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Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters
Drawing extensively upon the poet's unpublished manuscripts—poems, journals, essays, and letters—as well as all his published works, Marjorie Perloff presents Frank O'Hara as one of the central poets of the postwar period and an important critic of the visual arts. Perloff traces the poet's development through his early years at Harvard and his interest in French Dadaism and Surrealism to his later poems that fuse literary influence with elements from Abstract Expressionist painting, atonal music, and contemporary film. This edition contains a new Introduction addressing O'Hara's homosexuality, his attitudes toward racism, and changes in poetic climate cover the past few decades.
"A groundbreaking study. [This book] is a genuine work of criticism. . . . Through Marjorie Perloff's book we see an O'Hara perhaps only his closer associates saw a poet fully aware of the traditions and techniques of his craft who, in a life tragically foreshortened, produced an adventurous if somewhat erratic body of American verse."—David Lenson, Chronicle of Higher Education
"Perloff is a reliable, well-informed, discreet, sensitive . . . guide. . . . She is impressive in the way she deals with O'Hara's relationship to painters and paintings, and she does give first-rate readings of four major poems."—Jonathan Cott, New York Times Book Review
"A groundbreaking study. [This book] is a genuine work of criticism. . . . Through Marjorie Perloff's book we see an O'Hara perhaps only his closer associates saw a poet fully aware of the traditions and techniques of his craft who, in a life tragically foreshortened, produced an adventurous if somewhat erratic body of American verse."—David Lenson, Chronicle of Higher Education
"Perloff is a reliable, well-informed, discreet, sensitive . . . guide. . . . She is impressive in the way she deals with O'Hara's relationship to painters and paintings, and she does give first-rate readings of four major poems."—Jonathan Cott, New York Times Book Review
270 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
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May 20, 2020
I was hoping for something a little more biographical, but with no copies of “City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara (1993)” available, I figured I would chug through this. I’m pretty dumb, so I was lost at a lot of the line-by-line analysis and referential comps., but even for readers with little to no poetic comprehension, it’s hard to not recognize the genre-spanning impact his work had on others for decades to come. Take Frankie Cosmos song, “Fool” as an example. “Your name is a triangle / Your heart is a square/ I love to see you/ Way over there/Once I was happy/You found it intriguing […] I thought we could eat bread / I thought we could talk”. You might take a symbolist interpretation of the first two lines (i.e. their love are shapes that don’t fit together), but an O’Hara-esque surrealist interpretation seems more apt, jumping back to realist depictions of eating a snack with a loved one in the later lines. The see-sawing of the real and surreal, shifting pronouns, and ubiquitous first-person are all reminiscent of O’Hara, which makes sense given the first part of the band’s name is inspired by the man himself. While Frankie Cosmos more closely emulates O’Hara’s stylistic tenants, a lot of modern lyricists attempt poor imitations of his mode unknowingly. “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday” has become a formula for modern, poets, lyricists, and rappers alike. Takes Drake’s catalog of throw-away tracks, “5AM in Toronto”, “4PM in Calabasas”, or “6PM in New York” as examples. Drake attempts to make the surreal feel real, “I got a backyard where the money seems to come from the trees”, but Drake’s insistence on the identity of the first-person in his songs comes across as egotistic, rather than influenced by Personism. His penchant name-dropping might be more in the style though. And not enough can be said about how O’Hara and peers’ rejection of the compartmentalization of the arts has spawned a new generation of do-it-all creatives at the forefront of the modern zeitgiest. Donald Glover writes, directs, and stars in comedy-dramas while making billboard-charting albums in his spare time. Rapper Kanye West, built a billion-dollar company manufacturing everything from sneakers to living communities. Virgil Abloh, inspired by the same Dadaist movement as O’Hara (Virgil himself says he owes everything to Duchamp), directs luxury fashion houses, while DJ’ing Berlin night-clubs and collaborating on contemporary art exhibitions in Tokyo. As the book mentioned, “O’Hara is a poet not a painter for no better reason than that is what he is. But of course the poem is also saying that poetry and painting are part of the same spectrum, that in the final analysis SARDINES and ORANGES are one […] Art does not tolerate divisions; it must be viewed as process, not product.” O’Hara didn’t get the credit he was due before his life was tragically cut short on Fire Island, but author, Marjorie Perloff made the right prediction in 1977 that his legacy would have a lasting impact.
