of 1959, that centers on a telephone call to Frank’s poet friend Kenneth Koch:

The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer’s ankles
the white paint the green leaves in an old champagne bottle
and the formica shelves going up in the office
and the formica desk-tops over the white floor
what kind of an office is this anyway (164)

Again: present tense, medias res. The reference here is probably to Frank’s new office at the Museum of Modern Art, but the detail is less realistic than cinematic: one thinks of fifties films like James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause, with its bobby soxers and burning lights. White formica shelves going up, white desktops coming down onto white floors: the scene reflects the poet’s inner emptiness, what with nature reduced to a few leaves stuck into an empty champagne bottle. But even this description is quickly interrupted by the exasperated query: “what kind of an office is this anyway.” Is the unpunctuated question addressed to the self? Memory of someone else’s disparaging remark? The improvisational note, in any case, paves the way for the phone call that follows:

I am so nervous about my life the little of it I can get ahold of
so I call up Kenneth in Southampton and presto
he is leaning on the shelf in the kitchen three hours away
while Janice is drying her hair which has prevented her from hearing
my voice through the telephone company ear-blacker
why black a clean ear
Kenneth you are really the backbone of a tremendous poetry nervous system
which keeps sending messages along the wireless luxuriance
of distraught experiences and hysterical desires to keep things humming
and have nothing go off the trackless tracks

Address here is complicated: the poet doesn’t so much address Kenneth as relay, in the present tense, (to another friend?), how miserable he felt, how he called up Kenneth, and why Janice (Kenneth’s wife) wasn’t the one to answer the phone. The poet as protagonist may well feel out of control, but the poem itself is able to relate everything: “nervous” in line 1 above points ahead to the “tremendous poetry nervous system” of which Kenneth is said to be the backbone, the kitchen shelf Kenneth leans on connects to the shelves in Frank’s office: indeed, there seems to be one continuous shelf from Manhattan to Southampton “three hours away.” And the hair dryer Janice is using has the shape and look of the “telephone company ear-blacker”: the aside “why black a clean ear,” which literally refers to the phone thus slyly includes Janice, straight from the shower, as well.

In this context the address to Kenneth has the directness of actual speech, but the fact is that Frank’s words, as recorded here, are by no means a simulation of the actual phone conversation. On the phone, one speaks of specifics (“why did Vincent get mad yesterday? Or “what shall I tell Joe when I get home?”). “The wireless luxuriance / of distraught experiences and hysterical desires to keep things humming,” on the other hand, is a retrospective and abstracted description of the poet’s state of mind, again, perhaps, presented as if in witty summation to a third party We can see this doubling over process at work in the final section:

And once more you have balanced me precariously
on the wilderness wish
of wanting to be everything to everybody everywhere
as the vigor of Africa through the corridor
the sands of Sahara still tickle my jockey shorts
the air-conditioner grunts like that Eskimo dad
and the phone clicks as your glasses bump the receiver
to say we are in America and it is all right not to be elsewhere (164)

Note that the poem never supplies the words of comfort and reassurance Kenneth might actually proffer. Rather, Frank’s narrative of Kenneth’s cheering up is after the fact: the poet can look back on the “wilderness wish / of wanting to be everything to everybody everywhere” with some equanimity. And just telling it again and again, to one of his countless confidantes, Frank can break the dark mood. Africa and Alaska, emblematic of those far reaches beyond the poet’s grasp, are no longer threatening: indeed, he can joke about the “sands of Sahara still [tickling] my jockey shorts” or the air-conditioner “grunt like that Eskimo dad.” Only in the penultimate line does the “your” once again relate directly to Kenneth as Frank recognizes the sound of his friend’s glasses scraping the phone. That sound, as the phone clicks off is the reassurance he needs: “to say we are in America and it is alright not to be elsewhere.” Which is a way of saying that Frank is not out of line, that, whatever is at issue, he’s doing the right thing.

“Personism,” as exemplified here, is thus artfully constructed, inviting the reader to share what seems so private and is yet a common process of working oneself out of an anxiety state. We don’t know from the poem what’s wrong with Frank, why his life is falling apart, whom he’s in love with or just what “distraught experiences and hysterical desires” have been bothering him. We only know that friendship breaks the spell– “once more you have balanced me precariously—and that, as “precariously” tells us, it won’t last. In O’Hara’s poetic universe, nothing does last, as the poet knows only too well. The cream in the instant coffee is always “slightly sour” (100), the ice in the whiskey melting (159), the lunch hour nearly over. All the more reason to savor every moment: “There’s nothing so spiritual about being happy but you can’t miss a day of it, because it doesn’t last” (99). And soon we will read “how sad the lower East side is on Sunday morning in May” (213).

The longing to stop time in its “trackless tracks” is forever met by its opposite: the desire to “keep up” the surface with what the early abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman called “push and pull.” In a poem surprisingly not included in Ford’s Selected, “To Hell with It”: the poet declares:

				(How I hate subject matter!  Melancholy.
		intruding on the vigorous heart.
							     the soul telling itself
		you haven’t suffered enough ((Hyalomiel))
							    and all things that don’t change
		photographs,
				monuments,
					memories of Bunny and Gregory and me in costume
								(Collected Poems, 275)

Hyalomiel is a French trade name of a vaginal gel: lubricant is what’s needed to give life to those static items like photographs and monuments. And liquification is equivalent to surprise in O’Hara’s work: opening lines, especially, must jump out at the reader. “The only way to be quiet,” he declares in the short manifesto lyric “Poetry,” “is to be quick, so I scare/ you clumsily, or surprise / you with a stab.” And so we have openings like the following:

		I think a lot about
		the Peachums:  		                (“The Three Penny Opera,” 1950)
		Why do you play such dreary music
		on Saturday afternoon . . .                   (“Radio,” 1955)

		I’m having a real day of it.
						There was
		something I had to do.  But what?        (“Anxiety,” 1957)

“I think a lot about the Peachums” is wonderfully absurd because no one familiar with “The Three Penny Opera” (whether the Brecht-Weill play or, as here, the film) has ever given a thought to the Peachums, those vicious parents of Polly who are the purest of stereotypes, functioning in the play to satirize the financial ills of Weimar Germany, while glancing back slyly at the not so different mores presented in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, which is Brecht’s source. The opening declaration is thus comically absurd, as is the admonishment to the radio box in O’Hara’s second example. And it is the candor of “I’m having a real day of it” that immediately engages the reader, especially with the follow-up, “There was / something I had to do. But what?”

The immediacy of such poems is palpable, the comic-anxious moods heightened by O’Hara’s tensile line breaks: “I think a lot about / the Peachums” or “There was / something” in “Anxiety.” What, on rereading, I find even more remarkable in these poems is their contemporaneity; often, they sound as if they were written yesterday. Common sense suggests that, when poems use the particulars of slangy, everyday speech–and in O’Hara’s case, the New York gay argot of his time– along with former brand names like Hyalomiel or the “Heaven on Earth Bldg / near the Williamsburg Bridge,” they would date quickly. After all, our idiom in 2008– seven years after 9/11 and half a century after O’Hara’s radio days, his screening of “Three Penny Opera,” or his late-night suppers at the Sagamore Café — has certainly changed. The Cold War discourse and cold-water flats of O’Hara’s pre-Stonewall Manhattan have been replaced by a much more corporate and dispersed metropolis, whose poetic activity has shifted from the Cedar Bar to the internet, from the telephone (not yet a mobile in O’Hara’s days!) to email and the blogosphere.

The presentness of O’Hara’s poetry depends, I think, on its peculiar absorption of the public into the private sphere. Unlike the Lowell of “For the Union Dead” or “Inauguration Day, 1953,” O’Hara does not comment directly on public events, nor does he express political convictions. Rather, he makes the reader feel what it meant to live at a moment when the Berlin blockade or the Cuban Missile Crisis or, first and last, the threat of nuclear war was always on the edge of one’s consciousness. For the private citizen, the morning news was—and this remains the case today —paradoxical: on the one hand, the newsflash becomes part of our everyday life; on the other, we absorb the news passively, it being quite beyond our power to actually affect it.

“Poem” (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!)” is a case in point. In September 1959, Stalin’s successor Nikita Khruschhev was the first Soviet Premier to visit the U.S. Between high-level talks, Eisenhower entertained Khrushchev at Camp David, movie stars entertained him in Hollywood, and of course he saw the sights in New York. For the thirteen days of his trip, Khrushchev was constantly in the headlines, his unsmiling (though sometimes broadly grimacing) face staring defensively at his audience. What, under these circumstances, can we make of that absurd opening line? Why is it the “right day” for Khrushchev to come to New York?

From Frank’s particular perspective, this bright September day is the “right” one because he happens to be feeling especially buoyant. It’s a gorgeous sunny and windy day in New York– “the cool graced light/ is pushed off the enormous glass piers by hard wind / and everything is tossing, hurrying on up”—and his love affair with Vincent is evidently going well, as suggested by the droll double entendre of the line “last night we went to a movie and came out.” Wind, as I noted before, is always a sign of life, of vitality in O’Hara’s work; it energizes the poet and makes even the morning cab drive to work a pleasure:

		Where does the evil of the year go
							 when September takes New York
		and turns it into ozone stalagmites
							    deposits of light

But where does Khrushchev come in? On the morning cab ride, the Puerto Rican driver complains that “this country has everything but politesse.” Inconsequentially, that evening Frank remembers the comment as he and Vincent are dining after the movie. “Blueberry blintzes”: whether these are on the dinner menu or only conjured up vis-à-vis the Russian motif, the speaker notes that “Khrushchev was probably being carped at / In Washington, no politesse.” The joke, of course, is that it is Khrushchev himself who is probably doing the carping and that, in any case, nothing could be more alien to this dour personality than politesse or charm. Nor is he likely to care what sort of day it was in Manhattan. Indeed, the subliminal presence of the Soviet premier does color the poet’s mood: recalling his reading, last night, of François Villon, “his life, so dark,” the bright sunshine is perceived as “blinding” and the poet notes that “my tie is blowing up the street / I wish it would blow off / though it is cold and somewhat warms the neck.”

It is a momentary tremor. The exhilaration quickly returns, the expansive mood large enough to incorporate the dour presence of the Russian Premier:

		as the train bears Khrushchev on to Pennsylvania Station
		     and the light seems to be eternal
		     and joy seems to be inexorable
		     I am foolish enough always to find it in wind.  (176)

The Khrushchev train, bearing down on Penn Station, can’t spoil the poet’s mood. All the same, O’Hara concludes on a tremulous note: the light only seems to be eternal, the joy inexorable. And the wind, we know, bloweth where it listeth. The poem, in any case, traces the emotional arc of this poet’s response to public events, subliminally present as he makes his way through the city. It is the banality of the political that makes it so insidious. And again the pathetic argument draws the reader into the frame, for “Khrushchev is coming on the right day!” is a quip evidently made to an accompanying friend, and the whole “I do this, I do that” process seems to be relayed to various intimates, with the poet wryly performing himself in their presence.

The lesson—if there is anything as solemn as a lesson to be learned from O’Hara’s lyric—is the old one that poetry must show rather than tell, that poetry is always a mode of defamiliarization. At a time where the poetry journals are filled with trivial love songs and self-righteous anti-war poems—poems that present their speaker as knowing self, telling us others what the right stance is—O’Hara’s poetic instinct for the unbearable lightness of being is especially remarkable:

it’s also pretty hard to remember life’s marvelous
but there it is guttering choking then soaring
in the mirrored room of this consciousness
it’s practically a blaze of pure sensibility
and however exaggerated at least something’s going on
and the quick oxygen in the air will not go neglected
will not sulk or fall into blackness and peat (“In Favor of One’s Time’)

Or, as O’Hara put it in a neighboring poem, “it is possible isn’t it.”

Johns, O’Hara, Cage and the “Aesthetic of Indifference”

Marjorie Perloff

Modernism / Modernity, 8, no. 2 (2001): 197-223.

How does the flag sit with us, we who don’t give a hoot for Betsy Ross, who never think of tea as a cause for parties?

–John Cage, “Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas”[1]

In a sketchbook for 1964, Jasper Johns began to make notes for his paintings Watchman and According to What. On one particularly tantalizing page [figure 1], [2] Johns makes a sketch for what would appear in both paintings as the wax cast of a man’s lower torso, positioned on the seat of a chair, itself bisected vertically to accommodate the depth of the fragmented figure. Torso and chair are inverted so that the long left leg extends upward to meet the word “spy” at the lower margin of the enigmatic text, positioned as a reversed L-shape above it:

The Watchman falls “into” the “trap” of looking.
The “spy” is a different person
“Looking” is & is not “eating” & also “being eaten”
That is, there is continuity of some sort among
the watchman, the space, the objects.
The spy must be ready to “move,” must be aware
of his entrances & exits.
The watchman leaves
his job & takes away
no information.
The spy must remember
and must remember himself
& his remembering.
The spy designs himself
to be overlooked. The
watchman “serves” as a
warning. Will the
spy & the watchman
ever meet? In a
painting named Spy,
will he be present?
The spy stations himself
to observe the watchman.

If the spy is a foreign object
why is the eye not irritated?
Is he invisible?
When the spy irritates, we try
to remove him.
“Not spying, just looking”—
Watchman. (JJWI 59-60)

In the square inside the L-shaped text, Johns has written: “Somewhere here, there is the / question of “seeing clearly.” / Seeing what? According to What?”.

What /who are watchman and spy? “If the artist is the spy (never depicted),” writes Francis M. Naumann in a 1992 catalogue essay, “the watchman is the spectator/critic, a member of the viewing audience. In his capacity as a spectator, the watchman remains momentarily inactive — seated—his disoriented position and fragmentation suggesting that he has, as Johns has predicted, fallen into ‘the trap of looking’.” [3] . And Michael Crichton takes the distinction even more literally: “The notes suggest that this is a picture about looking. They identify the cast of the leg and chair, inverted in one corner; that is the watchman (falling into the trap of looking?).” [4]

But why would Johns, who has always resisted allegorical readings of his work, refer to the “spectator / critic” as a mysterious watchman, in seemingly endless struggle with an equally mysterious artist-spy? And why, to make matters even murkier, would he use an encaustic cast of a leg, unconnected to a body, as a representation of something as specific as this “watchman”? A few pages earlier in Johns’s sketchbook [figure 2] where the cast of the leg (not yet inverted) is outlined in the upper right, next to a hinge picture, we read:

	One thing made
		of another
		One thing used
		as another.
		an arrogant object
		Something to be folded or
		bent or stretched.
			(SKIN?)
		Beware of the body
		& the mind.
		Avoid a polar
		situation.
		Think of the
		edge of the city &
		the traffic there.	  (JJWI 56)

“Avoid a polar situation”: Johns has always preferred the “traffic” at the “edge of the city– a border situation– to binaries like artist / spy and spectator / watchman. In his Watchman note, an arrow points from the enigmatic phrase “’Looking’ is & is not ‘eating’ & also ‘being eaten,” to the parenthetical comment: “Cezanne?—Each object reflecting the other” [figure 1 and JJWI 59]. The reference is probably to Gertrude Stein’s observation that “Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole.” [5] For Johns, as for Stein, composition must be decentered, non-hierarchical, each part of the canvas as important as every other part.

