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BEAT GENERATION
A national group of poets who emerged from San Francisco’s literary counterculture in the 1950s. Its ranks included Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder. Poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth influenced the development of the “Beat” aesthetic, which rejected academic formalism and the materialism and conformity of the American middle class. Beat poetry is largely free verse, often surrealistic, and influenced by the cadences of jazz, as well by Zen and Native American spirituality.
ALLEN GINSBERG
One of the most respected Beat writers and acclaimed American poets of his generation, Allen Ginsberg enjoys a prominent place in post-World War II American culture. He was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Paterson. The son of an English teacher and Russian expatriate, Ginsberg’s early life was marked by his mother’s psychological troubles, including a series of nervous breakdowns. In 1943, while studying at Columbia University, Ginsberg befriended William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and the trio later established themselves as pivotal figures in the Beat Movement. Known for their unconventional views, and frequently rambunctious behavior, Ginsberg and his friends also experimented with drugs. On one occasion, Ginsberg used his college dorm room to store stolen goods acquired by an acquaintance. Faced with prosecution, Ginsberg decided to plead insanity and subsequently spent several months in a mental institution. After graduating from Columbia, Ginsberg remained in New York City and worked various jobs. In 1954, however, he moved to San Francisco, where the Beat Movement was developing through the activities of such poets as Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Ginsberg first came to public attention in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other Poems. “Howl,” a long-lined poem in the tradition of Walt Whitman, is an outcry of rage and despair against a destructive, abusive society. Kevin O'Sullivan, writing in Newsmakers, deemed “Howl” “an angry, sexually explicit poem” and added that it is “considered by many to be a revolutionary event in American poetry.”The poem's raw, honest language and its “Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath,” as Ginsberg called it, stunned many traditional critics. James Dickey, for instance, referred to “Howl” as “a whipped-up state of excitement” and concluded that “it takes more than this to make poetry.” Other critics responded more positively. Richard Eberhart, for example, called “Howl” “a powerful work, cutting through to dynamic meaning…It is a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit…Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality of love.” Paul Carroll judged it “one of the milestones of the generation.” Appraising the impact of “Howl,” Paul Zweig noted that it “almost singlehandedly dislocated the traditionalist poetry of the 1950s.”
In addition to stunning critics, Howl stunned the San Francisco Police Department. Because of the graphic sexual language of the poem, they declared the book obscene and arrested the publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The ensuing trial attracted national attention, as prominent literary figures such as Mark Schorer, Kenneth Rexroth, and Walter Van Tilberg Clark spoke in defense of Howl. Schorer testified that “Ginsberg uses the rhythms of ordinary speech and also the diction of ordinary speech. I would say the poem uses necessarily the language of vulgarity.” Clark called Howl “the work of a thoroughly honest poet, who is also a highly competent technician.” The testimony eventually persuaded Judge Clayton W. Horn to rule that Howl was not obscene. The qualities cited in its defense helped make Howl the manifesto of the Beat literary movement. Including such novelists as Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs and poets Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Ginsberg, the Beats wrote in the language of the street about previously forbidden and unliterary topics. The ideas and art of the Beats greatly influenced popular culture in America during the 1950s and 1960s.
Ginsberg followed Howl in 1961 with Kaddish and Other Poems. “Kaddish,” a poem similar in style and form to “Howl,” is based on the traditional Hebrew prayer for the dead and tells the life story of Ginsberg's mother, Naomi. The poet's complex feelings for his mother, colored by her struggle with
mental illness, are at the heart of this long-lined poem. It is considered to be one of Ginsberg's finest: Thomas F. Merrill called it “Ginsberg at his purest and perhaps at his best”; Louis Simpson simply referred to it as “a masterpiece.”
Ginsberg's early poems were greatly influenced by fellow northern New Jersey resident William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg recalled being taught at school that Williams “was some kind of awkward crude provincial from New Jersey,” but upon talking to Williams about his poetry, Ginsberg “suddenly realized [that Williams] was hearing with raw ears. The sound, pure sound and rhythm—as it was spoken around him, and he was trying to adapt his poetry rhythms out of the actual talk-rhythms he heard rather than metronome or sing-song archaic literary rhythms.” Ginsberg acted immediately on his sudden understanding. “I went over my prose writings,” he told an interviewer, “and I took out little four-or-five line fragments that were absolutely accurate to somebody's speak-talk-thinking and rearranged them in lines, according to the breath, according to how you'd break it up if you were actually to talk it out, and then I sent 'em over to Williams. He sent me back a note, almost immediately, and he said 'These are it! Do you have any more of these?'“
Another major influence was Ginsberg's friend Kerouac, who wrote novels in a “spontaneous prose” style that Ginsberg admired and adapted in his own work. Kerouac had written some of his books by putting a roll of white paper into a typewriter and typing continuously in a “stream of consciousness.” Ginsberg began writing poems not, as he states, “by working on it in little pieces and fragments from different times, but remembering an idea in my head and writing it down on the spot and completing it there.” Both Williams and Kerouac emphasized a writer's emotions and natural mode of expression over traditional literary structures. Ginsberg cited as historical precedents for this idea the works of poet Walt Whitman, novelist Herman Melville, and writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
A major theme in Ginsberg's life and poetry was politics. Kenneth Rexroth called this aspect of Ginsberg's work “an almost perfect fulfillment of the long, Whitman, Populist, social revolutionary tradition in American poetry.” In a number of poems, Ginsberg refers to the union struggles of the 1930s, popular radical figures, the McCarthy red hunts, and other leftist touchstones. In “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” he attempts to end the Vietnam War through a kind of magical, poetic evocation. In “Plutonian Ode,” a similar feat—ending the dangers of nuclear power through the magic of a poet's breath—is attempted. Other poems, such as “Howl,” although not expressly political in nature, are nonetheless considered by many critics to contain strong social criticism.