Quotes:
* “Depth… is not created by the arrangement of objects, one after another, toward a vanishing point, in the sense of Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary… by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull” pg. 22
* “‘The best of the current sculptures,’ says O’Hara, ‘didn’t make me feel I wanted to have one, they made me feel I wanted to be one’. If the art work has presence and if the beholder is as attentive as possible, the process of identification thus becomes complete.” pg. 24
* “That’s part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with Leroi Jones on August 27, 1858, 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. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born.” pg. 26
* “No matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life’s fabric, to the world’s beauty… Simply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, or that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!” pg. 31
* “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.” pg. 35
* “Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.” pg. 48
* “Pollock, Kline, and Motherwell may well have been O’Hara’s Gods, but, practically speaking, it was difficult to carry over into poetry the total abstraction of, say, Frankenthaler’s ‘Blue Territory’. Words, after all, have meanings, and thematic implications thus have a way of coming in by the back-door.” pg. 85
* “Unfortunately, many people wanted to see a justification, packaged in a new Sherry’s container, with a card saying, ‘Because of this show you are entitled to keep on admiring abstract expressionism’.” pg. 88
* “The matter-of-fact realism of these passages has been widely imitated: ‘It is 12:20 in New York a Friday’ has become a kind of formula for New York poets. But whereas any number of minor poets can offer us such a catalogue raisonne, O’Hara’s empiricism is deceptive for it modulates easily and surprisingly into fantasy and artifice.” pg. 125
* “He shifts from real to surreal and back again with astonishing speed. And this is why his poetry is ultimately so difficult to imitate. It is easy enough to begin a poem with ‘It is 12:23 in New York, a rainy Monday,’ or ‘I am walking up Broadway and I meet Ernie,’ but without O’Hara’s Dada or fantasy context, such empiricism (the literalism of simple Pop Art) becomes monotonous.” pg. 127
* “Like the ‘all-over’ painting, an O’Hara lyric often seems intentionally deprived of a beginning, middle, and end; it is an instantaneous performance. Syntactic energy is thus equivalent to the painter’s ‘push and pull’ — the spatial tensions that keep a surface alive and moving.” pg. 135
* The letter to Frank Lima referenced on pg. 170
* “In their imitations of O’Hara’s mode, Berrigan and Padgett use the poet’s particulars — the time signals, the place names, the random recounting of activities — but theirs tend to be simple empiricism, a cataloguing of ‘this is what happened to me today,’ in which the particulars don’t add up.” pg. 183
* “Frank O’Hara gave a whole new generation of poets the freedom to put anything you want in a poem and showed that poems could be written on the run.” pg. 196
* “O’Hara refused to care in the conventional sense; he would not fight for publication or scramble for prizes. But perhaps he adopted this stance because he knew, all along, that sooner or later we would indeed be looking.” pg. 197
Quotes:
* “Depth… is not created by the arrangement of objects, one after another, toward a vanishing point, in the sense of Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary… by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull” pg. 22
* “‘The best of the current sculptures,’ says O’Hara, ‘didn’t make me feel I wanted to have one, they made me feel I wanted to be one’. If the art work has presence and if the beholder is as attentive as possible, the process of identification thus becomes complete.” pg. 24
* “That’s part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with Leroi Jones on August 27, 1858, 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. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born.” pg. 26
* “No matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life’s fabric, to the world’s beauty… Simply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, or that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!” pg. 31
* “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.” pg. 35
* “Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.” pg. 48
* “Pollock, Kline, and Motherwell may well have been O’Hara’s Gods, but, practically speaking, it was difficult to carry over into poetry the total abstraction of, say, Frankenthaler’s ‘Blue Territory’. Words, after all, have meanings, and thematic implications thus have a way of coming in by the back-door.” pg. 85
* “Unfortunately, many people wanted to see a justification, packaged in a new Sherry’s container, with a card saying, ‘Because of this show you are entitled to keep on admiring abstract expressionism’.” pg. 88
* “The matter-of-fact realism of these passages has been widely imitated: ‘It is 12:20 in New York a Friday’ has become a kind of formula for New York poets. But whereas any number of minor poets can offer us such a catalogue raisonne, O’Hara’s empiricism is deceptive for it modulates easily and surprisingly into fantasy and artifice.” pg. 125
* “He shifts from real to surreal and back again with astonishing speed. And this is why his poetry is ultimately so difficult to imitate. It is easy enough to begin a poem with ‘It is 12:23 in New York, a rainy Monday,’ or ‘I am walking up Broadway and I meet Ernie,’ but without O’Hara’s Dada or fantasy context, such empiricism (the literalism of simple Pop Art) becomes monotonous.” pg. 127