Thus, unlike, say, Jackson Pollock’s all-over drip paintings of the preceding decade– paintings that, however improvisatory their process of composition might have been, are characterized, in the words of Johns’s friend Frank O’Hara, by their formal “balance, proportion, and controlled emotion” [6] — Watchman [figure 3] refuses to cohere. What, for example, is the relation of the three-dimensional body cast (the inverted leg), attached to the chair to the wooden ball and stick at bottom left? How do both these “real” objects relate to the three horizontal brownish-grayish “abstract” sections of the canvas, bearing the partially hidden words “RED,” “YELLOW,” and “BLUE” (only their first letters are visible)—words that—confusingly match not the color fields in which they appear, but the three rectangles on the right, as if to suggest that observation alone is never sufficient for understanding. When I look at Watchman, my eye moves down from the disturbing encaustic leg-cast to focus on the wide orange, white, and green brushstrokes that seem to replace the cast’s missing upper torso, brushstrokes that don’t blend, thus emphasizing the flatness of the canvas. As they cascade downward, they lose their color, giving way to a thin gray-brown wash dripping across a partially hidden newspaper page to the strip at the bottom, evidently made by dragging the stick at the left across the canvas through a layer of wet paint, leaving a black-through-white tonal scale covered with drips behind.

In studying the incongruous objects incorporated into Johns’s paintings of the early sixties—for example, the two letters N and O, cut out of aluminum foil and suspended from a wire in NO, the ruler and tin cup in Good Time Charlie [figure 4], the broom, china cup, and towel in Fool’s House — Leo Steinberg comments that for Johns, the canvas is “not a picture plane, not a window, nor an uprighted tray, nor yet an object with active projections into actual space; but a surface observed during impregnation, observed as it receives a message or imprint from real space.” [7] In Watchman [figure 3], the little wooden ball against which a stick leans diagonally is just such an imprint, a trace of impregnation that alters the surface. But what is the message and who is the spy?

Johns’s own comments only compound the mystery. Interviewed by Yoshiaki Tono in August 1964, after the completion of the painting, he explains that “The idea for this work first occurred to me two years ago, when I visited Madame Tussaud’s, in London. The image of flesh, the image of skin—images I had never used before. . . . . The idea of the leg of a person sitting on a chair came to me about a year ago” (JJWI 96). As for the verbal account of watchman and spy, Johns dismisses it as a “play on words.” “I don’t,” he tells Tono, “want you to associate the essay with the picture” (JJWI 96-97). When the latter presses, remarking that the poet Shin Ooka took the painting to refer to “the trace of something that had abruptly passed away . . . the end of a drama,” Johns replies, “For me the picture implies the fall of something, an interpretation I think is clear from the leg’s position in the overall composition.” But lest we start reading the image allegorically as a fall from innocence or grace or as a wartime execution, Johns adds matter-of-factly: “The leg will naturally fall . . . if you cut the support that attaches the chair to the canvas” (JJWI 97). And, in an allusion to Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations Johns had been reading with absorption since 1962, [8] he emphasizes his concern for the context within which meanings are made:

For instance, there is the word “red.” But what is “red” out of many shades of red, or which “red” is the real red, this red or that red? When we gradually add yellow, exactly how much yellow. He will turn “red” into “orange”? I find this way of seeing things very interesting. If you take up something, for instance, and you name it “something,” then you and I can understand exactly what the other party means through this naming. This is useful and necessary in our daily life. If we come closer and closer to that “something” to identify it, however, we will begin to wonder whether that “something” is really “something” or not. (JJWI 97).

Precision coupled with a respect for difference, Johns insists, is by no means equivalent to the materialism or objecthood practiced by Pop Art, then coming into vogue. Consider the following exchange, again in a 1964 interview (conducted by Jay Nash and James Holmstrand):

JN & JH: Although you deny being a Pop artist, you sometimes use such things as beer cans, light bulbs, etc. in your work. Doesn’t this seem inconsistent?

JJ: No, I don’t think of myself as a Pop artist. {The Pop movement] is technically more restrictive and deals mostly with images. I am not so much interested in dealing with images as working for form.

JN & JH: A number of painters—not only the Pop painters, but people like [Larry] Rivers and yourself—have concerned themselves with American subject matter (maps of the U.S., Confederate flags and soldiers, portraits of George Washington, etc.). Do you think this reflects an increasing nationalistic pride in artists?

JJ: I don’t think so. I’m merely concerned with looking and seeing and not much else. I’m not involved in patriotism or politics. . . (JJWI 104-105).

Here again is a reference to “looking and seeing” (watchman and spy?), this time in contradistinction to an art of “patriotism or politics.” This seeming political disengagement has been defined, in a much discussed essay by Moira Roth, as the “aesthetic of indifference.” [9] The Duchamp- Cunningham—Cage- Rauschenberg-Johns circle, Roth argues, responded to the oppressive Cold War climate of the fifties and sixties by adopting a stance of neutrality, passivity, and negation. Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, Cage’s Lecture on Nothing and notorious piano piece 4’33, and Johns’s “monotonous” and “repetitious” Alphabets and Numbers–these, she argues, contain “no messages, no feelings and no ideas. Only emptiness” (D/I 41). Indeed, she writes, the work of the Johns circle testifies to “the bizarre disjunction of art and politics that emerged in the 1960s. The radical political movements of the 1960s had virtually no expression in the art of that time, an art that was strangely appealing and acceptable to the very forces—governmental, corporate and middle-class powers—that these radical movements opposed” (D/I 35).

Here Roth is referring to the role the State Department and CIA have been shown to have played in the promotion and dissemination of New York Painting—especially abstract expressionism–in the late forties and fifties. [10] But Johns, as a representative of the next generation and as the youngest member) of the Cage-Cunningham circle, (he was born in 1930), went, so Roth posits, beyond the legendary political indifference and negation she associates particularly with Duchamp:

More than any other artist, Johns incorporated in his early art the Cold War and the McCarthy era preoccupations and moods. This is not to imply that Johns did this consciously or single-mindedly . . . but what emerges out of a collective examination of his work is a dense concentration of metaphors dealing with spying, conspiracy, secrecy and concealment, misleading information, coded messages and clues. These were the very subjects of newspaper headlines of the period, reiterated on the radio and shown on television. . . . [Johns’s] early work is a warehouse of Cold War metaphors” (D/I 43).

The argument for a subliminal presence of Cold War spying / concealment imagery in works like Watchman makes more sense than does the identification of watchman with viewer, spy with artist. But, as Jonathan D. Katz points out in his provocative response to Roth’s piece, published together with hers in Difference / Indifference (1998), her essay (originally appearing in 1977) underplayed the role sexuality played in the artistic choices made by the artists in question. Interestingly, Roth herself referred to Cage, Johns, and Cunningham as models of “a new breed of artist, an alternative to the politically concerned abstract expressionists,” and cites the sculptor George Segal’s description of the “new” artist as “slender, cerebral, philosophical, iconoclastic type,” with “a dandylike elegance of body build and a manner which delighted in cool and elegant plays of the mind” (D/I 37). “Dandy” is of course a euphemism for gay, and Roth acknowledged that the artists in question were predominantly homosexual or, like Duchamp performing as Rrose Sélavy, bisexual (see D/I 37). Katz, with the hindsight of twenty years, adds that, given the extreme homophobia of the postwar era, the “indifference” of the artists in question must be understood less as “passivity” than what he calls the “double duty” of “camouflage and contestation” that characterized “the compulsory Cold War closet.”(D/I 51). “What Roth refers to as ‘an aesthetic of indifference’,” writes Katz, “can be more accurately termed ‘a politics of negation,’ wherein negation functions as an active resistance to hegemonic constructions of meaning as natural or inherent in the work” (D/I 63). The performance of “silence” (or White Painting), in this scheme of things, testifies to the awareness of the possibilities of “a newly destabilized and de-essentialized construction of self” (D/I 55). The “natural,” always a mystification of the social, is replaced by the dandy’s “narcissistic pleasures of performative fluency” (D/ I 59).

This reminder of the role sexual orientation played in the negative politics of the Cage circle is a useful antidote to Roth’s overly schematic distinction between a committed and an uncommitted poetry. But Katz glosses over certain key differences among the artists inside the circle in question. To understand the role of Johns’s “cool” art in the “activist” sixties, it is useful to read Johns’s work against that of a closely related gay artist, or rather poet (and art critic) —a poet who was Johns’s exact contemporary (born 1926) and, like him, a great admirer of John Cage, whose Music of Changes, as performed by David Tudor, he had introduced to a third poet-friend, John Ashbery, as early as 1952. [11] I am thinking, of course, of Frank O’Hara, whose poetry stands behind a number of important Johns compositions and vice-versa. At the same time, O’Hara’s aesthetic, rooted as it was in the fifties, was to prompt Johns’s own radical rethinking, in the early sixties, of what art could be —an art in which the “memory of [one’s] feelings” gradually gave way to the memory of one’s prior works, of what Cage had called, in a brilliant meditative essay on Johns’s work, “structures, not subjects” (JCYM 75, my emphasis). Cage / Johns / O’Hara: the trio makes for an interesting rethinking of Cold War “difference” and “indifference.”

“JOHNS ’63 HELL”[12]

In 1961, as is often remarked, Johns’s work changed dramatically. As Kirk Varnedoe tells it:

. . . a new emotional tone intervened in Johns’s work, chill, dark, and bleak. Titles of negation, melancholy, or bitterness (No, Liar, In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Hara) underlined this altered mood. . . . Gray, formerly the guise of impassive neutrality, became an expressive cast of gloom and morbidity. This was now an art under pressure, and imagery of imprinting and smearing, along with thinned-out passages of staining paint and crusts of scraped residue, gave it a more troubled material and psychological life” (KV 191).

What had happened? In Off the Wall, Calvin Tomkins reports that Johns’s long-term relationship with Rauschenberg broke up in 1961: “By the time the summer ended they were no longer together. The break was bitter and excruciatingly painful, not only for them but for their closest associates—Cage and Cunningham and a few others—who felt that they, too, had lost something of great value.” [13] Johns began spending a large part of the year in a house he had bought on Edisto Island, off the coast of South Carolina.

One of the first paintings made after the move to Edisto was called In Memory of My Feelings-Frank O’Hara [figure 5]. This is not, as the title might suggest, an homage to a new lover; quite the contrary. Johns and O’Hara had first met in 1957, but they were not immediately friends, possibly because O’Hara’s primary allegiance, in his role as curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was to the abstract expressionists: he was exhibiting (and writing on) Jackson Pollock and William De Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler. [14] Johns, for his part, remained aloof from these painters. Asked in a 1964 interview whether his “stylism” was “a logical step beyond abstract expressionism,” he responded: “I tried to consciously avoid making statements that were already being made well. The 1940s did something valuable with the work of Pollock and others. In the 1950s there was a hangover where they were not producing private [pictures] but painting public pictures and refining statements. I am not interested in refinement. I try to avoid resemblances” (JJWI 105).

There was also the question raised by Moira Roth and Jonathan Katz about the abstract expressionists’ lifestyle: the loud and aggressively macho Cedar Bar scene was no more congenial to Johns than it had been to Cage, who recalls trying to avoid Jackson Pollock “because he was generally so drunk, and he was actually an unpleasant person for me to encounter. I remember seeing him on the same side of the street I was, and I would always cross over to the other side.” [15] But despite such conflicting loyalties, by 1959 Frank and “Jap” were corresponding—O’Hara sent Johns a long, amusingly annotated list of books worth reading, both poetry and prose (see MPFO 15ff)—and it is Jap who accompanies Frank to the Southampton weekend house party given by Kenneth and Janice Koch, where O’Hara and the dancer Vincent Warren become lovers—a weekend memorialized in the poem “Joe’s Jacket”:

Entraining to Southampton in the parlor car with Jap and Vincent, I see life as a penetrable landscape lit from above like it was in my Barbizonian kiddy days when automobiles were owned by the same people for years. . . . (FOHCP 329)

“Joe’s Jacket” ends on a note of pained resignation—‘it will not be need, it will be just what it is and just what happens” (FOHCP 330)—as the poet recognizes the impact his new relationship will have on his long-time companion Joe [LeSueur]. Perhaps Johns related this painful ending to his own break-up with Rauschenberg; in any case, his painting takes its title from O’Hara’s earlier (1956) poem “In Memory of My Feelings.”

Johns’s hinged painting [see figure 5] is divided in half, but the two seemingly matching “halves” are discordant. In the right half, the “abstract” brush strokes—predominantly black and blue with some white and a few color flecks or orange-red—don’t blend: theirs is, in Leo Steinberg’s words, a “ceaseless overlap-interlace of figure and ground; a paint surface like knitting or basketry. Not a shallow space but the quickened density of a film.” The “M-W brushstroke” used here and in related paintings of the early sixties, “functions like the corrugated staples carpenters use” (LST 44). In the left half of the painting, the blue-black paint strokes thin out and drip onto the largely white area near the bottom. In the top half, the strokes are obliterated by a more smoothly painted brown-grey rectangle, reminiscent of Johns’s earlier Canvas [figure 6] and Flags [figure 7]. Suspended on a wire from a screw near the top of this rectangle is an ordinary silver spoon, oddly hung, not by its handle, but upside down, as is the fork whose prongs are just visible behind it. The fork’s shadow, just to the right of the utensils, recalls a hand, with fingers closed. The well of the spoon intersects the bottom edge of the rectangle.

Before we consider the function of spoon and fork, we should note that the lower edge of the canvas is unpainted, reminding us that painterly illusionism is not in order. And right above this unpainted lower strip, we read the stencilled letters of the painting’s title “IN MEMORY OF MY FEELINGS — FRANK O’HARA and, to its right, the signature “J. JOHNS” with the date “[19]61.” This seeming authentication is misleading, for the painting in no way “illustrates” O’Hara’s poem, of which more in a moment. Indeed, as Fred Orton puts it, “the grey brushstrokes that dominate the right, and mark the white ground and turpentine-like-brown greyness of the left canvas are there not as the direct expression of feelings but as signifiers of the expression of feelings appropriated from the pictorial language of abstract expressionism. In the context of Johns’s surface, they refer to the idea of the unmediated association of feelings and facture, but their very identity as appropriated signifiers inhibits our seeing and understanding them as marks directly expressive of Johns’s feelings.” [16]

Brushstroke thus becomes ironic allusion, a kind of distancing device whereby overt emotion, whether the painter’s own or that of the previous New York generation, is kept at bay. The suspended spoon and fork contribute to this sense of displacement. Fred Orton speculates that Johns had in mind O’Hara’s poem “Dig My Grave with a Silver Spoon,” and that there is some private association between these little eating utensils and death (Orton 69). [17] But perhaps, as I have suggested elsewhere, the most important thing to note is that Johns strips ordinary domestic objects like spoons of their normal associations, recontextualizing them so as to “make it strange.” Spoons and forks are to eat with, not to be suspended from wires like stick figures in a game of Hang Man. Spoons and forks are to be held by someone, one in each hand, not bound together as they are here, where the fork oddly hides behind (or couples with?) the suspended, phallically erect spoon, (MPFO xxii). And, finally, the juxtaposition of these ordinary, everyday objects with the bluish-gray paint surface is curiously disorienting, challenging the viewer’s notions of how a visual field should be organized.

The blue-black brushstrokes play yet another role: they almost bury the words “DEAD MAN” stenciled across the lower edge of both canvases: “D on the left, “EAD MA[N} on the right, and then above that, but only on the right canvas, again—this time in smaller letters—‘DEAD MAN’. [18] The thick paint strokes, as Orton points out, “completely cover the human skull that Johns pictured, probably with a crude stencil of his own devising, in the top right of the canvas.” The naked eye cannot make out this skull; Orton is presumably drawing on Johns’s sketchbook for 1961, which contains a page [figure 8], at whose top we read “A DEAD MAN” and right below it:

Take a skull
cover it with paint
rub it against canvas (JJWI 29)

The outlined canvas below (evidently a first sketch for In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Hara) has a skull and crossbones at the upper right and the words “DEAD MAN” in large block letters at the lower margin. The skull motif reappears in a larger shaded version beneath the rectangle and in the second sketch, this time covered with black calligraphic squiggles, at the lower left. In both cases, the skull also resembles a light-bulb, thus recalling the sculpmetal and graphite renditions of light bulbs of the late fifties [figure 9].
[19]

The reference to “DEAD MAN” appears curiously prophetic, as O’Hara met his own death five years later, when he was only forty, in the tragic beach buggy accident at Fire Island. The commemorative volume published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1967 again bore the title In Memory of My Feelings.[20] But in 1961, O’Hara was very much alive, so the words “DEAD MAN” and the outline of the hidden skull must be construed otherwise. A hint is supplied in John Cage’s collage essay “Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas,” first published in the Jewish Museum catalog of the work of Johns early in 1964 and reprinted in A Year From Monday (1967). In this text, in which the italicized passages are taken from Johns’s own writings, Cage tries to recreate the artist’s strange but highly disciplined ways of working and to define his aesthetic. Near the beginning, we read:

Beginning with a flag that has no space around it, that has the same size as the painting, we see that it is not a painting of a flag. The roles are reversed: beginning with the flag, a painting was made. Beginning, that is, with structure (JCYM 74).

But not just any structure: “If it comes to his notice that someone else had one of his ideas before he did, he makes a mental or actual note not to proceed with his plan” (JCYM 74). Here is the fear of “resemblances” I talked of earlier, the need to See It New. And also to differentiate Johns from his contemporaries: “if only,” notes Cage, discrimination “will make us pause long enough in our headstrong passage through history to realize that Pop Art, if deducted from his work, represents a misunderstanding, if embarked upon as the next step after his, represents a non-sequitur” (75). And we recall Johns’s own distinction between Pop Art’s “dealing with images” and his own “working for form” (JJWI 92).

Gay “concealment,” it seems, can mean many different things: witness the obsession with object and image of that other famous gay sixties artist, Andy Warhol. For Johns, perhaps because of the rootlessness and isolation of his childhood, subjectivity becomes a matter of endless self-invention. In Cage’s wonderfully dead-pan “bio” sketch:

He does not remember being born. His earliest memories concern living with his grandparents in Allendale, South Carolina. Later, in the same town, he lived with an aunt and uncle who had twins, a brother and sister. Then he went back to live with his grandparents. After the third grade in school he went to Columbia, which seemed like a big city, to live with his mother and stepfather. A year later, school finished, he went to a community on a lake called The Corner to stay with his Aunt Gladys. He thought it was for the summer but stayed there for six years studying with his aunt who taught all the grades in one room, a school called Climax. The following year he finished high school living in Sumter with his mother and stepfather, two half-sisters and his half-brother. He went to college for a year and a half in Columbia where he lived alone. (JCYM 78))

How do we interpret these “facts”? There is no simple answer. We may surmise, if we like, that Johns must have been lonely and miserable. But this would be to read normative values into the equivocal portrait, whereas it might just be possible, in Johns’s particular case, that the absence of close family ties and a home produced a remarkable self-reliance and resilience. Then, too, as Cage implies, there is, after all, one constant in the nomadic life described—namely, South Carolina, represented, in the present of Cage’s essay, by Edisto.

A few pages later, Cage poses the question, “Does he live in the same terror and confusion that we do?” And he responds in Johns’s own words, “The air must move in as well as out—no sadness, just disaster.” (JCYM 80). This Buddhist note of acceptance (a faith Cage wholly shares and hence can write about so movingly) culminates in the text’s final paragraph, which refers to an afternoon of mushroom hunting in the local woods:
Even though in those Edisto woods you think you didn’t get a tick or ticks, you probably did. The best thing to do is back at the house to take off your clothes, shaking them carefully over the bathtub. Then make a conscientious self-examination with a mirror of necessary. It would be silly too to stay out of the woods simply because the ticks are in them. Think of the mushrooms (Caesar’s among them!) that would have been missed. Ticks removed, fresh clothes put on, something to drink, something to eat, you revive. There’s scrabble and now chess to play and the chance to look at TV. A Dead Man. Take a skull. Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull against canvas. (JCYM 84).

How do we reconcile the upbeat references to the evening’s “reviv[al]”—eating, drinking, playing scrabble and chess, watching TV after a hard day’s work– with the death note of the final citation, “A Dead Man. Take a skull. Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull against canvas” ? Is man, in Johns’s scheme of things, no more than this? Here it is useful to turn to the O’Hara poem that gave Johns his title, In Memory of My Feelings.

THE SCENE OF MY SELVES

O’Hara’s long autobiographical poem was begun on his thirtieth birthday; the immediate occasion may well have been the crisis of turning thirty and fearing that his vocation might never be realized. Indeed, as Bill Berkson speculates, the poem’s sense of urgency may well have to do with the publication, that same year (1956), of another long poem by a friend of the very same age—Howl by Allen Ginsberg. [21] “In Memory of My Feelings” opens as follows:

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.
My quietness has a number of naked selves,
so many pistols I have borrowed to protect my selves
from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons
and have murder in their heart! (CPFOH 252-53)

The crisis O’Hara presents so movingly here is that of objectification by the other. At the outset, the poet’s “naked selves” are endlessly victimized and terrorized: “A gun is ‘fired’,” and “pink flamingoes” absurdly crush “one of me” “underneath their hooves,” leaving behind “terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets.” (CPFOH 253). A little further along, “My transparent selves / flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing / without panic” (CPFOH 253). Indeed, memory only increases the pain and humiliation: “My father, my uncle, my grand-uncle and the several aunts”–these become nothing less than “the dead hunting” the “alive ahunted” (CPFOH 253). The poet’s mind, trying to deal with these memories of victimization is “like a shuttered suite in the Grand Hotel / where mail arrives for my incognito, / whose façade has been slipping into the Grand Canal for centuries” (CPFOH 254).

This last passage is characterized by the “performative fluency” Jonathan Katz speaks of, the campy power to construct alternate identities that allow one to survive. A central strategy, in the gay poetry of the sixties, is humor: for much of this poem, O’Hara’s narrator is able to laugh at his past exploits and at “the occasion of these ruses”(CPFOH 257). Many of the “memories,” moreover, far from being actual recollections, are based on various Hollywood films, as in the comic passage about Lord Nelson, where the “meek subaltern writhes in his bedclothes / with the fury of a thousand, violating an insane mistress / who has only herself to offer his multitudes” (CPFOH 255). The resort to imaginary memories that are actually quotations from other works, thus distancing the reader from the poet’s inner turmoil, distinguishes O’Hara from the Confessional poets of the fifties and sixties: “personism,” as O’Hara conceives of it, is not “personalism.”

But in part 4, hallucination and burlesque give way to a moment of transcendence:

		One of me is standing in the waves, an ocean bather,
		or I am naked with  plate of devils at my hip.
							 			Grace
		To be born and live as variously as possible. . .  (CPFOH 255-56)

And there follows the now well-known catalogue of assumed identities– “I am a Hittite in love with a horse . . . I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs / in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall / I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole. . . . I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain” (CPFOH 256)—a series of ecstatic identifications in which the poet is able to get outside himself and act in various desirable or comically absurd and hyperbolic roles.

It is a brilliant performance but one that cannot last. The fifth and final section opens with the short line “And now it is the serpent’s turn” (CPFOH 256). How to reconcile the phallic serpent to “the heart / that bubbles with red ghosts, since to move is to love”? Fantasies of domination give way to a reprise of erotic / masochistic dreams, whether of “being shot / by a guerrilla warrior or dumped from a car into ferns,” or a moment in which

        The hero, trying to unhitch his parachute,
stumbles over me.  It is our last embrace.
“The fancy,” in Keats’s words, cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do.”  Hence the poignancy and pathos of the poem’s ending:
			I could not change it into history
	And so remember it,
and I have lost what is always and everywhere
		present, the scene of the my selves, the occasion of these ruses,
		which I myself and singly must now kill
						and save the serpent in their midst.  (CPFOH 257)

The integrity of the self—this time, a “real” or natural self—is preserved, but only at a very high cost.

There is much more to be said about this complex poem, [22] but here I want to focus on its relationship to Johns’s painting. In both cases, meaning is created by juxtaposition of unlike items in an intricate network of metonymic images. In the poem, for example, the various unrelated scenes of hunting and war—whether remembered incidents or allusions to World War II films, or even pure inventions—play on the fear and paranoia of the poet, or again, the great-aunt’s “blood vessels [that] rushed to the surface/ and burst like rockets,” can be related to the Grand Canal scene in Venice, where “rockets splay over a sposalizio” (CPFOH 254), and then to the “fury of a thousand” in the Lord Nelson scene. In the same vein, the painting has no focus or vanishing point, no figure silhouetted against a ground, no symmetry between left and right halves, and yet the shape of the spoon handle is metonymically related to paint shapes throughout, and the brushstrokes, as I have already noted, create structures of great intricacy. Or again, in Watchman [figure 3], the little red stick at bottom left echoes the line of the chair back in the upper right, even as the black and white strip with its drips at the bottom of the frame carries on the rhythm of the vertical strip above it to create a T-shape. Each part of the canvas is as important as every other part, the principle being, again in Stein’s words, to “use everything.”

Both poem and painting create tension between formal abstraction and the introduction of ordinary, everyday objects. “My quietness has a man in it,” gives way to the particularism of O’Hara’s absurdist catalogues, even as Johns’s painting projects the suspended spoon and fork against a backdrop of thick and separate brushstrokes. The curious tension between the abstract and the “real,” also produces a marked eroticism: in a comic allusion to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, O’Hara’s “ardent lover of history hides, / tongue out / leaving a globe of spit on a taut spear of grass / and leaves off rattling his tail a moment / to admire this flag” (CPFOH 255); in the painting, that “spear,” in the form of spoon, reappears as a blue, black, or white brushstroke, in many places “hiding” something reddish orange.

But what about Johns’s hidden “DEAD MAN”? How does this reference relate to the “man” in O’Hara’s first line — “My quietness has a man in it”– or to those multiple selves” who must, in the end, be “killed” so as to “save the serpent in their midst”? It is, I would posit, in their treatment of death that O’Hara and Johns part company. O’Hara is still very much a post-Romantic poet, yearning for presence, for a particular palpable self that is anchored in a particular body. However much his “I” clowns around, playing self-deprecating games with what Katz calls “performative fluency” however much he can laugh at his own past and present inadequacies and postures, the driving force of the poem is anxiety (which is also the title of one of his most moving poems—see CPFOH 268), a free-floating fear whose ultimate object, death, is never far away, as in “A Step Away from Them,” where not even the “beautiful and warm” avenue can dispel the thought that “First / Bunny died, then John Latouche, / then Jackson Pollock” (CPFOH 258), or as in the last two lines of “Music,” where the poet’s buoyant mood is dispelled by the thought, “But no more fountains and no more rain / And the stores stay open terribly late” (CPFOH 210). O’Hara’s most famous poem, let’s remember, is the elegy “The Day Lady Died.”

For O’Hara, death and petrifaction (as in the Medusa’s stare in “In Memory”) are omnipresent, threatening at every moment to dissolve the fragile self. Evidently, Johns recognized this vulnerability: in In Memory of My Feelings-Frank O’Hara, he writes “A DEAD MAN” in big block letters, only to “cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull against canvas. John Cage, visiting Johns in Edisto Beach, where the latter had evidently undergone a bout of depression, [23] catches this mood perfectly in Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas. Contemplating Johns’s map and flag paintings, Cage remarks, “Stupidly we think of abstract expressionism. But here we are free of struggle, gesture, and personal image. Looking closely helps, though the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger of falling in love” (JCYM 83).

This subtle distinction between personal gesture and the sensuality of the paint itself refers obliquely to the distinction between the gesture painting (or gesture poetry) of the fifties and the more conceptual art of the sixties (Cage’s present in the essay), when the erotic became, so to speak, a source of ideation rather than personal image. Indeed, to come back to the title, unlike O’Hara’s memory of his feelings, Johns’s “memory” is not of former “feelings” or the specific incidents, real and imaginary, that generated those feelings; the memory, rather, is of his earlier art works: flags, canvases, numbers, letters, targets. It is this particular continuity that gives comfort.

Cage, who declares himself somewhat intimidated by the “enigmatic aura of his [Johns’s] personality” (YM 73), understands this perfectly. “A Dead Man,” he knows, could be used as well as anything else to give life to a given painting: “Take a skull. Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas.” The shape of a skull, as Johns depicts it, is not, after all, all that different from a lightbulb. Indeed, the skull-rubbing exercise was soon to be taken quite literally. In May of 1962, Johns made Study for Skin, a series of four drawings made by pressing the artist’s lubricated face on paper and then rubbing charcoal on the paper to render the oiled surface visible [see figure 10]. The resulting images are strangely indeterminate. On the one hand, we can see them, especially No. I [figure 11], as images of an eyeless face, flanked by hands spread on a pane of glass, behind which the man to whom they belong is somehow trapped. On the other, they are, in John Cage’s words, “Structures, not subjects” in their successive transformation of recognizable object into abstract form (JCYM 75). “He sometimes,” says Cage, “introduces signs of humanity to intimate that we, not birds for instance, are part of the dialogue. . . Finally, with nothing in it to grasp, the work is weather, an atmosphere that is heavy rather than light . . . in oscillation with it we tend toward our ultimate place: zero, gray disinterest” (JCYM 76). The “scene of my selves,’ to use O’Hara’s phrase, is gradually occluded.

The “zero” drawing process culminates in the lithograph Skin with O’Hara Poem of 1965 [figure 12]. Here the imprint of hands and face is placed on the semitransparent, brittle drafting paper used by engineers, which, as Riva Castleman tells us, “provided an unusual and anonymous surface for the artist’s uninhibited embrace of the [engraving] stone. The poem by O’Hara was added to the composition two years after the imprint was made, and remains the sole example from what was intended to be a portfolio of prints on unusual papers in a variety of shapes and sizes incorporating new works by the poet.” [24]

The relation of O’Hara’s text to the picture in which it is embedded is itself quite strange. Reproduced as typescript above the very graphic and ominously black, extended right hand (the hand imprints have the look of X-rays), [25] the poem “The Clouds Go Soft” is barely visible. If it weren’t for the title Skin with O’Hara Poem, one would hardly notice it. Given the title, however, the viewer looks for the text in what is a game of hide of seek. Here is O’Hara’s poem:

	The clouds go soft
					change color and so many kinds
		     puff up, disperse
						sink into the sea
	the heavens go out of kilter
                                            an insane remark greets
						             the monkey on the moon
			in a season of wit
						it is all demolished
	or made fragrant
			       sputnik is only the word for “travelling companion”

	here on earth
			at 16 you weigh 144 pounds and at 36

		the shirts change, endless procession
					      but they are all neck 14  sleeve 33

			and holes appear and are filled
	the same holes			                anonymous filler
				  no more conversion, no more conversation

		the sand inevitably seeks the eye
							  and it is the same eye
(CPFOH 474-75)

The poem, dated 11 July 1963, belongs to O’Hara’s final years and is as dark as anything he wrote. Even its lines trail off inconclusively, one line never quite anticipating the placement of the following. The poet who had always celebrated change, motion, vitality, and openness, here cannot get beyond his obsessive death thoughts. Like Johns’s charcoal “skin” rubbings, the clouds are said to “go soft”—an absurd remark since clouds are by definition soft, constantly change color, and inevitably sink, whether, as here, into the sea or behind mountains, trees, or buildings. The references to the moon launch and Sputnik in line 5-11 only serve to intensify the poet’s own isolation: “Sputnik,” after all, means “travelling companion,” wryly suggesting, in an echo of Philip Sidney’s famous sonnet “With how sad steps, oh moon. . .”, that even in outer space there must be more companionship than here on earth. Down here, even as the years tick off inexorably (“the shirts change, endless procession”), everything remains the same (“they are all neck 14 sleeve 33”), the armholes imperceptibly turning into graves. “No more conversion, no more conversation”: nothing but the “zero, gray disinterest” Cage discerns with reference to Johns’s drawings.

The last two lines of “The Clouds Go Soft” are especially arresting. Here it is not, in the words of the popular song, smoke that “gets in your eye” but sand that “inevitably seeks” it. Smoke is ephemeral whereas sand can cause permanent damage to the eye. And yet O’Hara’s reference is also an in-joke, an allusion to the actual sand at Edisto beach. Just a few months earlier, in a letter-poem called “Dear Jap,” O’Hara had written, “When I think of you in South Carolina I think of my foot in the sand.” The reference is to Johns’s Memory Piece (Frank O’Hara) begun in 1961 [figure 13], made by placing a rubber cast of O’Hara’s foot into the hinged lid of a small pine box, so that, when the box is closed, the cast foot makes an imprint in the sand in the top drawer. [26]

Barely legible in the visual field of Johns’s Skin with O’Hara Poem, “The Clouds Go Soft,” is thus an apt analogue to the composition of body fragments– helpless, extended hands, palms against an invisible surface, flanking a smudged black facial contour, rather like an image of the Crucifixion or perhaps Veronica’s Napkin — in the lithograph. But why did poet and painter never complete the originally projected portfolio of collaborations, of which Skin with O’Hara Poem turned out to be the only exemplar? My hunch is that the personal anguish expressed in this and related O’Hara poems of 1963[27] was one that Johns, having undergone a similar personal crisis, had schooled himself, probably with Cage’s help, to submit to the discipline of formal structuration, thus depersonalizing the visual field. Skin with O’Hara Poem is a bleak, unsettling picture, but the source of pain is not specified: it might relate to war as readily as to the sorrows of lost love. “I’m interested,” as Johns was at pains to tell David Sylvester shortly after exhibiting Skin with O’Hara
Poem, “in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality” (JJWI 113).

By 1964, in any case, Johns was spending more time than ever with Cage, Cunningham, and David Tudor. In March, en route to Hawaii and Japan, he traveled with Lois Long and Cage to San Francisco, where Cage performed with David Tudor at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. It was at one of their performances, that Johns noticed the spot of light on the ceiling—a reflection from the mirror in a woman’s compact—that gave him the idea for the reflective light he was to use shortly in the painting Souvenir [figure 14]—a painting that incorporates a penny arcade self-portrait placed on cheap souvenir plate. After vacationing with Cage and some others in Hawaii in April, Johns left for Tokyo, where he painted Watchman. A new phase had begun.
In the notebook sketch for the painting, let’s recall, Johns distinguishes between a watchman who “falls ‘into’ the ‘trap’ of looking,” and a spy who “must be ready to ‘move’ must be aware / Of his entrances & exits.” The watchman “leaves / his job & takes away / no information,” whereas the spy “must remember / & must remember himself & his remembering.” And further: whereas “The spy designs himself to be overlooked,” “the watchman ‘serves’ as a warning.”

But a warning of what? Perhaps that the poetry of immediate presence of a Frank O’Hara, especially fetching and brilliant as it was in those poems of the late fifties like “Why I Am Not a Painter” or “Khrushchev is coming on the right day!”, was no longer sufficient: “The spy stations himself / to observe the / watchman.” Indeed, one way to understand such Johns works as In Memory of My Feelings-Frank O’Hara, Skin with O’Hara Poem, and Watchman, is as covert critique of O’Hara’s “Personism,” [28] with its potential “fall ‘into’ the ‘trap’ of looking” and its “tak[ing] away” of “no information.” Against this particular posture, this “occasion of my ruses,” Johns puts forward a “cool” Conceptualism that takes the mode of the painter’s earlier Flags, Targets, Numbers, and Alphabets to their logical conclusion. But “cool” is of course itself a cover: the very absence of “personal” references or images of human life is itself a sign of pathos. And would could be more “emotional” than the sense of disjunction and mismatch (of letters with colors, and so on) displayed in paintings like Watchman?

Does the “information” Johns speaks of relate to McCarthyite surveillance and the Cold War discourse of spying, as Moira Roth thinks? Perhaps these notions are subliminally present. In a larger sense, however, the distinction is between warm and cool, between the gestural expressivity of the second-generation New York painters and poets of the late fifties, and the more ideational, philosophical, and distanced art that inevitably came into being, whether consciously or not, in response to the political climate of the sixties. For the autobiographical “imprint” found in such poems as “Joe’s Jacket,” Johns substitutes the rubber imprint of O’Hara’s actual—but in the context, wholly anonymous–foot. Were it not for the title Memory Piece [Frank O’Hara], the viewer of Johns’s box construction could not possibly identify this foot’s owner. “The spy,” remember, “designs himself to be overlooked.” Thus, in the ambitious According to What, painted later in 1964, the self-portrait of Souvenir has been painted over and replaced by the work’s title, even as the painting itself contains oblique references to all of Johns’s earlier work, specifically, the leg and chair, hinged canvas, sign letters, color chart, newspaper, coat hanger and spoon, the primary color abstraction and tonal scale. [29]

Accordingly, when Johns becomes the director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1965, he “designs” scenery that involves no painting or drawing on his part at all, but is, on the contrary, a conceptual set based on Duchamp’s Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare of her Bachelors, Even) . It consists of the seven components of the Glass as Duchamp had designated them in his diagrams: The Bride, Milky Way, Nine Malic Molds, Glider and Water Mill Wheel, Chocolate Grinder, Oculist Witnesses, and Sieves or Parasols.[30] In an interview with James Klosty, Johns explains how, having obtained Duchamp’s approval, he painted the images on plastic in a friend’s Canal Street loft, and then transcribed them onto seven vinyl boxes of varying shapes and sizes. [31]

The resulting dance piece, Walkaround Time (1968) was not entirely successful and is infrequently performed, probably because, as Merce Cunningham recalls, “the seven objects of the Glass . . . limited very much what one could do in the space; it meant that all of your traffic had to be lateral from one wing to the other. [32] But despite its choreographic problems, Walkaround Time is a brilliant conceptual work, testifying to the role intertextuality can play in the process of “stationing [one]self to observe the watchman.”

In a 1967 page of Johns’s sketchbook we read:

		Distinguishing one thing from another
		(Duchamps “2 like objects”)

Making distinctions where
							       { none has existed
                                                              	       { none has been said to exist
                                                                      { none has been made
How does the (eye) make such distinctions
			?
Linguistically, perhaps, the verb is important.
But what about such a case in painting?                 (JJWI 61)
Making distinctions:  Johns may well be alluding to the following lines from O’Hara’s “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul”?:
		and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth’s
		although he is coming to lunch with Norman
		I suspect he is making a distinction
		well, who isn’t                           		(FOHCP 328)

But O’Hara’s good humored and self-deprecating gesture of tolerance becomes, in Johns’s own writing, a pressing metaphysical question. And such questions, themselves inevitably political in their implications, proved to be central to the “new art” or “new poetry” of the sixties and to their legacy to the increasingly pervasive Conceptualism of the nineties. [33] As Cage, put it:

There are various ways to improve one’s chess game. One is to take back a move when it becomes clear that it was a bad one. Another is to accept the consequences, devastating as they are. Johns chooses the latter even when the former is offered. Say he has a disagreement with others; he examines the situation and comes to a moral decision. He then proceeds, if to an impasse, to an impasse. When all else fails (and he has taken the precaution of being prepared in case it does), he makes a work of art devoid of complaint.
(JCYM 74).

A work of art devoid of complaint. “A painting,” as Cage interprets Johns, “is not a record of what was said and what the replies were but the thick presence all at once of a naked self-obscuring body of history” (JCYM 79). The personal now becomes inseparable from the political. “The spy,” let’s remember, “must be ready to ‘move,’ must be aware of his entrances & exits.” In this way, what was perceived by contemporaries as indifference can now be understood as an oblique but necessary form of intervention. In Johns’s words (JJWI 54), “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”

Footnotes

Figures

Figure 1 Jasper Johns, Sketchbook Notes, Book A, p. 55, 1964, in
Jasper Johns, Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), p. 37.

Figure 2 Jasper Johns, Book A, p. 49, 1964, Writings, p. 37.

Figure 3 Jasper Johns, Watchman. 1964. Oil on canvas with objects. 215.9 x 153 cm (85 x 601/4”). Collection Mr. Hiroshi Teshigahara, Tokyo.

Figure 4 Jasper Johns. Good Time Charley. 1961. Encaustic on
Canvas with objects, 96.5 x 61 cm (38 x 24”). Private collection.

Figure 5 Jasper Johns. In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Hara. 1961. Oil on canvas with objects, 101.6 x 152.4 cm. (40 x 60”). Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Figure 6 Jasper Johns. Canvas. 1956. Encaustic and collage on
Canvas with objects. 76.2 x 63.5 cm (30 x 25”). Collection of the arist.

Figure 7 Jasper Johns. Flag on Orange Field. 1957. Encaustic on canvas. 167.6 x 124.5 cm (66 x 49”). Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

Figure 8 Jasper Johns, Book A, p. 18, 1960-61, Writings, p. 29.

Figure 9 Jasper Johns. Light Bulb. 1960. Bronze. 10.8 x 15.2 x10.2 cm (4 1/4 x 6 x 4”). One of four casts. Collection Irving Blum.

Figure 10. Ugo Mulas. In Edisto Beach, S.C., 1965. Ugo Mulas Estate.
In Kirk Vardenoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), pp. 196-97.

Figure 11 Jasper Johns, Study for Skin I. 1962. Charcoal on paper, 22 x 34”. Collection of the artist.

Figure 12. Jasper Johns. Skin with O’Hara Poem. 1963-65. Lithograph. 55.9 x 86.4 cm (22 x 34”). Edition of 30. Published by Universal Limited Art Editions.

Figure 13. Jasper Johns. Memory Piece (Frank O’Hara). 1961-70.
Wood, lead, rubber, sand, and sculpmetal. 6 x 6/14 x13
(closed). Collection the artist.

Figure 14 Jasper Johns, Souvenir. 1964. Encaustic on canvas with objects. 73 x 53.3 cm. (283 3/4 x 21” ). Collection Sally Ganz, New York.

Marjorie Perloff

Published in American Letters & Commentary (2002): 18-23.

–Good writers are those that keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. . . .

The fogged language of swindling classes serves only a temporary purpose. . . .

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself. And this looseness and blowsiness is not anything as simple and scandalous as abrupt and disordered syntax.

It concerns the relation of expression to meaning.

–Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, Chapter 3

How to write poetry after 9/11? I think Pound has it about right. As the “antennae of the race,” poets must strenuously resist the “language of [the] swindling classes,” as expressed in the daily press and on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News—and even, as I shall suggest here, in the discourse of some of our so-called Public Intellectuals. Poets are the language users best prepared to resist this “sloppy writing”—writing that undercuts the relation of expression to meaning.

Take a seemingly straightforward little sentence, Cornell West’s declaration in April 2002 that Harvard’s President “Larry Summers is the Sharon of Harvard.” Earlier, West had made numerous comparisons between Sharon and Hitler so that, in essence, he was here saying that Larry Summers is like Hitler. So inured are we to this sort of double talk that few people object, and the trustees of Princeton promptly and unanimously voted to give Professor West a Chair. But the remark is not only inaccurate and slanderous; it is meaningless. The notion that a university president who actually dares to challenge the work of one of his chaired professors can be compared to a prime minister, deploying what many take to be extremist, excessively violent tactics in his war against the Palestinians, makes no sense. In a democratic society like ours, university presidents actually do have freedom of speech. Summers had not done anything to West except, possibly, to humiliate him by suggesting that he produce more hard scholarship and less popular writing. What it has to do with Sharon is anybody’s guess, except that what West is saying is that they’re both, you know, bad guys! Bullies!

` But now let’s take the comparison the next step. One may hate Sharon but just how is Sharon like Hitler? I suppose West links them as twin oppressors and murderers of innocent people. But Sharon is fighting what is in essence a civil war: before 1948, there was neither an Israel nor a state called Palestine and the complex question is how these two ethnic groups can conceivably live together. Sharon was voted into office in a democratic election, and, no more than his Labor predecessor Ehud Barak is he likely to remain Prime Minister for long. Hitler, by contrast, seized power by criminal means, could do whatever he liked (which is hardly true for Sharon!), and set in motion a calculated plan to kill off anyone who could be shown to have so much as a drop of Jewish blood. He also exterminated other ethnic and social groups and nations. If Sharon were a Hitler, he would already have taken over Jordan, with Egypt next on his list. To call Sharon a Hitler is thus simply irresponsible, as it is irresponsible to call Milosevic a Hitler. Indeed, all three of these cases are quite different.

It was Wittgenstein who taught us that the limits of language are the limits of our world and that each word or sentence had to be understood in a particular context. When Christopher Hitchens recently dared to criticize Islamic Fundamentalism, the cry of “Fascist” immediately went up! Never mind that Hitchens has been a Socialist all his life; if he says X, then it must be Y. But Fascists were real people who practiced real things like stamping out all dissent in the Italy of entre deux guerres, like killing their enemies in cold blood, and running a hideous dictatorship. What did Hitchens do? He dared to say in The Nation that perhaps the U.S. needed to defend itself against the attacks of 9/11. When the adjective “Fascist” (or its close relative “McCarthyite”) is applied to such an opinion, the language cannot help but be debased.

Marcel Duchamp coined the word infrathin for the smallest possible difference between two items or two words and argued that the infrathin is crucial to an understanding of the world as we know it. “Eat,” he insisted is not the same as “ate”; “tables” is not the same as “table.” The smallest tense and person shifts matter. Cream feels different on one’s hands than does water. A name for anything—Nine Malic Moulds, Why not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?”, or Fountain is useless unless it designates something very particular. Precision, as poets have always known, is what matters. And so you can imagine how Duchamp would have felt about the double talk we endlessly meet in the media. What happened in Jenin was immediately called a “massacre.” Then when it turned out that only about 50 people had been killed, 17 of whom were civilians (over against 23 Israeli soldiers who were killed), the word massacre suddenly disappeared from the radar screen, to be replaced by human rights abuses, although how and why these abuses were different from others was never stated. Those anchor persons who had for days used the word massacre never apologized for the mistake. And, in any case, whatever that thing was in Jenin, reporters could confidently and piously refer to the cycle of violence. This term is especially inane, sounding, for all the world, like the spin cycle on the washing-machine, and of course spin is what’s involved. What is the “cycle of violence”? Yes, the Israelis attack the Palestinians and then vice-versa and then the cycle is renewed. But is violence then always cyclical? And if not, why? Are there any straight lines in question or only circles? And what would violence be if it weren’t a cycle but a sudden disruption of what is otherwise the calm world of peace?

Or take the current discussion of the word “evil.” Commentators have had a field day making fun of Bush for talking about terrorists as “evil” and of “evil” nations like North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. How absurd, we sophisticated people like to say: how can one call a nation or a large phenomenon or indeed anything “evil”? How quaint and stupid, how characteristic of Cowboy Bush! But wait a minute. Suppose we do a survey and see whether anyone reading this journal thinks colonialism is not evil. Is any thinking person making a practical case for a revival of colonialism? Does anyone seem eager to debate the subject? Or do we take this particular evil as beyond discussion? And if so, why is it inconceivable that a specific government might be “evil”?

So clichéd and vapid has our public discourse become that many of my friends actually admitted surprise that those who worked at the World Trade Center weren’t all rich stockbrokers on the one hand or janitors on the other. The very acronym WTC pointed to the evils of capitalism as we know it. But then the moving daily obituaries in the New York Times revealed that the victims were actually people more or less like the rest of us, working at all sorts of jobs. There was the classicist who was giving a seminar to a travel group. There were mathematicians trained at MIT. There were many computer scientists and technicians. And the WTC workers were so multiethnic and racially diverse that the usual clichés seemed oddly irrelevant. An African-American mother who was an avid and successful trader. A Latino chef who was about to open his own restaurant. And so on. What those obituaries helped us see is difference—the very real distinctions between hitherto nameless and faceless “ordinary” citizens.

But it doesn’t happen this way very often in the newspaper and this is where poetry comes in. It is too soon to talk about the poetry of 9/11 –the events are still too painful—and whatever that poetry will look like, it is not likely to have the pure moral outrage of, say, Milton’s great sonnet on the Massacre at Piedmont which begins, “Avenge, Oh Lord, thy slaughtered saints.” But I like to think that it might be as nuanced and complex and differential as Frank O’Hara’s “The Arrow that Flieth by Day,” with its conflation of Cold War and personal references, or like his brilliantly witty political poem that begins:

Khrushchev is coming on the right day!

the cool graced light

is pushed off the enormous glass piers by hard wind

and everything is tossing, hurrying on up

this country

has everything but politesse a Puerto Rican cab driver says

and five different girls I see

look like Piedie Gimbel

with her blonde hair tossing too,

as she looked when I pushed

her little daughter on the swing on the lawn it was also windy

last night we went to a movie and came out.

Ionesco is greater

than Beckett, Vincent said, that’s what I think, blueberry blintzes

and Khrushchev was probably being carped at

in Washington, no politesse

What makes it the “right” day for Khrushchev or for the poet? It takes the whole poem to answer that question. O’Hara wrote it on 17 September 1959; it was the height of the U.S. / Soviet stand-off vis-à-vis Cuba and Khrushchev’s visit to Washington was made much of in the papers as a key event that might change the course of the Cold War. The poet had undoubtedly seen headlines and articles about the impending “crisis,” the preparations for the Soviet’s leader’s visit, and so on. But although politics and war are never far from O’Hara’s consciousness —how can they be in ’59?—for him, Khrushchev is coming to New York on the right day for no better reason than that this is a Red Letter day for Frank. Why? Because he and Vincent Warren are in love and because the strong wind blowing somehow prolongs last night’s ecstasy. So, in the absurd logic of the poem, it must somehow be the “right day” even for something as ominous and unpleasant as Khrushchev’s arrival in Manhattan No day, of course, is the “right” day for Khrushchev’s visit, but the poet, momentarily transported by his memories and feelings, by the wind that makes everything comes alive, is feeling so good that, in a droll, campy gesture, he can pay homage even to the dour old Soviet Premier, whose visit hardly promises anything but trouble. And his is also an homage to the politesse whose absence the Puerto Rican cab driver mourns and to the “graced light” of his own world, so different from that public world “in Washington [where there really is] no politesse.”

In line 24 of the poem, O’Hara asks:

Where does the evil of the year go

when September takes New York

and turns it into ozone stalagmites

deposits of light

The “evil of the year” refers both to Frank’s troubled love life (evidently real bad this past summer) as well as to the general political situation which makes the immediate past “the evil of the year.” Love compensates for that past but only momentarily: in the next passage, the poet recalls: “so I get back up / make coffee, and read Francois Villon, his life, so dark.” Darkness is never far away and it is only the poet’s momentary wind-borne ecstasy that can dissipate it.

And so the poem moves to its conclusion:

as the train bears Khrushchev on to Pennsylvania Station

and the light seems to be eternal

and joy seems to be inexorable

I am foolish enough always to find it in wind

The image of the permanently scowling Khrushchev –an icon at this time–borne inexorably into Penn Station gives way, miraculously enough, to the poem’s inexorable joy. This, O’Hara tells us, is what the texture of life is actually like: we do feel joy even when the times are bad. The personal is not always the political though the two are inextricable. So Khrushchev is coming on the right day!

Could O’Hara have substituted someone else for Khrushchev? Could he have written “Castro is coming on the right day?” Or Mao Tse-Tung? Hardly. First, the reference would be inaccurate (they didn’t come on state visits!), and facts matter in poetry. Second, these names conjure up very different images and so there would be no joke. Khrushchev is just unpleasant and unappealing enough to be perfect for O’Hara’s purposes. No one, it seems, is likely to be looking forward to conversing with Nikita!

Each situation, in other words, is unique, at least for the poet. Comparisons of Bin Laden to Hitler, or of Apartheid-South Africa to Israel, or of 9/11 to Pearl Harbor–these are always dubious. Perhaps politicians, in order to rally the troops, have no choice but to call up such comparisons, such one-liners about Fascism or terrorism or Evil Empires or American vigilance. But the poet’s first obligation is to “keep the language efficient” by refusing easy answers and invidious comparisons. What I finally find so appalling about Cornell West’s assertion that “Summers is the Sharon of Harvard” is not whether the statement is, in fact, right or wrong but that it shows such a failure of imagination.

Poetry 1956

Marjorie Perloff

Lecture given at University of Copenhagen, September 1997

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple.
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go sweet and fresh to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.[1]

This much anthologized poem [2] provides us with an interesting index to Establishment poetics in the mid-fifties. Its thirty lines are divided into six five-line stanzas, the meter being predominantly iambic pentameter (“Sóme are in smócks: but trúly thére they áre”), with some elegant variation, as when a line is divided into steps (see lines 4, 15, 18, 30), presumably to create a more natural look. A similar effect is gained by the absence of end rhyme, although there is a good deal of alliteration and assonance (e.g., “And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul”).

“You must imagine,” Wilbur remarked in an interview, “the poem as occurring at perhaps seven-thirty in the morning; the scene is a bedroom high up in a city apartment building; outside the bedroom window, the first laundry of the day is being yanked across the sky and one has been awakened by the squeaking pulleys of the laundry-line.” [3] What interests me here is the pronoun “one.” Indeed, in the opening stanza, the references are to “The eyes,” not “My eyes,” to “the astounded soul,” not to “my” astounded soul. The claims the poem will evidently make are for the universality of the experience described. Or so it struck three poet-critics–Richard Eberhart, Robert Horan, and May Swenson– who responded to Wilbur’s poem in Anthony Ostroff’s anthology The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic.[4]

“The important thing about Wilbur’s poem,” writes Eberhart, “is that it celebrates the immanence of spirit in spite of the ‘punctual rape of every blessed day.’ The conflict is between a soul-state and an earth-state. The soul wins. The soul, felt as a vision of angelic laundry on awakening, must still be incorporated into the necessities and imperfections of everyday reality. Man is redeemed by the angelic vision” (AO 4). In the last two stanzas, as Robert Horan adds, “the soul (like the laundry emptied of too seraphic a breath), descends to accept the waking body, even though it be in bitter love” (AO 7) Indeed, the poem moves toward the “acceptance of the fact that the sweating, ruined, half-penitent world must be clothed with our compassion. The angel must become human, as heaven must become the street where we walk” (AO 8).

The ideal, for Horan and his fellow poet-critics, is the “difficult balance” of the poem’s last line, the balance between body and soul, the material and the spiritual, the disembodied angels and the “heaviest nuns walk[ing] in a pure floating / of dark habits.” “The modern lyric,” declares May Swenson in her commentary, “is autonomous, a separate mobile . . . an enclosed construct . . . a package individually wrapped” (AO 12). Such an individual package depends upon the careful control of tensions and balances. Notice, for example, the tension between words of stress (“pulleys,” “hangs,” “shrinks,” “gallows”) and those of rest (“calm swells,” “impersonal breathing,” yawns),” between white (“angels,” “water,” “steam,” “linen,” “pure”) and red (“rape,” “rosy,” “warm look,” “love,” “ruddy”). “The whole poem,” writes Swenson, “is in fact an epitome of relative weight and equipoise” (AO 16).

The Age Demanded such equipoise, an equipoise, epitomized in 1956, in the poetry world of the Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Sewanee Review, and so on, by metaphysical poetry, especially that of John Donne, and, more immediately for Wilbur, by the Yeats of “Sailing to Byzantium,” who referred to the soul as “clap[ping] its hands” and singing. Responding gratefully to his three readers, Wilbur adds that there are also important allusions in his poem: the title, for example, comes from St. Augustine. And he adds: “Plato, St. Theresa, and the rest of us in our degree having known that it is painful to return to the cave, to the earth, to the quotidian; Augustine says it is love that brings us back. That is why the love of line 23 has got to be bitter–for the sake of psychological truth” (AO 18). As for Robert Horan’s mild disclaimer that the poem is somewhat “fastidious” and “remote,” Wilbur counters, “I’ve always agreed with Eliot’s assertion that poetry ‘is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality’” (AO 19). Hence, evidently, all those references to “one” and to “the astounded soul.”

Depersonalization, ambiguity, tension, paradox. We need not dwell here on the merits (or lack thereof) of these New Critical values, for they are only too well known. Rather, what interests me about the laundry-as-angel metaphor, which is the heart of Wilbur’s poem, is its curious inaccuracy. “The incident,” writes May Swenson, “is so common that everyone has seen it, and . . . the analogy is . . . fitting in each of its details: a shirt is white, it is empty of body, but floats or flies, therefore has life (an angel)” (AO 13). But if, as Wilbur himself explains it, the scene is outside the upper-story window of an apartment building, in front of which “the first laundry of the day is being yanked across the sky,” the reality is that the sheets and shirts would probably be covered with specks of dust, grit, maybe even with a trace or two of bird droppings. At best, those sheets seen (if seen at all) from Manhattan highrise windows in the fifties, billowing over the fire-escapes under the newly installed TV aerials, would surely be a bit on the grungy side.

But of course the awakening poet might not notice this because the laundry that, as Wilbur puts it, “is being yanked across the sky,” as if by some blind external force, is certainly not his concern; the poet, after all, is represented as having been asleep when it was hung out to dry. Richard Eberhart seems to be aware of this aloofness when he remarks that Wilbur’s “is a man’s poem. Certainly not all women would like a laundry poem which pays no heed to hard work and coarsened hands. They might say, poet, have your ruddy dream, but give us better detergents” (AO 5). A remarkable fifties statement, this, in its assumption that woman is she who has “coarsened hands” from doing the laundry, while man, that ruddy dreamer, can view that same laundry as angelic. Or, to turn the dichotomy around, woman is she who only dreams of better detergents–a dream, by the way, the affluent fifties were in the process of satisfying– whereas man dreams idealistically (and hence hopelessly) of “clear dances done in the sight of heaven,” dances that might allow him to escape, at least momentarily, “the punctual rape of every blessed day.”

“Punctual rape”: it is the alarm clock going off, violating one’s delightful daydreams, even as Donne’s “busie old foole, unruly Sunne” intrudes, through windows and curtains, on the sleeping lovers in “The Sunne Rising.” But in Wilbur’s poem the intruding daylight is not chided, evidently because to be alive, however difficult, is to be blessed. The metaphor will not withstand much scrutiny, for here, as in the case of the laundry metaphor, the drive is to get beyond the image as quickly as possible, so as to talk about the relation of soul to body, spirit to matter–those great poetic topoi introduced by the Augustine-derived title, “Love Calls us to the Things of This World.” The actual “things of this world,” in 1956, it turns out, are studiously avoided. The poem refers to “rosy hands in the rising steam”–no doubt, as Eberhart remarks, an allusion to Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” (AO 4), but where are the real hands of those laundresses, hands that Eliot, half a century earlier, had seen “lifting dingy shades in a thousand furnished rooms?”

Let us look at another image of the “things of this world,” circa 1956, this one not from a poem but from Robert Frank’s book of photographs called The Americans, published by Grove Press in 1959, with a preface by Jack Kerouac. The Americans was the fruit of a cross-country trip, funded by a Guggenheim fellowship; its eighty-two images, culled from more than twenty thousand frames,[5] range from Butte, Montana to Beaufort, South Carolina, from New Orleans to New York. Here is Frank’s first picture, captioned Parade–Hoboken, New Jersey [Figure 1].

Like Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us,” this photograph positions the viewer/ reader at a window. But here the focus is not on what is seen (and metaphorized) outside the window but on those who are looking out and on the frame from within which they look (or don’t look). Presumably these residents of Hoboken are watching a parade passing by below– perhaps, as the presence of the flag suggests, a Veterans Day or Memorial Day parade. But who are these viewers? On the left is an elderly woman with blankly staring eyes; she wears what looks like a flowered house dress, and on her left, all but hidden by a curtain, we see an elbow encased in a sleeve made of the same fabric. Two women, then, in some sort of uniform, perhaps the insignia of inmates of an institution But the woman in the right-hand window, whose face is covered by the flag, is dressed differently; she wears a loose jacket or coat, and her upper hand looks like a prosthesis. Is the building a prison? A hospital? An old age home? Or just an apartment house? The picture is at once wholly literal and yet enigmatic: indeed, Frank may not know himself what it is he is shooting.

Interestingly, his photograph exhibits a symmetry that might be compared to the “difficult balance” of Wilbur’s last line. The rectangular windows to the left and right meet the edges of the frame, the right one being cropped. The composition is divided into three almost equal parts, window, brick wall, window. Further, the horizontal rectangles–bricks, window sills, partially lowered shade in left window, and large billowing flag (which continues the lower border of the window shade)–create a deceptive grid structure–deceptive because although the windows balance one another, the figures within them do not. The accent, in any case, is on separation–of one body part from another, inside from outside, the flag from the patriotic event it supposely signifies, the viewers from the viewed. The framing, moreover, heightens the sense of confinement suggested by the uniforms–if indeed that is what the matching dresses are.

“Grainy and contrasty,” writes John Brumfield, “the photograph is a bit on the harsh side, almost scuzzy, with a sour kind of bleakness emphasized by the immobility of the figures and the monotony of the building.” [6] No playful “angelic vision” to redeem man here, no body waking and rising to the world in all its “hunks and colors,” no acceptance of the “punctual rape of every blessed day.” Which is not to say that Frank’s photograph is primarily a protest image. We see women in the windows of a plain brick building bearing a ceremonial flag in honor of the parade referred to in the caption. Period. On the other hand, within the context of The Americans, Parade–Hoboken, New Jersey becomes a link in a chain, a larger image of an America in which the flag, brick wall, dark window, and people aimlessly looking, become part of a larger composition that includes countless juke boxes, lunch counters, motorcyclists, and large sedans at drive-in movie theatres. In Frank’s images, people, whether alone, in twos and threes, or in crowds, always seeming curiously detached from one another. His people are nothing so glamorous as thieves to be reformed or lovers to be undone, and besides, the focus is not on their individuality but on their relationships to one another as well as to their culture.

When The Americans was first published, reaction was largely hostile, for its images did not conform to the ameliorist vision of the postwar to be found in the pages of Life and Look, or, for that matter, in The Family of Man exhibition, which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in late 1955 and then travelled around the world with the subtitle “The greatest photographic exhibition of all time.” Carl Sandburg, who provided the Prologue, exclaims:

Everywhere is love and love-making, weddings and babies from generation to generation keeping the Family of Man aliving and continuing. Everywhere the sun, moon and stars, the climates and weathers, have meanings for people. Though meanings vary, we are alike in all countries and tribes in trying to read what sky, land and sea say to us. Alike and ever alike we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity lives with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.[7]

So a photograph of lovers in Italy is juxtaposed to a “comparable” one from New Guinea (see figures 2 and 3), nude pregnant women roaming the rocky steppes of Kordofan (figure 4) are juxtaposed to a blonde pregnant American woman, cosily nestled under a blanket contemplating the pussy cat at her feet (figure 5), and so on. Everywhere, it seems, love calls us to the things of this world.

“Poems,” Richard Wilbur remarked in an interview, “are not addressed to anybody in particular.” The poem . . . is a conflict with disorder, not a message from one person to another.” [8] The poem as “message from one person to another”: Frank O’Hara, we shall see, adopted precisely this Wilburian negative, or rather, he had already adopted it before Wilbur made this pronouncement. I shall come back to this point but, for the moment, let’s backtrack and try to understand this “conflict with disorder,” this containment of chaos, or, as Reuben Brower called it in The Fields of Light, “the aura around a bright clear centre.”[9] Robert Frank, an emigre from Switzerland (the one neutral country during the war), who came to the U.S. in 1947 at the age of twenty-three, to experience, at first hand, the fabled American freedom, [10] had nothing at all to say about bright clear centers. But the dominant discourse of the period, whether in photography or poetry, was both centered and centrist, even when, as in the case of Robert Lowell, it was much darker than Richard Wilbur’s genial one. The “skunk hour” of Lowell’s famous poem, for example, is defined by its allusive relationship to St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, and centered by the sign of the “chalk-dry and spar spire / of the Trinitarian Church” that dominates Lowell’s Maine village–the emblem, for the poet, of a residual and dessicated Puritanism that could only poison human lives.

In “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” which appears just a few pages before “Skunk Hour” in Life Studies (1959), Lowell refers to the decade as the “tranquillized fifties.” The reference is specifically to Miltown, the first of the popular tranquillizers (“Tamed by Miltown, we lie on mother’s bed” is the opening line of “Man and Wife”), but of course it points more generally at the supposed political apathy and complacency of the affluent fifties. Yet the adjective “tranquillized” gives us little sense of the actual faultlines of the period — faultlines visible when we read Robert Frank’s The Americans against The Family of Man and, as we shall see below, when we read the more radical poets of the fifties against a poet like Wilbur. First, though, I want to sketch in the tensions in question.

Culture Shocks

The lead story of the January 23, 1956 issue of Newsweek was called “The Eisenhower Era.” Although the President had not yet made up his mind to run again (that didn’t happen until March), and although the public worried that Ike’s failing health would put Nixon, who was generally disliked and mistrusted, just “a heartbeat away from the presidency,” [11] Eisenhower was enormously popular. Polls gave his performance a 75% approval rating, and no wonder: as Newsweek records, jobs were up from 61.3 to 65 million, taxes were cut although inflation was down, and 57% of Americans owned their own homes as compared to 55% in 1952. The country was at peace–ten years after the end of World War II, three years after the end of the Korean War, and a decade before there was full-fledged war in Vietnam, Americans were not fighting anywhere on the globe. And even McCarthyism was losing its force: the Senator, curtailed by the Senate’s condemnation motion of December 1954, was to die within the year.

In his Introduction to Colliers’s new series on “The American Tradition,” Henry Steele Commager asked, “What has America meant to mankind?” and he replied:

It has meant a chance to prove that men could govern themselves, and to show that a vast continent with the greatest diversity of interest and mixture of peoples could nevertheless hold together as a single nation. It has meant an example to the whole world of expansion without imperialism and power without militarism. And it has meant freedom–freedom from tyrannical government, freedom from economic oppression, freedom from ignorance and superstition.

These are all part of the American tradition, and so, too, those less dramatic and quieter things–the land itself, so spacious and various and beautiful, the struggle with the frontier carried on from generation to generation; the spread of plenty and well- being over a large area; the widest experiment in public education in all history, schoolhouses in every village and town, and colleges and universities in every state of the land; the elevation of the status and dignity of woman; philanthropy on a scale never before practiced; the spread of libraries and museums and orchestras and the quickening of pride in the commonwealth. All this, too, is part of the American tradition. (27 April 1956, p. 21)

From the hindsight of 1996, we tend to read these optimistic and patriotic declarations of ‘56 with great skepticism. But it’s important to remember that there was a grain of truth in Commager’s article: the creation of new universities, orchestras, libraries, and cultural centers was astonishing as was the affluence that made it possible for, say, the young Allen Ginsberg, arriving in San Francisco in 1954 with only $20 in his pocket, to land “almost immediately” a market research position with Towne-Oller Associates, an elegant firm on Montgomery Street. He had a secretary and was making up to $450 a month.[12] And when, a few months later, Ginsberg told his psychiatrist that what he really wanted to do was to stop work, write poetry, spend days out of doors, visit museums and friends, and cultivate his own perceptions and visions, Dr. Hicks replied, “Well, why don’t you?” A challenge that Ginsberg quickly accepted, managing (on what?) to produce the poems to be collected in Howl (1956). [13] On the other coast, meanwhile, Frank O’Hara, living with a succession of friends and lovers in a succession of wonderfully cheap apartments (c. $60 a month), was able to find work at the ticket booth or card shop of the Museum of Modern Art so as to support his poetic habit. But then of course O’Hara and Ginsberg were hardly members of the working class. They were Ivy Leaguers (Harvard and Columbia respectively), and in the mid-fifties Ivy Leaguers could always get by somehow.

Indeed, the affluence of the Eisenhower years was nowhere more visible than in the booming university culture (thanks to the GI Bill) and arts establishment. It was a time of ardent Francophilia: on Broadway, Julie Harris was starring in The Lark, Jean Anouilh’s sentimental psychodrama about Joan of Arc, and Giraudoux’s version of the Trojan War, La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu was a big hit in Christopher Fry’s verse translation, Tiger at the Gates. The Comedie Française on tour presented Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Marivaux’s Arlequin poli par l’amour. Simon and Schuster brought out an English translation of Proust’s Jean Santeuil (reviewed in The Nation by Mina Curtis), Vintage published Montaigne’s autobiography, Baudelaire’s art criticism (under the title The Mirror of Art), Bergson’s Comedy, Gide’s Strait is the Gate and his Journals, and Camus’s The Rebel. And Harcourt Brace published a new translation of Molière’s Le Misanthrope by none other than Richard Wilbur.

It was still a time, then, when mainstream publishers brought out “serious” literary works, preferably French or at least foreign (but rarely, in this early postwar period, German). And not only literary: Doubleday, today a largely commercial house, published a new translation of Diderot’s Rameu’s Nephew, Ortega y Gasset’s Dehumanization of Art, Henri Frankfort’s Birth of Civilization in the Near East, Arthur Waley’s Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, and, what was to be a central work for both John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism, Selected Writing.

The reader will have noticed by now that, so far as foreign high culture is concerned, Writer almost invariably equaled Male, Simone de Beauvoir’s Mandarins, being a major exception. At the same time–and this is an interesting spin on the culture industry–the U.S. novel (as well as a fair amount of the poetry, from Leonie Adams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Bogan, to Babette Deutsch, Carolyn Kizer, Elizabeth Spencer, and Ruth Stone) was largely the domain of women. Katharine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, serialized in the Atlantic in 1956, was one of the major literary events of a year that also boasted the publication of Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life and Caroline Gordon’s The Malfactors. An important story by Flannery O’Connor, “Greenleaf,” appeared in the summer issue of the Kenyon Review. And, although I haven’t done a count, reviewers in the mainstream journals and little magazines were more likely to be women in 1956 than in 1996: Bishop, Miles, and Kizer reviewed frequently for The New Republic, McCarthy, Vivienne Koch, Mary O. Hivnor, and Margaret Avison for the Kenyon Review, Dorothy Van Ghent and Marie Boroff for the Yale Review, and so on. Given the large number of women among fiction readers, women were allowed–indeed encouraged– to write fiction, but they were almost never editors or publishers, and, with such exceptions as Hannah Arendt and Suzanne Langer, not eligible to be major “thinkers.”

No wonder, then, that when a Pittsburgh TV station (WQED), aided by special funds from the Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, inaugurated a series of monthly programs on intellectuals, it was called “Wise Men.” The first Wise Man of the Month was Robert Frost. “Tapping the top of a high-toe shoe,” we read in Colliers (27 April), “he says poems simple in sound, profound in thought, and amazes his audience with the range of his knowledge” (p. 42). In Pittsburgh, Frost faced an audience of thousands and he was interviewed by another “Wise Man,” Jonah Salk.

In response to Salk’s question about poetic form, Frost made his famous declaration, “I’d as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down,” a pronouncement few established poets at the time seemed eager to quarrel with. As Wilbur put it, “I have no case whatever against controlled free verse. Yet I think it is absurd to feel that free verse–which has only been with us in America for a little over a hundred years–has definitely ‘replaced’ measure and rhyme and other traditional instruments.” [14] As for the larger function of poetry, Frost declared that “My poems are my adjustment to the world,” a revealing statement, for adjustment was one of the big watchwords of the psychoanalytic fifties, the drive to be “well-adjusted” dominating so much of the personal life of the period. In Freudian parlance, moreover, “well-adjusted” was a code-word for “straight”: the “well-adjusted” got married, had families, and lived what were then called “normal” lives.

A paradox of this high-culture moment, when funds were as readily available for “Wise Men” series as for symphonies and museum exhibitions, is that, so far as the Literary Establishment was concerned, the practices of the early-century avant-garde–of Futurism, Italian and French, as of Dada and Surrealism and Russian Constructivism–might just as well have never existed. [15] The free verse / metrical verse quarrel, for example, doesn’t even begin to take account of such voco-visual poetic experiments as Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate. In the Kenyon and Sewanee, the poet of choice (as Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us” confirms) was John Donne (see, for example, the symposium on “English Verse and What It Sounds Like” in the Fall 1956 issue of Kenyon Review, where Seymour Chatman and Arnold Stein and John Crowe Ransom discuss Donne’s prosody), the “great” modern poets, Yeats, Frost, and the Eliot of Four Quartets and the verse dramas.

Perhaps “playing tennis with the net down” seemed so dangerous because the cultural order, impressively artistic and intellectual as it was at one level, could not easily deal with the tensions just beneath the surface. In the mid-fifties, the U.S. was the richest and most powerful country in the world but also, as one critic puts it, the “most jittery.” [16] And for good reason. In 1956 not an issue of Look or Colliers or Newsweek went by without some reference to the Cold War. Articles bear names like “Must our Air Force be Second Best?” (Look, May 1), “Ex-Stalinists of the West,” (a discussion of the response of the various European Communist parties to Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin, which took place in April of ‘56; see New Republic, April 9), “The Red Atom” (Colliers, November 23), “Algeria–can France hold on?” (New Republic, April 9), “Communism in South East Asia” (Yale Review, Spring 1956), and so on. One of the most startling articles, from the perspective of later developments, is Peter Kalischer’s “Upsetting the Red Timetable,” in the July 6 issue of Colliers (p. 29). “Two years ago at Geneva,” writes Kalischer, “South Vietnam was virtually sold down the river to the Communists. Today the spunky little Asian country is back on its own feet, thanks to a ‘mandarin in a sharkskin suit,’” who was none other than President Ngo Dinh Diem. “Today,” we read, “a republic nine months old, South Vietnam is alive, kicking, and pugnaciously anti-Communist.” Or so it was hoped, given that, as early as 1956, according to Kalischer, 53% of all U.S. foreign aid was going to buttress the South Vietnamese armed forces.

But the obsession with the Soviet Union’s possible and projected acts of aggression, excessive as it may strike us now that the Cold War is over, was by no means a figment of the Pentagon’s imagination. For by the autumn of 1956, just two weeks before Eisenhower was re-elected in a landslide, an event took place that marked a significant turning point in Cold War politics. That event was the aborted Hungarian Revolution. Fighting broke out on October 23 and by the 28th, the Imre Nagy government proclaimed a cease-fire, demanded withdrawal of Soviet forces from its capital, reconstituted the pre-1947 democratic parties of workers and peasants, and announced the abandonment of a one-party regime, withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, neutrality, and free elections. The Soviets hesitated but when the West made no move, on November 4, they moved in tanks, brutally crushing the rebellion. Almost 200,000 refugees came to the U.S. within the next few months.

The press devoted a good deal of space to the failed revolution as to the Poznan workers’ riots that took place almost simultaneously in Poland. Together with the Suez crisis of July (which signalled the end of British imperialism in the Middle East) and the Egypt-Israeli war that broke out in October, the year that began with such euphoric commentary on American affluence and world peace was ending in a kind of nightmare. No longer could the U.S. trust in Kruschchev’s “revisionist” intentions. Even The Nation, which in the earlier months of 1956 had reported enthusiastically about the new Five-Year Plan for consumer goods (Alexander Werth, “Russia’s Hopes for 1960: Steel, Power and Food,” February 18), and about the Soviets’s good intentions so far as disarmament was concerned (Paul Wohl and Alexander Werth, “New Soviet Blueprint: Challenge to the West,” March 3), was forced to admit that the Russians were not to be trusted. “10 Days that Shook the World: The Counter-Revolution,” was the title of Mark Gayn’s November 10 piece about events in Eastern Europe.

And further: the difficulties abroad were matched at home by the aftershocks of the Desegregation of the Schools Act of 1954. Indeed, although one would never know it, in reading, say, The Kenyon Review or even the Black Mountain Review (Black Mountain College, incidentally, closed in 1956), the race wars were an especially poisonous feature of the discourse of these years. Even Adlai Stevenson, the darling of the liberals, was not exempt. The Montgomery bus boycott, which began in December 1955, came to a head in January ‘56 and brought Martin Luther King to national attention. But, as Carey McWilliams points out in an article called “Mr. Stevenson on Jim Crow” (Nation, February 18), Stevenson paid little attention to the problem.

In the September 24 issue of The New Republic, L. D. Reddick, then a student at Fisk University, reviewed Robert Penn Warren’s little book, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. Warren, who was teaching at Vanderbilt, was extremely cautious about integration. It shouldn’t, he observed, come too soon, for the Negro was not ready for it. Such caution was the theme of a Look special feature (3 April), evaluating the Desegregation Act. The issue begins by reprinting the famous Supreme Court Decision, as expounded by Chief Justice Earl Warren: “‘We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ’separate but equal’ has no place.” But this view is countered in Senator Sam Ervin Jr.’s “The Case for Segregation,” with its current wisdom that “people like to socialize with their own” (p. 32). And in an ostensibly neutral article called “Fear underlies the Conflict,” William Atwood writes:

Whatever they may tell you, white Southerners are afraid of the Negro in their midst. And they are afraid of him today as never before. For the Negro no longer behaves like the amiable ‘dark’ who knew his place and did not question the white man’s right to give orders.

The fear is partly political. In the Black Belt, white men shudder at the prospect of Negro bloc-voting that might put them under the jurisdiction of colored officials. Still haunted by the nightmare of Reconstruction, they now feel that any concession to Negro demands for equality means another surrender, another Appomattox.

The fear is also economic. Industrialization has enabled Negroes to earn wages that are making them independent of an economic order based on discrimination. . . . A negro with money in the bank is no longer at the mercy of the dominant race; he becomes a customer to be catered to.

And the fear is social, with profound sexual undertones. To a white Southerner, classroom integration implies a kind of social equality that does not exist even on an assembly line. He will tell you that sooner or later, some Negro boy will be walking his daughter home from school, staying for supper, taking her to the movies . . . and then your Southern friend asks you the inevitable, the clinching question, “Would you want your daughter to marry a Nigra?”

And there is nothing you can say to quiet his fears . . . that mixed schools will “mongrelize” the race. (p. 27).

Atwood doesn’t say he subscribes to this point of view but neither does he condemn it. And again, it may have taken an outsider like Robert Frank to show us what everyday life in the South looked like in 1956. (figures 6 [Funeral--St. Helena, South Carolina], 7 [Charleston, South Carolina], 8 [Trolley, New Orleans]). In the latter photograph, for example, seven people — up front, a formally dressed white man and, behind him, white woman, in the rear, a shirtsleeved black man and casually attired black woman, and in the center, two white children, dressed up in what look like party clothes, with their all but invisible black nanny hovering behind them– are placed within a tight grid: windows separated by metal strips, upper rectangular panels, reflecting only dimly what is going by outside the streetcar, and the metal surface below the window, again broken up into rectangles, separated by a studded strip. The grid indicates not only race but gender separation and hierarchy: in all three cases, the man (or little boy) comes first.

None of the passengers look at one another; rather, all are looking out at something–but what? The white man’s face is veiled by the reflection of the glass because his window is down, the white woman’s head is cropped as is the black woman’s elbow. But whereas the whites sit facing front in “normal” position, the children and tbe black man and women are turned 90%, facing out of the window, the black woman in back looking over her left shoulder. The photograph makes no overt comment on segregation, the faces of the blacks at the rear of the car, for instance, show no anger. But the image of the jail-like grid is there, startling testimony that the Family of Man, the entity that Sandburg called “one big family hugging close to the ball of Earth for its life and being,” is more accurately an aggregate of wholly separate beings placed together in a series of arbitrarily defined spaces that have been assigned to them. “Robert,” said Allen Ginsberg in a 1985 piece on Frank’s work, “had invented a new way of lonely solitary chance conscious seeing, in the little Leica format. . . . Spontaneous glance–accident truth.”[17]

Counterpoetics

“Lonely solitary chance conscious seeing”: Ginsberg might have been talking about his own poetry or, for that matter, of the “New American Poetry” as it manifested itself in 1956, the year of Howl, as well as of some of Frank O’Hara’s most important “lunch poems,” [18] and of John Ashbery’s Some Trees, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for 1956. The usual view is that Ginsberg was a “public” poet, O’Hara and Ashbery much more private and “apolitical” ones, but it would be more accurate to say that in the work of all three (and this is also true for their intersecting but different circles), the political is internalized in very curious and complicated ways. Complicated in that, unlike their avant-garde precursors of the early century (Mayakovsky, an important model both for Ginsberg and for O’Hara, is a case in point), fifties poets, however radical or counterculture they took themselves to be, seem to have had no meaningful access to a public sphere that operated according to increasingly incomprehensible laws.

A terrifying and ideologically charged war had just been “won,” but before the lessons of that war and the Holocaust could in any way be assimilated, much less digested, our former allies, the Soviets, were shown to have committed genocide that rivalled Hitler’s–genocide, moreover, against their own people, beginning with the destruction of the peasantry in the course of the collectivization of the farms and culminating in the Gulag. The cycle of totalitarianism and death seemed to be starting all over again, this time with the new threat of nuclear weapons. At the same time, the Cold War was just that–cold–which is to say a very distant reality to those who actually lived their everyday life in the New York or San Francisco of the later fifties. If you were a male white poet, even a gay male white poet in 1956, the reality of everyday life was the reality of possibility. New ballets to see and great Italian movies to go to, new gay bars in the Village or in North Beach, new art galleries showing breakthrough painting and performances of John Cage’s “Music of Changes.” At the same time, for Ginsberg, as for O’Hara and Ashbery, possibility was consistently threatened by the awareness that there were jobs they, as gay men, could not hold, places they were not wanted, and that the bars they frequented were regularly raided.

Diagnosis and critique, thirties-style, were out of the question, there being no specific “them” to blame for international conditions and no commitment, as yet, to focus on the plight of minorities at home. Better not to think about politics at all and to concentrate, as fifties poetry did with a vengeance, on personal fulfillment. Even Ginsberg’s “angelheaded hipsters,” after all, were those who, in the words of “Howl,” “drag[ged] themselves through the negro streets” (notably not their streets but the streets of Harlem) “looking for an angry fix,” or “drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity.” [19] En route to vision, there was a good deal of contradiction, as in Ginsberg’s marvelously comic, marvellously painful ode of 1956 called “America.” It begins:

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me. [20]

Warren Tallmann rightly called “America” “the nearest thing to a purely clown poem Ginsberg has.” [21] It’s not that the poet isn’t genuinely worried about the atomic bomb and the Cold War, but the relationship between public and private has become so fractured that the strongest urge is to opt out. “I don’t feel good don’t bother me” is a candid admission that he, at any rate, doesn’t want to participate[22] –not in war (Ginsberg was not drafted because of his near-sightedness), but not in oppositional activity either. The only way to respond, it seems, is to play the fool:

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument. (AGCP 146)

But what is rarely remarked is that the droll self-deprecation we find in “America” is itself a function of affluence. Consider the following lines:

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. . . .

My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.

I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations

America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I’m addressing you.

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.

Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am America,

I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.

I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.

I’d better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints ot marijuana millions of genitals

an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour

and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live

in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic. (146-47)

The latter part of this passage acts as an index to the U.S. “concerns” of the day, as reported in the newspapers– the U.S. obsession with Communist China, the flaunting of “national resources,” the burgeoning prison and mental-hospital population (Ginsberg knew the latter at first hand), and the public indifference to the underprivileged “liv[ing] in my flowerpots” (a foreshadowing of the homelessness to come two decades later). And Ginsberg is wonderfully deft at weaving together the clichés of press talk (“Asia is rising against [us]“) with ordinary racist cliché (“I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance”), memories of personal oppression, as in the reference to Uncle Max, jokes about middle-class morality (“I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go”–this latter, a reference to William Burroughs, who went there for the sake of the drug culture), and finally with the common wisdom of the day (pace then Senator John F. Kennedy) that a Catholic could not be elected president in the Protestant U.S.
But it is also the case that Ginsberg’s absurdist “holy litany” is predicated on the availability of possessions undreamt of by the citizens of other nations in 1956– plenty of free time, liquor, marijuana, the public library, and money to pay the psychoanalyst– so that the “national resources” he lampoons so brilliantly are also ones he takes for granted. Again, the catalogue “America free Tom Mooney / America save the Spanish Loyalists / America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die / America I am the Scottboro boys” and the spoof on anti-Communist paranoia in Ginsberg’s “cigar-store Cherokee” parody dialect–”The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. . . . Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations” (H 33)– is undercut by the campy conclusion:

America is this correct?

I’d better get right down to the job.

It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Here is a twist to “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World” that Richard Wilbur didn’t have in mind. Ginsberg’s candor and colloquialism, his pointed imagery (so different from Wilbur’s elegant metaphysical conceits), his defiantly anti-poetic, non-scannable chant-like verse, his willingness to let it all hang out, his refusal to play the game, his admission of weakness–these were surely a breath of fresh air in the poetic world of 1956. Indeed, the stunning conclusion, with its allusion to Whitman’s equally queer if more decorous apostrophes to America, remains a watershed in postwar American poetry.

Yet–and this is a signature of the time — no matter how “oppositional” Ginsberg’s stance purports to be, its disengagement (drop out, get high, have sex) may leave us feeling slightly queasy. Unlike its models–Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and “I Hear America Singing,” Blaise Cendrars’s “Easter in New York,” “Apollinaire’s “Zone,” Mayakovsky’s “Cloud in Trousers”–poems where personal vision goes hand in hand with serious social critique –here putting one’s “queer shoulder to the wheel” is not likely to lead to anything. “I’m in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.” Is it a wise passiveness? Or just, in the words of Ginsberg’s first book title, an “empty mirror”?

A somewhat different spin occurs in a related poem of 1956,

Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them.”:

It’s my lunch hour, so I go

for a walk among the hum-colored

cabs. First down the sidewalk

where laborers feed their dirty

glistening torsos sandwiches

and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets

on. They protect them from falling

bricks, I guess. Then onto the

avenue where skirts are flipping

above heels and blow up over

grates. The sun is hot, but the

cabs stir up the air. I look

at bargains in wristwatches. There

are cats playing in the sawdust.

On

to Times Square, where the sign

blows smoke over my head, and higher

the waterfall pours lightly. A

Negro stands in a doorway with a

toothpick, languorously agitating.

A blonde chorus girl clicks: he

smiles and rubs his chin. Everything

suddenly honks : it is 12:40 of

a Thursday.

Neon in daylight is a

great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would

write, as are light bulbs in daylight.

I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S

CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of

Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice.

And chocolate malted. A lady in

foxes on such a day puts her poodle

in a cab.

There are several Puerto

Ricans on the avenue today, which

makes it beautiful and warm. First

Bunny died, then John Latouche,

then Jackson Pollock. But is the

earth as full as life was full, of them?

And one has eaten and one walks,

past the magazines with nudes

and the posters for BULLFIGHT and

the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,

which they’ll soon tear down. I

used to think they had the Armory

Show there.

A glass of papaya juice

and back to work. My heart is in my

pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy. [23]

In this famous “lunch poem,” public events obviously play much less of a role than in Ginsberg’s “America.” Indeed, its oppositionality would seem to be all on the level of rhetoric. For Wilbur’s highly crafted stanzas, O’Hara substitutes a nervous short free-verse line, breaks coming at the least expected junctures and creating a taut suspension, as in the very first lines, “It’s my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk among the hum-colored / cabs.” [24] Again, for Wilbur’s studied impersonality, O’Hara substitutes the intimate address, whether to a friend or to himself, he describes in “Personism,” [25] and for Wilbur’s elaborately contrived metaphor (as in the case of the “angelic” bed-sheets, “rising together in calm swells / Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear / With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing”), O’Hara’s “I” substitutes persons, places, and objects that are palpable, real, and closely observed.

The poet’s lunch-hour walk, presumably from the Museum of Modern Art on 53d St. between 5th and 6th Avenue in the direction of Times Square, is full of enticing sights and sounds: cabs hum, laborers in hard hats (whose “dirty / glistening torsos” the gay poet subliminally desires) are eating sandwiches and drinking Coca-Cola, the skirts of girls in high heels (the then proverbial office uniform) “flip” and “blow up over / grates,” the myriad cut-rate jewelry shops on 6th Avenue try to outdo each other with “bargains in wristwatches,” the huge Chestfield ad above Times Square blows smoke at the cigarette-friendly pedestrian, a black man, hanging out in a doorway makes eyes at a blonde chorus girl walking by, and the Puerto Ricans on the Avenue are enough to make it, by the poet’s Dadaesque reasoning, “beautiful and warm.” Pleasurable, too, are the absurd contradictions representative of New York life: the “Negro . . . with a toothpick, langurously agitating,” the “Neon in daylight” and “lightbulbs in daylight,” the lunchspots with fancy names like JULIET’S CORNER that serve cheeseburgers and chocolate malteds, the ladies with poodles who wear fox furs even on the hottest summer day,, and so on.

But, as James E. B. Breslin noted in his excellent essay on O’Hara (JEB 210-49), the poet seems to be “a step away,” not only from the dead friends (Bunny Lang, John Latouche, Jackson Pollock) he will memorialize later in the poem, but from all the persons and objects in his field of vision “Sensations,” writes Breslin, “disappear almost as soon as they are presented. Objects and people . . . remain alien to a poet who can never fully possess them”(JEB 218). The question is why. For Breslin, the poet’s malaise, his inability to hold on to things, to move toward any kind of transcendence beyond the fleeting, evanescent moment is largely a function of O’Hara’s unique psychological make-up. But since, as Breslin himself suggests, O’Hara’s fabled “openness is an admitted act of contrivance and duplicity” (JEB 231), we might consider the role culture plays in its formation.

Consider, to begin with, the repeated metonymic displacements of specific metaphors. New York’s yellow cabs are compared to bees (“hum-colored”), but their color relates them to the laborers’ “yellow helmets,” worn to “protect them from falling / bricks, I guess.” Yellow helmets, yellow jackets: the poem’s brilliance is to connect these disparate items and yet to leave the import of the connection hanging. Is the tentative explanation (“I guess”) about “falling bricks” tongue-in-cheek or serious? In the same vein, “skirts” are no sooner seen “flipping / above heels” in the hot air than they are described as “blow[ing] up over/ grates,” even as the sign high up in Times Square “blows smoke over my head.” “Blow,” for O’Hara, always has sexual connotations, but “blow up,” soon to be the title of Antonioni’s great film, also points to the vocabulary of nuclear crisis omnipresent in the public discourse of these years. And now the muted and intermittent sounds of skirts flipping, smoke blowing, cabs stirring up the air, and cats playing in the sawdust give way to the moment when “Everything / suddenly honks: it is 12.40 of / a Thursday.” Here sound is illogically related to time: gridlock in the streets, an absolutely ordinary event in midtown Manhattan, somehow makes the poet look up at the big clock above Times Square and have the surreal sense that time iscoming to a stop. The connection is momentary (rather like an air-raid siren going off), but it changes the pedestrian’s mood. At 12:40, at any rate, lunch hour has passed the half-way point, and now thoughts of the dead come to the fore–or were they already there in the reference to the “sawdust” in which the cats play? The pronoun “I” shifts to the impersonal “one”; “neon in daylight” is no longer such a pleasure, revealing as it does the “magazines with nudes / and the posters for BULLFIGHT,” and the mortuary-like “Manhattan Storage Warehouse / which they’ll soon tear down,” the reference to the Armory in the next line linking death with war.

By this time, the “great pleasure” of the poet’s lunch hour has been occluded by anxiety. Not the fear of anything in particular: O’Hara’s New York is still a long way from the crime and drug-ridden Manhattan of the nineties. On the contrary, the poet’s anxiety seems to stem from the sheer glut of sensation: so many new and colorful things to see– new movies starring Giuletta Massina, new Ballachine ballets for Edwin Denby to write about, new editions of Reverdy poems, new buildings going up all over town. Colorful, moreover, is now associated with persons of color: the poet, exoticizing the Other, takes pleasure in the “click” between the “langurously agitating Negro” and “blonde chorus girl” (a sly parody of the scare question being asked with regularity in the wake of the Desegregation Act of 1954, “Would you want your daughter to marry a Nigra?”) [26] , and he observes playfully that “There are several Puerto Ricans on the avenue today, which / makes it beautiful and warm.” Yet–and here the contrast replicates the juxtapositions found in Look or Colliers– for every exotic sight and delightful sensation, there are falling bricks, bullfights, blow ups and blow outs, armories, mortuaries, and, as the name Juliet’s Corner suggests, tombs. In this context, ironically, the actual death references in the poem (“First / Bunny died . . .”) function almost as overkill.

The “glass of papaya juice ” of the penultimate lines sums it up nicely. Papaya, now sold in every large city supermarket, was a new commodity in the fifties; the new Puerto Rican emigres (who, for Frank, make it “beautiful and warm”) were opening juice bars all over Manhattan. Papaya juice was considered not only exotic but healthful, the idea of drinking fruit and vegetable drinks that are good for you being itself a novelty in this period. The juice bar O’Hara frequents on the way “back to work” makes a wonderful contrast to the hamburger joint where he had lunch. Cheeseburger & malted: this all-American meal, soon to be marketed around the globe by McDonald’s, gives way to the glass of papaya juice–a new “foreign” import. But the juice the poet ingests is also contrasted to the heart which is in “my pocket” and which is “Poems by Pierre Reverdy.” The heart is not in the body where it belongs but worn externally, in the poet’s pocket. And again it is a foreign (in this case, French) vintage.

In the boom economy of the late fifties, such new foreign imports created a daydream world of exotic pleasures. But the yellow helmets (also reminiscent of air raid helmets) and falling bricks, the sudden honking, the large-scale razing of buildings, and the Bullfight poster remind us, as they remind the poet, that the delights proffered by the culture are not only transient, as Breslin suggests, but that there may well be nothing behind the “neon in daylight” surfaces. Which–and this is the poet’s as well as the reader’s quandary –doesn’t make them any less desirable. On the contrary, whereas Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us,” argues that we must accept the fallen world with love and compassion, “A Step Away from Them” asserts that, yes, of course, our fallen world (fallen from what?) of “dirty glistening torsos” is lovable (whether it “deserves” our love is a question O’Hara would never presume to answer!), but wonders how the hell we can survive those artificial waterfalls and falling bricks. To which the answer, in the words of the neighboring “Song [Is it Dirty?]” is “you don’t refuse to breathe do you” (FOH 327).

Thus the personal becomes the political. O’Hara’s close friend John Ashbery, who was, in these same years, translating Reverdy, internalized the “march of events” even more fully. His response was to produce fragmented narrative in which the hackneyed discourse of the popular press, patriotic sloganeering, literary and film allusions, and highly private references were woven together in a seemingly seamless whole, the poet shifting roles so rapidly that it was impossible to identify his voice in the poem. When it first appeared in 1956 in an edition of 817 copies, Ashbery’s second book, Some Trees (Yale University Press) was a hopeless anomaly, despite its prize-winning status. [27] The poet himself was not available to defend it; he had left the U.S. for Paris in ‘55, not to return for a decade. In a 1988 interview with O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch, Ashbery sketches in the background for this decade abroad:

I couldn’t write anything from about the summer of 1950 to the end of 1951. It was a terribly depressing period both in the world and in my life. I had no income or prospects. The Korean War was on and I was afraid I might be drafted. There were anti- homosexual campaigns. I was called up for the draft and I pleaded that as a reason not to be drafted. Of course this was recorded and I was afraid that we’d all be sent to concentration camps if McCarthy had his own way. It was a very dangerous and scary period.” [28]

But the reality of 1956 was more complicated than this later rationalization would suggest. The “danger” and “scariness” does enter the poetry, but its mediations are multiple. Here is “Two Scenes,” the opening poem of Some Trees:

I

We see us as we truly behave:

From every corner comes a distinctive offering.

The train comes bearing joy;

The sparks it strikes illuminate the table.

Destiny guides the water-pilot, and it is destiny.

For long we hadn’t heard so much news, such noise.

The day was warm and pleasant.

“We see you in your hair,

Air resting around the tips of mountains.”

II

A fine rain anoints the canal machinery.

This is perhaps a day of general honesty

Without example in the world’s history

Though the fumes are not of a singular authority

And indeed are dry as poverty.

Terrific units are on an old man

In the blue shadow of some paint cans

As laughing cadets say, “In the evening

Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.” [29]

Ironically enough, this particular poem was first published in The Kenyon Review (Spring 1956), where it was wedged between two quite conventional poems, Herbert Morris’s “Twenty-Eight” and Theodore Holmes’s “The Life of the Estate,” the latter containing such passages as “The house sits up on the hill; and has that satisfied look / Of a head taking credit for the comfort the body enjoys in bed.” [30] Given its title and its “normal” stanzaic appearance (“Two Scenes” has two nine line stanzas, its lines ranging from six to fifteen syllables), the Kenyon readership might have glanced at it and concluded that it was just another pictorial poem, with pastoral references to “tips of mountains” and “a fine rain.” Those who did actually read it, however, must have been more than a little confused.

“We see us,” the poem opens, “as we truly behave.” Not as the familiar adage has it, “We see ourselves as others see us,” and certainly not “We see ourselves as we truly are,” but, inconsequentially (for how could it be otherwise, given that the other’s behavior is the one thing we certainly can “see”), “as we truly behave.” The assertive opening statement is thus no more than tautology, and hence empty gesture, even as the lines that follow convey perfectly reasonable information that doesn’t add up because there is no context that relates “a” to “b.” “From every corner comes a distinctive offering”: a simple enough sentence and suggestive of formal ceremony: the journey of the Magi or homage to the Queen on her birthday, perhaps. “The train comes bearing joy” is equally reasonable, but how do “The sparks it (the train?) strikes illuminate the table”? What table? And in line 4 the expected train conductor or engineer turns out to be a water-pilot; perhaps, then, the table of line 3 was a water table. The ominously repeated reference to “destiny” defies explanation, at least at this point in the poem, but clearly the arrival of the boat (which has now replaced the train) is significant: “For long we hadn’t heard so much news, such noise.” Line 7 in contrast, is straightforward description: “The day was warm and pleasant” sounds like the opening of any standard short story in a highschool textbook. But again the statement is undercut: the familiar pop song line “I see you in my dreams” becomes the absurd “We see you in your hair,” “hair” now rhyming with the “Air” that opens the next line, a line that recalls a Chinese or Japanese brush painting where air seems to rest “around the tips of mountains.” This last statement is in quotations, but who says it?

What, then, is the poem all about? In II, which by no means follows I, the first five lines (the first three are rough hexameters) rhyme on unstressed suffixes of abstract nouns: “machinery,” “honesty,” “history,” “authority,” “poverty.” The verse lumbers on dully, rather like badly written skeltonics. Yet this stanza does refer back to Scene I. The fine rain anointing the canal machinery takes us back to the movements of the water-pilot; perhaps he is steering his ship down the canal. The destiny that guides the pilot is real enough, since “This is perhaps a day of general honesty / Without example in the world’s history / Though the fumes are not of a singular authority / And indeed as dry as poverty.” A mock-announcement is about to be made but it never occurs. Rather, the poet’s camera zeros in on “an old man / In the blue shadow of some paint cans.” Picasso (and Stevens’s) “man with the blue guitar”? Or just an old housepainter? We can never be sure: “As laughing cadets say, ‘In the evening / Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.”

The last line with its Wittgensteinian twist might serve as an epigraph for any number of Ashbery poems and, for that matter, for the language poems that are their successors. On the one hand, procedure is all–everything has a schedule, a formula, an instruction manual. On the other, you can never “find out what it is.” Its meaning eludes us. But the “if” ensures that we keep on looking. And indeed, “Two Scenes” is not at all non-referential. When we reread it, we note that it foregrounds the basic need to decipher what one sees–to catch that “distinctive offering” coming to us “from every corner.” And the ciphers are indeed tantalizing, the train, the sparks that illuminate the table, the water-pilot making his way through the canal in a fine rain, the canal fumes, the blue shadow of the paint cans, the laughing cadets. Is this a journey up river in a Conrad novel? Are we witnessing a love scene (“We see you in your hair”)? Or a film account of mobilization, the laughing cadets waving goodbye to those of us who remain behind?

One way to approach these questions it to read the poem as a cultural as well as a lyrical text. The mid-fifties, as we have seen in Henry Steele Commager’s paean to America, was a time bloated with patriotic and nationalist slogans. “Destiny guides the water-pilot and it is destiny,” surely echoes Roosevelt’s ringing “I have a rendezvous with destiny” as well as the Hollywood film God is my Co-Pilot. “This is perhaps a day . . . without example in the world’s history” recalls the President’s reference to December 7 (Pearl Harbor) as a day that shall live in infamy, even as “general amnesty” punningly and absurdly reappears as “general honesty.” At the same time, Ashbery’s “story-line” alludes to the drive toward epiphany so characteristic of Kenyon Review short stories (“The sparks it strikes illuminate the table”), as well as to the master narrative of the period which was relentlessly Freudian, authoritatively guiding those ways in which “we truly behave,” even as the movies increasingly guided the ways in which we looked. There is not an image in Ashbery’s poem that we haven’t seen somewhere else (think of all the fifties movies where a train chuffs into town, purportedly bringing “joy”), not an image that hasn’t been recycled from another unnamed source. And the laughing cadets serve as a reminder of military operations, of the boy soldiers about to given a schedule, but for what? It seems that even here war is not so far away.

Ashbery’s lines are ungainly, his language like “Terrific units” designedly anti-poetic. Allusion, used pointedly and sparingly in poems of the Wilbur tradition, is now the very fabric of the poem–everything alludes to something, if you can find out what it is. Note that unlike Wilbur, Ashbery makes no claim to know “the things of the world”; indeed, things have become so much “canal machinery,” as equivocal as Robert Frank’s quite literal but ultimately opaque images. Unlike the Ginsberg of Howl or the O’Hara of Lunch Poems, Ashbery does not place himself at the center of the poem. “I” becomes “we” becomes “you.” The subjectivity of the poet is thus everywhere and nowhere, which is another way of saying it is inextricable from the poetic language itself. Perhaps, in the wake of “Wise Man of the Month” discourse, this was the most adequate way of coming to terms with a public sphere as baffling as it was impenetrable.

Ashbery’s lyric mode in this, the very first of the texts in his Selected Poems (a mode, incidentally, that has not changed significantly over the years) has enormous implications for the poetry of our own time, although it is only fair to say that in the nineties, as in the fifties, the dominant poetic paradigm is not unlike the Wilbur model (or module), with its drive toward profundity, its desire to “say something” about body and soul, love and war. The later fifties mark, in this respect, an important turning point. In 1956, we might say, public spectacle, especially as filtered through the media, had become at once so threatening and yet so remote that the easiest poetic (or artistic) path was to pretend none of the negative symptoms existed. Didn’t The Family of Man prove that love, childbirth, illness, and death were the same the world over? And weren’t those elaborate conceits treasured by mainstream poets timeless and universal?

In this context, counterculture poetics could only respond with what was quite literally an opening, but no more than an opening, of the field. Questions of politics were neither dramatized as, say, in Yeats’s great “Easter 1916,” which was, after all, an insider’s view of the “Irish Question,” nor used parabolically as in Auden’s poems of the early forties. Rather, the political was internalized, whether in the campy rhetoric of Ginsberg’s “America,” or in O’Hara’s unwillingness to rationalize everyday experience, or in the complex parodic versions of Ashbery’s “‘They Dream Only of America’,” poems, where the political is always present, “if you can find out what it is.” In this sense, oppositional poetry of the fifties was cool rather than hot, mordant and witty performance rather than its more contemplative, engaged, and analytical European counterpart, as found, say, in the lyric of Paul Celan or Ingeborg Bachmann. War as daily reality (rather than as newspaper report or speculation about nuclear testing) seemed very far away. Thus, when actual revolutionary struggles occurred, as they did in Montgomery in January and in Hungary in October of ‘56, the poets seemed to be looking in some other direction. Rather like the riders on the trolley in Robert Frank’s great photograph, looking out with rapt attention at the images going by, but remaining, at least for the moment, “a step away from them.

Footnotes