Ginsberg's political activities were called strongly libertarian in nature, echoing his poetic preference for individual expression over traditional structure. In the mid-1960s he was closely associated with the counterculture and antiwar movements. He created and advocated “flower power,” a strategy in which antiwar demonstrators would promote positive values like peace and love to dramatize their opposition to the death and destruction caused by the Vietnam War. The use of flowers, bells, smiles, and mantras (sacred chants) became common among demonstrators for some time. In 1967 Ginsberg was an organizer of the “Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In,” an event modeled after the Hindu mela, a religious festival. It was the first of the countercultural festivals and served as an inspiration for hundreds of others. In 1969, when some antiwar activists staged an “exorcism of the Pentagon,” Ginsberg composed the mantra they chanted. He testified for the defense in the Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial, in which antiwar activists were charged with “conspiracy to cross state lines to promote a riot.”
Sometimes Ginsberg's politics prompted reaction from law-enforcement authorities. He was arrested at an antiwar demonstration in New York City in 1967 and tear-gassed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. In 1972 he was jailed for demonstrating against then-President Richard Nixon at the Republican National Convention in Miami. In 1978 he and long-time companion Peter Orlovsky were arrested for sitting on train tracks in order to stop a trainload of radioactive waste coming from the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant in Colorado.
culture, Ginsberg's work was the object of much scholarly attention throughout his lifetime. A documentary directed by Jerry Aronson, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, was released in 1994. The same year, Stanford University paid Ginsberg a reported one million dollars for his personal archives. New poems and collections of Ginsberg's previous works continued to be published regularly. And his letters, journals, and even his photographs of fellow Beats provided critics and scholars new insights into the life and work of this poet.
In the spring of 1997, while already plagued with diabetes and chronic hepatitis, Ginsberg was diagnosed with liver cancer. After learning of this illness, Ginsberg promptly produced twelve brief poems. The next day he suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. Two days later, he died. In the New York Times, Ginsberg was remembered by William Burroughs as “a great person with worldwide influence.”
Ginsberg's poetry from the last few years of his life was collected in Death and Fame: Poems, 1993-
1997. This volume includes those works produced by Ginsberg immediately after he learned of his cancer. A Publishers Weekly reviewer, who acknowledged that “there has never been an American poet as public as Ginsberg,” described Death and Fame as “a perfect capstone to a noble life.” Ray Olson and Jack Helberg, writing in Booklist, found Ginsberg's poetry “polished if not constrained,” and Rochelle Ratner, in a Library Journal assessment, observed that “Ginsberg's tenderness and caring is... very much in evidence.”
Another of Ginsberg's posthumous publications, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995, presents more than one hundred-fifty essays on such subjects as nuclear weapons; the Vietnam War; censorship; poets such as Walt Whitman and Beat figure Gregory Corso; and other cultural luminaries, including musician John Lennon and photographer Robert Frank. A Publishers Weekly critic appraised Deliberate Prose as “sometimes lovely, sometimes slapdash” and added that the book is “sure to appeal to [Ginsberg's] broad contingent of fans.” Booklist reviewer Ray Olson, meanwhile, found Ginsberg's essays “more immediately approachable than much of his verse.”
How would Ginsberg have liked to be remembered? “As someone in the tradition of the oldtime American transcendentalist individualism,” he said, “from that old gnostic tradition…Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman…just carrying it on into the 20th century.” Ginsberg once explained that among human faults he was most tolerant of anger; in his friends he most appreciated tranquility and sexual tenderness; his ideal occupation would be “articulating feelings in company.” “Like it or not, no voice better echoes his times than Mr. Ginsberg's,” concluded a reviewer in the Economist. “He was a bridge between the literary avant-garde and pop culture.”
FERLINGHETTI
As poet, playwright, publisher, and activist, Lawrence Ferlinghetti helped to spark the San Francisco literary renaissance of the 1950s and the subsequent “Beat” movement. Like the Beats, Ferlinghetti felt strongly that art should be accessible to all people, not just a handful of highly educated intellectuals. His career has been marked by its constant challenge of the status quo; his poetry engages readers, defies popular political movements, and reflects the influence of American idiom and modern jazz. In Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Poet-at-Large, Larry Smith noted that the author “writes truly memorable poetry, poems that lodge themselves in the consciousness of the reader and generate awareness and change. And his writing sings, with the sad and comic music of the streets.”
Ferlinghetti was essential to the establishment of the Beat movement. His City Lights bookstore provided a gathering place for the fertile talents of the San Francisco literary renaissance, and the bookstore’s publishing arm, the “Pocket Poets” series, offered a forum for Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Patchen and Gregory Corso. As Smith noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “What emerges from the historical panorama of Ferlinghetti’s involvement is a pattern of social engagement and literary experimentation as he sought to expand the goals of the Beat movement.” Smith added, however, that Ferlinghetti’s contribution far surpasses his tasks as a publisher and organizer. “Besides molding an
image of the poet in the world,” the critic continued, “he created a poetic form that is at once rhetorically functional and socially vital.” Ferlinghetti himself alleges that he never wrote “Beat” poetry. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle reporter Heidi Benson, Ferlinghetti explained why he preferred the term “wide-open”: “Wide-open poetry refers to what Pablo Neruda told me in Cuba in 1950 at the beginning of the Fidelista revolution: Neruda said, ‘I love your wide-open poetry.’ He was either referring to the wide-ranging content of my poetry, or, in a different mode, to the poetry of the Beats…” Ferlinghetti was born Lawrence Monsanto Ferling. His father, an Italian immigrant, had shortened the family name upon arrival in America. Ferlinghetti discovered the lengthier name and took it as his own when he was an adult. Ferlinghetti had a tumultuous youth, parts of which were spent in France, a state orphanage in New York, and in the mansion of the wealthy Bisland family in Bronxville, New York. Young Ferlinghetti endeared himself to the Bislands to such an extent that when his aunt, their governess, disappeared suddenly, he was allowed to stay. Ferlinghetti’s formal education included the elite Riverdale Country Day School, Mount Hermon, a preparatory academy in Massachusetts, and the University of North Carolina where he majored in journalism and worked with the student staff of the Daily Tarheel. Upon graduating, he joined the U.S. Navy. After his discharge Ferlinghetti took advantage of the G.I. Bill to continue his education. He received his master’s degree from Columbia University in 1948, and completed his doctoral degree at the University of Paris in 1951.
Ferlinghetti left Paris in 1951 and moved to San Francisco. In 1953 he joined with Peter D. Martin to publish a magazine, City Lights. In order to subsidize the magazine, Martin and Ferlinghetti opened the City Lights Pocket Book Shop in a neighborhood on the edge of Chinatown. Before long the City Lights Book Shop was a popular gathering place for San Francisco’s avant-garde writers, poets, and painters. “We were filling a big need,” Ferlinghetti told the New York Times Book Review. “City Lights became about the only place around where you could go in, sit down, and read books without being pestered to buy something. That’s one of the things it was supposed to be. Also, I had this idea that a bookstore should be a center of intellectual activity; and I knew it was a natural for a publishing company too.”
In addition to his new career as an entrepreneur, Ferlinghetti was busy creating his own poetry, and in 1955 he launched the City Lights Pocket Poets publishing venture. First in the “Pocket Poets” series was a slim volume of his own, Pictures of the Gone World. In Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Smith observed that, from his earliest poems onwards, the author writes as “the contemporary man of the streets speaking out the truths of common experience, often to the reflective beat of the jazz musician. As much as any poet today he…sought to make poetry an engaging oral art.” Such sentiments found an appreciative audience among young people of the mid-twentieth century who were agonizing over the arms race and cold war politics. By 1955 Ferlinghetti counted among his friends such poets as Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Whalen, as well as the novelist Jack Kerouac. Ferlinghetti was in the audience at the watershed 1955 poetry reading “Six Poets at the Six Gallery,” at which Ginsberg unveiled his poem “Howl.” Ferlinghetti immediately recognized it as a classic and offered to publish it in the “Pocket Poets” series. The first edition of Howl and Other Poems appeared in 1956 and sold out quickly. The second shipment of the book—seized by U.S. customs, then released—occasioned the infamous “Howl” trial when the San Francisco Police Department arrested Ferlinghetti on charges of printing and selling lewd and indecent material. Ferlinghetti engaged the American Civil Liberties Union for his defense and welcomed his court case as a test of freedom of speech. Not only did he win the suit on October 3, 1957, he also benefitted from the publicity generated by the case. The case was vital in energizing the San Francisco renaissance and Beat cause, establishing definite principles to the various movements’ often disparate aims.
For Ferlinghetti, these “principles” included redeeming poetry from the ivory towers of academia and offering it as a shared experience with ordinary people. In 1958 New York’s New Directions press published Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, a work that has since sold well over one million copies in America and abroad. In Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Smith suggested that the poems in A Coney Island of the Mind demonstrate the direction Ferlinghetti intended to go with his art. The poet “enlarged his stance and developed major themes of anarchy, mass corruption, engagement, and a belief in the surreality and wonder of life,” he wrote. “It was a revolutionary art of dissent and contemporary
MICHAEL MCCLURE
Beat poet, playwright, novelist, and documentary filmmaker Michael McClure was born in Marysville, Kansas, and raised there and in Seattle. Educated at the University of Wichita, the University of Arizona, and San Francisco State College—where he studied with poet Robert Duncan—he gave his first poetry reading in 1955 alongside Allen Ginsberg.
McClure’s poetry combines spontaneity, typographical experimentation, Buddhist practice, and “body language” to merge the ecstatic and the corporeal. Publishers Weekly has noted of his work, “McClure infuses ecstatic direct address and colloquial diction with an exquisite sensibility, one that reveals the world in its ordinary complex gorgeousness.”
McClure is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Of Indigo and Saffron (2011), Mysteriosos and Other Poems (2010), Rebel Lions (1991), and The New Book/A Book of Torture (1961). He is also the author of the novels The Mad Cub (1970) and The Adep t (1971), and several essay collections, including Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac (1994) and Meat Science Essays (1963). He has written more than 20 plays and musicals, several television documentaries, and the song “Mercedes Benz,” which was made famous by singer Janis Joplin. His 1965 play “The Beard,” which depicts an imagined sexual encounter between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, gained notoriety when it was (unsuccessfully) brought to trial on charges of obscenity.
McClure frequently performs his poetry with musical collaborators, including composer Terry Riley, and has recorded several CDs with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. His honors include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Alfred Jarry Award, as well as a Rockefeller grant for playwriting and an Obie Award for Best Play.
He lives in Oakland with his wife, the sculptor Amy Evans McClure. A selection of his papers is held at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
NEW YORK SCHOOL
A group of poets aligned with the New York School of painting in the 1950s and ’60s. A diverse group of writers, the main figures of the New York School are Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schulyer, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest. Influenced by relationships and collaborations with painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, and Larry Rivers, the New York School poets are known for their urbane wit, interest in visual art, and casual address. A second generation of New York School poets grew up in the 1960s and included Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman.
FRANK O’HARA
Frank O'Hara was a dynamic leader of the "New York School" of poets, a group that included John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. The Abstract Expressionist painters in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s used the title, but the poets borrowed it. From the beginning O'Hara's poetry was engaged with the worlds of music, dance, and painting. In that complex of associations he devised an idea of poetic form that allowed the inclusion of many kinds of events, including everyday conversations and notes about New York advertising signs. Since his death in 1966 at age forty, the depth and richness of his achievements as a poet and art critic have been recognized by an international audience. As the painter Alex Katz remarked, "Frank's business was being an active intellectual." He was that. His articulate intelligence made new proposals for poetic form possible in American poetry.
He was born Francis Russell O'Hara in Baltimore, Maryland, to Russell J. and Katherine Broderick O'Hara but moved at an early age to Grafton, a suburb of Worcester, in central Massachusetts. While growing up, he was a serious music student and wished above all to be a concert pianist. He took courses
at the New England Conservatory. O'Hara writes: "It was a very funny life. I lived in Grafton, took a ride on a bus into Worcester every day to high school, and on Saturdays took a bus and a train to Boston to study piano. On Sundays, I stayed in my room and listened to the Sunday symphony programs." After service aboard the destroyer USS Nicholas in the South Pacific during World War II, he entered Harvard (Edward Gorey was his roommate), first majoring in music but changing to English and deciding to be a writer. His first published work was some poems and stories in the Harvard Advocate. While living in Cambridge, O'Hara met poets Ashbery, who was on the editorial board of the Advocate , and V. R. "Bunny" Lang. In 1956 O'Hara was one of the original founders of the Poets Theater in Cambridge. On occasional visits to New York, he met Koch and Schuyler, as well as the painters who were likewise to be so much a part of his life, notably Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Michael Goldberg, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock. He was the first of the young New York Poets to write regular art criticism, serving as editorial associate for Art News , contributing reviews and occasional articles from 1953 to 1955. He had a long association with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, beginning as a clerk at the information and sales desk in the front lobby, later becoming an assistant curator at the museum and an associate curator of painting and sculpture in 1965, despite his lack of formal training. He was an assistant for the important exhibition, "The New American Painting," which toured eight European cities in 1958-1959. This exhibition introduced the painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement to European audiences. The title of the exhibition was changed when Donald Allen used it as the title of his anthology The New American Poetry. While employed by the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara was the curator or cocurator of nineteen exhibitions. He was an active and articulate spokesman for the new painting inside the major collecting museum in New York. He performed his administrative and curatorial duties surrounded by ceaseless conversation about art, poetry, music, and dance.
O'Hara's work was first brought to the attention of the wider public, like that of so many others of his generation, by Allen's timely and historic anthology, The New American Poetry (1960). It was not until O'Hara's Lunch Poems was published in 1965 that his reputation gained ground and not until after his sudden death that his recognition increased. Now his reputation is secure as an important and even popular poet in the great upsurge of American poetry following World War II. His influence on the next generation of poets—including Bill Berkson, Alice Notley, and Ted Berrigan—was immense. He did not cultivate academic alliances or solicit editors and publishers. Painter John Button remarks: "When asked by a publisher-friend for a book, Frank might have trouble even finding the poems stuffed into kitchen drawers or packed in boxes that had not been unpacked since his last move. Frank's fame came to him unlooked-for." His recognition came in part because of his early death, the somewhat absurd and meaningless occasion of that death (he was run down by a beach taxi on Fire Island), the prominence and loyalty of his friends, the renown of his own personality, and above all, the exuberant writings themselves. His casual attitude toward his poetic career is reminiscent of the casual composition of many of the poems themselves. One of his poems, "Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)," for example, was written on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading, and his most important statement of poetics, "Personism," was written in less than an hour while Allen, who requested it, was on his way across town to pick it up. Koch touches upon this particular quality of O'Hara's genius—his naturalness: "Something Frank had that none of the other artists and writers I know had to the same degree was a way of feeling and acting as though being an artist were the most natural thing in the world. Compared to him everyone else seemed a little self-conscious, abashed, or megalomaniacal." When this quality entered his verse, his work was formally inventive and most compelling.
During his lifetime O'Hara was known as "a poet among painters," part of a group of such poets who seemed to find their inspiration and support from the painters they chose to associate with, writing more art reviews and commentary than literary opinion. O'Hara published only two book reviews: one of poetry collections by friends Chester Kallman, Ashbery, and Edwin Denby; the other of John Rechy's City of Night , 1963. His own art criticism, the major portion of which has been collected as Art Chronicles 1954 - 1966 (1975), helped to encourage the painters he liked best and maintain the public awareness of them, although in itself it is nowhere as brilliant as, for example, Rainer Maria Rilke's writings on Auguste
poems. The poems at times can be correctly read as intense personal statements, not just sleight-of-hand performances. A survey of his Early Writing (1977), written between 1946 and 1950 while O'Hara was still a student at Harvard, reveals a striking diversity of forms that includes ballads, songs, a blues (so- called), a madrigal, musical exercises such as a gavotte, a dirge (complete with strophe, antistrophe, and epode), and even more exotic forms such as the French triolet. There are also an imitation of Wallace Stevens (with a touch of Marianne Moore) titled "A Procession for Peacocks"; a strict sonnet; a litany; poems in quatrains; couplets, and heroic couplets; poems with faithful rhyme patterns; and various prose poems. O'Hara's most persistent interest, however, was the image, in all its suddenness, juxtaposed with an equally unlikely image, following techniques not of Imagism but those perfected by the French Surrealists. This period of experimentation and learning (although the imitations and parodies continued) advanced into an interest in post-Symbolist French poetry, especially that of Guillaume Apollinaire and later Pierre Reverdy, along with the big-voiced, roaring surrealism of Vladimir Mayakovski. At the same time O'Hara's innate Americanness was encouraged by writers such as William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, together with the colloquial W. H. Auden, whom he felt to be an "American" poet in "his use of the vernacular." O'Hara was alert to all developments in his chosen art. Between 1952 and 1958 he either attended or participated in discussions of the new poetry and the new painting at the Abstract-Expressionist meeting place in New York called The Club. His essay,"Nature and New Painting," indicating a surprisingly early familiarity with Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" essay (1950) before it became widely known later in the decade, was the subject of three panel discussions in January and February of 1955."
Among the poems of this early period, "Oranges" stands out. A series of twelve prose poems (originally nineteen) written while he was home from Harvard during the summer of 1949, they are less the "pastorals" of their subtitle than a decidedly anti-Arcadian surrealistic parody beginning: "Black crows in the burnt mauve grass, as intimate as rotting rice, snot on a white linen field." About twenty copies of the poems, with a painting by Hartigan on the cover, were later published on the occasion of an exhibit of Hartigan's Oranges paintings. As Terence Diggory has demonstrated, Hartigan did twelve paintings for twelve O'Hara poems in the fall of 1952, and by so doing redefined her relationship to Abstract Expressionism and proposed a mode of "collaboration as a dialogue of multiple selves" between poets and painters that influenced poets and painters alike. The poems themselves do not even mention the word of the title, a cleverness the poet was well aware of. O'Hara gives an account of the series in his more justly famous "Why I Am Not a Painter," written in 1956:"
One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
"
Goldberg did in fact make an abstract painting with the word Sardines written on it as the title. Two other poems written at Harvard--the "Poems," beginning "At night Chinamen jump" and "The eager note on my door"--although among his earliest and having the same daring imagery as the surrealist poems, are exceptional as well for their narrative and dramatic poise. They remain among his finest, and he readily included them in later collections. Following his four years in Cambridge, O'Hara went to the University of Michigan on the advice of John Ciardi, his creative-writing teacher at Harvard, to compete in the Hopwood Awards, winning an award in writing for his manuscript "A Byzantine Place" and his verse play Try! Try! (later produced by the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which he helped found). He missed the activity of New York and returned in 1951, working briefly as private secretary to photographer Cecil Beaton and then at the Museum of Modern Art. During this period the New York School took its distinct shape, the name parodying, according to poet Edwin Denby who was there, the School of Paris, "which also originated as a joke in opposition to the School of Florence and the School of Venice." O'Hara himself describes the milieu in a memoir of the painter Rivers: "We were all in our early twenties. John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and I, being poets, divided our time between the literary bar, the San Remo, and the artists' bar, the Cedar Tavern. In the San Remo we argued and gossiped: in the Cedar we often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue and gossip.... An interesting sidelight to these social activities was that for most of us non-academic and indeed non-literary poets in the sense of the American scene at the time, the painters were the only generous audience for our poetry, and most of us read first publicly in art galleries or at The Club. The literary establishment cared about as much for our work as the Frick cared for Pollock and TX O'Hara's poems at this time were still heavily surrealistic, as exemplified by "Memorial Day 1950," "Chez Jane," and "Easter," which prefigured the more ambitious Second Avenue (1960) with its catalogue of random juxtapositions. In "Easter" the images are fully nonreferential, or referential to their own reality alone: "The razzle dazzle maggots are summary / tattooing my simplicity on the pitiable." Only the accustomed syntactic structures prevail--subjects, predicates, clauses--supporting the progression that becomes a tramp of alien, autonomous images over an otherwise familiar bridge. When the images expand out, however, and a narrative occurs, as in "A Terrestrial Cuckoo" from this same time, the results are delightfully comic:
What a hot day it is! for
Jane and me above the scorch
of sun on jungle waters to be
paddling up and down the Essequibo
in our canoe of war-surplus gondola parts[.]
This is O'Hara at his best, combining his voice and personality with the most far-flung word montages."
Among the early poems, Second Avenue , in eleven parts, is easily the most ambitious. It was written in the spring of 1953 but not published in book form until 1960. The artist Rivers recalls how this "long marvelous poem" was written in his "plaster garden studio overlooking" the avenue of the title, with the poet finishing it between poses for a sculpture Rivers was making of him. Koch, who also had some role in the poem's composition, finds it "among the wonders of contemporary poetry," and Albert Cook, the
form in the poem, then, becomes much more important than a doctrine of composition or a sermon about city life. When the Surrealists left Europe for America just before and during World War II, they injected Surrealism into American poetry and painting. O'Hara's poem of 1953 is the leading example of an attempt to install the European model in contemporary writing, but as Koch writes in his review of The Collected Poems in the New Republic : "For all their use of chance and unconsciousness, Frank O'Hara's poems are unlike Surrealist poetry in that they do not programmatically favor these forces (along with dreams and violence) over the intellectual and conscious. He must have felt the beauty and power of unconscious phenomena in surrealist poems, but what he does is to use this power and beauty to ennoble, complicate, and simplify waking actions." The poem might be said to be, in light of the manner of composition and success of the later poems, overworked, trying too hard to assert the mode of composition. One need only compare the "Poem" beginning "Now the violets are all gone, the rhinoceroses, the cymbals"--the same catalogue of disparate objects--to see how, when the personality takes over, a true, more shareable lyricism flowers. Perloff wisely points out that when the two strands are merged--the surrealistic, with its endless variety and high-spirited inventiveness, and the personal, the spoken American, the colloquial narrative with its charming persona--O'Hara attains his triumph."
As long as the succession of rapid-fire discontinuous images does not extend beyond tolerance, and, further, when there is some attempt to relate those images to an order of reality beyond themselves, O'Hara's surrealism works. In "On Rachmaninoff's Birthday," beginning "Quick! a last poem before I go / off my rocker," the final line-- "You'll never be mentally sober"--comments on the previous assortment of images and relates to the initial "I," rounding out the poem while adding a dimension of self-reflection and conscious control to an otherwise indulgent randomness. (This is just one of seven poems O'Hara wrote for the Russian composer's birthday over the years.) Or where the images are consistent, added to with like elements, as in "Romanze, or the Music Students," beginning:"
The rain, its tiny pressure
on your scalp, like ants
passing the door of a tobacconist.
"Hello!" they cry, their
noses glistening...
--almost like an animated cartoon--this is the cleverness that makes O'Hara most appealing.
The lyrical/narrative "I," the "I" with verve and personality, the distinctive O'Hara persona, the "I" of what he himself called his "I do this I do that" poems, makes its appearance as early as "Music," written in 1954. There too the persona is set upon a representational landscape of midtown Manhattan, where landmarks are called by name, as they exist in public reality (the Equestrian statue, the Mayflower Donut Shoppe, Bergdorf Goodman's, Park Avenue itself). Just how personal and lyrical this "I" is can be seen in "To the Harbormaster," a love poem written for Rivers that sustains the metaphor of a ship. Other poems from this period concern images of a different order, including movie stars such as James Dean, both a symbol and a victim of popular culture, to whom no less than four poems are dedicated. There is also the mock-heroic "To the Film Industry in Crisis," addressed "to you, / glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope, / stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all / your heavenly dimensions and rever berations and iconoclasms!" The mock epic continues later with the equally amusing "Ave Maria," beginning: "Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!"
A meditative poem such as "Sleeping on the Wing" from 1955 is a further advance and indication the poet's personality has fully emerged; specifically, that he is aware of the precious advantage, indeed the great comfort, of undisguised human "singularity," which he knows to be "all that you have made your
own." Interestingly, despite all the appearances of a prolonged, considered meditation, the poem was actually composed with great rapidity, increasingly typical for O'Hara, a sign perhaps of the confidence, embodied by Li Po, of the poet come into his own. Schuyler remembers: "The day this was written I was having breakfast (i.e. coffee) with Frank and Joe [O'Hara's roommate Joe LeSueur] at 326 East 49th Street, and the talk turned to Frank's unquenchable inspiration, in a teasing way on my part and Joe's. The cigarette smoke began jetting from Frank's nostrils and he went into the next room and wrote SLEEPING ON THE WING in a great clatter of keys." "In Memory of My Feelings" (1956) can be thought of as a transitional poem from "Second Avenue" to the "Odes." In the poem O'Hara demonstrates the process of assuming and then rejecting many possibilities of self-definition. The self, in the process of conceiving and reconnecting its emotional nature--the heart is the counter to the evil of life in the serpent--finally recognizes that "the scene of my selves" is constantly moving within the process of endless change. Art cannot grant fixity; it can produce no statues; it can, however, demonstrate the very processes of generating artistic form."
"A Step Away From Them" from 1956 has come to be known as the first of his so-called lunch poems, beginning:"
It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs.
....
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.
"
The poet is immersed in his mode, his monde. The perceptions and information follow along with the acts of seeing and thinking. The same is true of his poem of determined optimism dedicated to painter Mitchell ("Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's"), where happiness is "the least and best of human attainments," or the cohesiveness of "Platinum, Watching TV, Etc.," preserved in Poems Retrieved (1977), or the equally expansive poem to another painter friend titled "John Button Birthday." These are all poems written when O'Hara was most at home in his world and at the full strength of his style. They are followed by a series of Odes (1960) and continue into his most productive years, 1959 and 1960. When he wrote them, it was another dawning in American poetry and he one of the chief instigators, as he knew himself in his "Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's," when he wrote: "tonight I feel energetic because I'm sort of the bugle, / like waking people up... ."
that must be faced, where "too much endlessness" is "stored up, and in store," awaiting. It is not his alone, but the human and historical condition. There are repeated reminders of the "darkness" at the center of life, but even as that darkness occurs it appears "a glistening / blackness in the center / if you seek it... capable of bursting / into flame or merely / gleaming profoundly." Amidst all, the poet has been selected to bear like Prometheus "the gift of fire" to a "foreign land," a "temporary place of light, the land of air." It is this land toward which the poem moves, concluding with almost a historical imperative:"
for flowing
as it must throughout the miserable, clear and willful
life we love beneath the blue,
a fleece of pure intention sailing like
a pinto in a barque of slaves
who soon will turn upon their captors
lower anchor, found a city riding there
of poverty and sweetness paralleled
among the races without time,
and one alone will speak of being
born in pain
and he will be the wings of an extraordinary liberty[.]
"
O'Hara advances this poem by the spatial relationships of blocks of information and by using different internal voices, which are indicated by indentations and internal margins. He has learned lessons from Rivers, who in a painting like The Wall (1957) or The Accident (1957) spreads derivative images--like O'Hara drawing up blocks of memories from his life--over the field of the canvas and attempts a narrative guided by spatial relationships of the images and not a linear, causal argument. Ashbery is often recognized as the master of telling parables in poems, but here O'Hara demonstrates that he also has mastered the form. From out of the process of death and rebirth "beneath the blue," or living the life of the imagination as Stevens imagined it, a poet will emerge who understands that life is lived within contrary forces--"poverty and sweetness," "pain" and "an extraordinary liberty." Still, he resists oversimplification and insists on discontinuities. Toward the end he offers this quotation and potential hope:"
"the exquisite prayer
to be new each day
brings to the artist
only a certain kneeness"
--not newness , not keenness , but an absurd kneeness. The use of the word might even be a Platonic joke. The artist is brought down to his knees, not just by the prayer for creative novelty, one of the values necessary for his art, but by being reduced to a certain futility and awkwardness. Ironies and apparent contradictions abound: "you pull a pretty ring out of the pineapple [a grenade] / and blow yourself up"; everything is simultaneously "all right" and "difficult"; "wit" and "austerity" are shared; we fall sobbing to the floor with both "joy" and "freezing." Even at the end, in the city of the future, almost a new world, "poverty" and "sweetness" persist as parallels."
The "Ode to Michael Goldberg" should answer any charges that O'Hara cannot sustain a long poem. Drawn from the full flood of childhood memory, it courses up through "A couple of specifically anguished days" of the present which "make me now distrust sorrow, simple sorrow / especially, like sorrow over death." It is perhaps his most encompassing poem, most ruminative, introspective; it includes the darkness at the very quick of his soul that obviously haunted him and that he lived with so cheerfully and so well. And like the configuration of the lines on the page in "Ode on Lust," this poem demonstrates O'Hara's process of writing like a painter with an awareness of the spatial dimensions of language. He lived caught between sweetness and poverty, between longing for love and being rejected in love, but also attempting to keep "the poem 'open'" in the "extraordinary liberty" of the daily enterprise."
Resonance of Whitman and great rolling tones are evident in the opening lines of "Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets":"
From near the sea, like Whitman my great predecessor,
I call
to the spirits of other lands to make fecund my
................................
It is a voice of majesty, announcing a large theme.
"
The diction is self-consciously exalted, proper to an ode, compared to the breezy familiarity ordinarily expected of O'Hara: Love is "traduced" by shame; "reticence" is paid for by a poet in his blood; "fortuity" is in "the love we bear." O'Hara even forgoes his tendency to wisecrack before the seriousness of his intended theme: "here where to love at all's to be a politician," he writes, threatening sarcasm, and continues with a mocking rhyme, "as to love a poem / is pretentious, this may sound tendentious but it's lyrical." The drift into smartness ("it's lyrical") is checked, however, and the poem is restored to seriousness, even gravity, by what follows--"which shows what lyricism has been brought to by our fabled times"--and elevated diction such as "cowards are shibboleths" and "one specific love's traduced." This ode is actually one of O'Hara's most directly political poems, mounting almost to a rhetoric of defiance: "blood! blood that we have mountains in our veins to stand off jackals / in the pillaging of our desires and allegiances... ." The poem is formal even in its line arrangement--a series of long waves of couplets. There is not one drop of silliness or playful avoidance, as he continues: "for if there is fortuity it's in the love we bear each other's differences / in race." It is almost a somber poem, certainly stately, as it moves in assured and measured cadences to its end: "the only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth / and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are." It is a comment on racial relations in his own America at the beginning of the Civil Rights era, an important political and social statement; he is turning his back on the "terrible western world" to invoke such anticolonialist poets as Aimé Césaire. It may even be a noble poem, like "Ode to Joy," in pleading for "no
O'Hara's level of accomplishment remained at its peak through 1961, through a series of love poems-- later published as Love Poems (Tentative Title) (1965). Poem after poem is of a high order of achievement--"Rhapsody," "Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul," "Joe's Jacket," "You Are Gorgeous and I'm Coming," and "Personal Poem." These are all poems with the identifying characteristics of an O'Hara poem, all the same quick-stepping, name-dropping, vivacious, uninhibited narrator (name-dropping because he is utterly at home in his surroundings and in the poem). Artists and their creations continue to decorate the poems as comfortably as they do a sunken living room. John Bernard Myers, the publisher of Tibor de Nagy Editions, remembered: "I waited for these poems for three or four years; Frank could never get himself to type them up. When he did give them to me I couldn't induce him to arrange them in their proper sequence nor give me a title. I wrote 'Love Poems (Tentative Title)' on the first page, then arranged them so that the sequence would show the beginning of a new love, its middle period of floundering, the collapse of the affair with its attendant sadness and regret. Frank liked the arrangement and my 'tentative' title. And that was that." Homosexual love is the subject of the poems. While the poems were written at about the same time, the narrative sense of the book was provided by the publisher. Surrealism is at easy reach but not overshadowing; there is care for what Olson called the "dailynesses," varied rhythms, syncopation gained by restricting punctuation, an organic syntax, the trust to natural speech (although still very much the speech of a dashing sophisticate), the informed chatter, the management of time in a poem such as "Fantasy," the recurrent optimism of "Poem (Khrushchev's coming)." The series of love poems to dancer Vincent Warren--including "Les Luths," "Poem (Light clarity avocado salad)," "Having a Coke With You," and "Steps''--are all affirmative, delicate, precise, poems of frontal immediacy, heartfelt, with feeling no longer hidden behind a bravado of brilliant images and discordant segments. O'Hara moves out of the modernist mode of dada, surrealism, and cubism and into the postmodern advantage: a variety of techniques, which actually incorporate the salient gains of modernism while losing nothing of the flexibility and possibility of openness, the "going on your nerve" of "Personism." At its worst or most excessive, his style lapses into giddiness, or what Stuart Byron calls "Queertalk." While surely not limited to sexual ambiguity, the language of the poems is ripe with in-talk of the 1960s; these qualities are indeed dominant in O'Hara's poems from the start. They also happen to be the reason for their great success."
His last major effort was a long poem titled "Biotherm" (after a brand of skin lotion which Berkson's mother left around and O'Hara found). Perloff praises it as a "great" poem, while other critics understand it as a demonstration of writing as the physical activity of speech--writing and language as part of the physiological response that Olson had advocated. Multu Konuk Blasing uses models from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida in an attempt to unlock the poem. However complicated it is, the poem also had a strong influence on younger poets such as Berkson, to whom it is dedicated, Berrigan, and Ron Padgett (specifically, their collaborative Bean Spasms , 1967). It was composed over an extended period of time, from August 1961 to January 1962. O'Hara wrote to Allen: "I've been going on with a thing I started to be a little birthday poem for B[ill] B[erkson] and then it went along a little and then I remembered that was how Mike's Ode ["Ode to Michael Goldberg"] got done so I kept on and I am still going day by day (middle of 8th page this morning). I don't know anything about what it is or will be but am enjoying trying to keep going and seem to have been able to keep it 'open' and so there are lots of possibilities, air and such." The structure is complex: images and reference build up on the surface of the poem and are not given order by generalization or summaries. The poem joins eating with the making of language, as a "MENU" for Berkson suggests, but there is also the connection between eating and talking:
oh god what joy
you're here
sob and at the
most recent summit
conference they
are eating string
beans butter
smootch slurp
pass me the filth
and a coke pal
oh thank you[.]
The frame of reference is immense, and there are puns and playful connections on and with French and English. As in the early "Ode to Michael Goldberg," this poems stresses movement, quick passages through the details of life and thought, and in its spread it too engages the spatial dimensions of language. The process of language achieving articulation through the body and then collecting itself in a web of multiple associations finally becomes the subject of the poem. It also engages the process of the painters in that, like the "Odes," it relates information spatially, not always linearly; it uses indentations and internal margins to specify different voices inside the poem. The poem sets out the history of O'Hara's relationship with Berkson, but it also presents around that history remarks or observations on "the music of the fears," of "September 15 (supine, unshaven, hungover, passive, softspoken)," of routines of eating, lists of fantastic favorites, "a long history of populations," and comparisons to the poetry of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, "pretty rose preserved in biotherm." Like Stevens, in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," O'Hara is a poet of the city who concentrates on enacting the processes of the mind as it contacts reality. Perceiving reality and attempting to remodel it in poetic form, he is perceiving and thinking spatially in blocks of information, both personal and referential, as a way to demonstrate that the acts of poetry are fully engaged in the activities of loving people, interacting with historical as well as contemporary events."
on Altair 4, I love you that way, it was on Altair 4 "a happy day"
I knew it would be
yes to everything
I think you will find the pot in the corner
where the Krells left it
rub it a little and music comes out
the music of the fears
I reformed we reformed each other
being available
it is something our friends don't understand
if you loosen your tie