* “Like the ‘all-over’ painting, an O’Hara lyric often seems intentionally deprived of a beginning, middle, and end; it is an instantaneous performance. Syntactic energy is thus equivalent to the painter’s ‘push and pull’ — the spatial tensions that keep a surface alive and moving.” pg. 135
* The letter to Frank Lima referenced on pg. 170
* “In their imitations of O’Hara’s mode, Berrigan and Padgett use the poet’s particulars — the time signals, the place names, the random recounting of activities — but theirs tend to be simple empiricism, a cataloguing of ‘this is what happened to me today,’ in which the particulars don’t add up.” pg. 183
* “Frank O’Hara gave a whole new generation of poets the freedom to put anything you want in a poem and showed that poems could be written on the run.” pg. 196
* “O’Hara refused to care in the conventional sense; he would not fight for publication or scramble for prizes. But perhaps he adopted this stance because he knew, all along, that sooner or later we would indeed be looking.” pg. 197
June 14, 2016
Strong survey of my favorite poet, with a nice mixture of biographical detail, line analysis, and contextual comparison. Perloff is smart to set O'Hara off against the painters who were both his friends and the subject of his day-job (asst. curator at MOMA), and I came away with a better understanding of his work in the context of mid-century abstract art. There's a nice amount of detail from personal interviews as well, and the life-story is touching w/o overwhelming the material. Perloff is reliant on certain poems that she may value more than the reader, though I'm not sure if that's a reflection of the book being written 40 years ago, before the Lunch Poems really came into vogue. I've always preferred the insouciant O'Hara to the elevated, and the collection doesn't give works like "Poem (Lana Turner has Collapsed)" as much attention as they perhaps deserve.
The book's introduction is essential because it addresses some complaints I would've otherwise had: leaning too hard on the influence of de Kooning and Pollock while ignoring the clear impact that Rauschenberg, Johns, Cage, and Cunningham, as brilliant artists who used collage and also were part of the same gay tableau as O'Hara, had; an underplaying of the romantic relationships that peppered O'Hara's life. This retroactive expansion into the homosocial sphere let me forgive certain things in the text that haven't aged well (strange that she's properly defensive of dismissals of O'Hara as light but keeps on referring to him as "bitchy).
Best of all, for me, was the line analysis and attention paid to my favorite O'Hara poem, with which I close:
WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? 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.
The book's introduction is essential because it addresses some complaints I would've otherwise had: leaning too hard on the influence of de Kooning and Pollock while ignoring the clear impact that Rauschenberg, Johns, Cage, and Cunningham, as brilliant artists who used collage and also were part of the same gay tableau as O'Hara, had; an underplaying of the romantic relationships that peppered O'Hara's life. This retroactive expansion into the homosocial sphere let me forgive certain things in the text that haven't aged well (strange that she's properly defensive of dismissals of O'Hara as light but keeps on referring to him as "bitchy).
Best of all, for me, was the line analysis and attention paid to my favorite O'Hara poem, with which I close:
WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? 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.
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October 29, 2008this book was first published in 1977 lamenting o'hara's exclusion from antholgies at the time and suggesting that o'hara will be an important poet for future generations. wow, i'm reading this book 30 years after it was first published! it's just weird for me to be in the midst of the fulfillment of her wish. i'm excited to devote some attention to o'hara right now. i taught lunch poems once and read portrait in a convex mirror and wasn't very enthused. sometimes it isn't the right time to be reading a poet and then years later you get it. i've ordered the collected...
and this is also coming at the subject from the angle of teaching poetry at an art school in order to explore common ground between genres. i'm curious. i'm on page 9 and am loving perloff's style as usual. i guess this is sort of a p/review.
and this is also coming at the subject from the angle of teaching poetry at an art school in order to explore common ground between genres. i'm curious. i'm on page 9 and am loving perloff's style as usual. i guess this is sort of a p/review.
January 17, 2025
could have been so much better
July 7, 2023
Read most of this book 2 years ago.. just finished the last 40 pages this week and was almost brought to tears a few times. Even if O’Hara isn’t my favorite poet, this book is so beautifully written it’s hard not to fall in love with his art.
September 27, 2019
Helpful for understanding O'Hara's goals and processes, but even though she explains what he does, she doesn't justify why it's worthwhile.
April 25, 2025
so much of what i want to say but can't find the words for echoes through o'hara....perloff is a wonderful writer that treats her subjects with so much care........
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews