Warhol-o-Rama

by Peter Oresick

Published on the occasion of Andy Warhol's 80th birthday, Warhol-o-rama surveys the extraordinary life--and robust afterlife--of AndyWarhol (1928-1987). In this rollicking poetic sequence Peter Oresick reads Warhol through the eyes and words of others--from critics to Catholics to Carpatho-Rusyns. The result is an unorthodox and entertaining serial portrait of an American artist whose 15 minutes of fame seem to have no end in sight.

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2008

About the author

Peter Oresick (pronounced o-RES-ik) is a poet, publisher, and professor.

Currently he is Associate Professor of English at Chatham University, where teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program and edits the literary journal The Fourth River . He has also taught at the The Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Emerson College, and the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

As a publisher he served in senior positions in literary, scholarly, and technical publishing from 1981 to 2004 at the University of Pittsburgh Press, Graphic Arts Technical Foundation, and Printing Industries of America.

At the University of Pittsburgh Oresick earned a BA in Education and a MFA in Poetry.

Reviews

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poetry collection about Andy Warhol

Poetry as headlines; Warhola as a kind of pop religion.
Sometimes 15 minutes is a lifetime;
And still he doesn’t die
(although she shot him).

I saw it on TV
In the newspapers
In a film
On a billboard
In neon lights
On a marquee,
In a magazine…
New York seduced and then
The whole country, and then
THE WHOLE WORLD!
(or at least urban portions thereof).

And still he doesn’t die.

An anachronism: Googling for Andy
Several million hits.

Surrealists for Andy
Tru Capote NOT for Andy
Whose ego’s bigger?

And still he doesn’t die.

Warholmart, Warhollandaise, Warholocaust
A concrete poem of letters, letters, letters
In tribute to the name, the ineffable name.

Laconic Andy, knowing the less you say
In answer, the more they make up that
You don’t have to invent, and
The more the legend feeds the myth
And the popcornmedia machine.

And still he doesn’t die.

15 minutes is like entering
A black hole. It stretches like
White spaghetti
With Dylan singing “Blonde on Blonde.”

And still he doesn’t die.

What I am reviewing here is a book of poems composed by Peter Oresick, who is a celebrated poet, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, which means his poetry has the academic stamp of approval upon it, and was probably financed by some endowment. In fact (leafing back to the back of the title page), the author thanks the Heinz Endowments for a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

What Oresick is about here is to pay a double-edged tribute to an American pop art icon (and ambient culture) in a poetic style that in some sense mirrors the art and lifestyle of the pop artist. Consequently, the style, form, diction, meter, etc. are at turns jarring, challenging, irreverent, splashy, nouveau, mundane, experimental, repetitive, ingenious, etc.

Does Oresick succeed? Is this collection of poems a Work of Art? Should you pluck down your hard-earned coin? Is Andy pleased, bemused, irritated, honored, reborn…? Will the people who hand out the money at Heinz Endowments find that their money was well spent?

Personally speaking (and to be specific) I liked “Googlism for Andy Warhol” a lot. The concrete poem, “Andy Warhol for Warholniks at a Loss for Words” was Warholderful. I wasn’t crazy about “Andy Warhol for Astrologers.” Nor was I enthused by “Andy Warhol for Photoshop.” “Warhol for Philosophers” was inspired. And so on. I think the reader, old enough to have lived through the long, very long 15 minutes of Warholmania (or perhaps through that infamous, very long film that he made, call it “Sleep”), poet or not, will find this collection riveting. Internet-style poets looking for inspiration will be inspired. And the city of Pittsburg, which houses the Andy Warhol Museum, will appreciate the notice.

But is it art?

Does Santa Claus take potty breaks in your bathroom? Is the Pope Jewish? Did JFK have his way with Marilyn Monroe (or she have hers with him)? Will the Internet change the language? Will the ampersand take the place of “and,” & will capital letters go the way of spam? Yes, Virginia. Yes, America. WARHOL-O-RAMA is Art. And no, you only THINK you can write like that.

I think the ultimate strength of Oresick’s poetry is in the underlying critique and left-handed celebration of the mass culture that both he and Warhol insist upon. Yes, insist. Oresick’s poetry glitters with the flimsy sheen of fame and celebrity, it is laden with the weight of newspaper pages past, it reeks of the smell of the masses finding themselves among the rancid buttered popcorn tangerine pigskins of their couch potato lives, it soars with lead balloons, and digs deep with toothpicks, and comes up smelling like teen spirit and Something Amazing, a boy falling out of the sky. In short among the checkout stands and super-sized fries and the Tupperware parties of our lives, Oresick is there noticing, and then getting it all down in faux rhythm and rhyme.

--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Peter Oserick’s Warhol-O-Rama was published in tribute to what would have been the highly influential pop artist’s 80th birthday. The poetic cycle explores the connections (and influences, both ways) between Warhol and America in general—its tabloids, its urban legends, its media, its tourism, etc.). Even the table of contents is a tribute to Warhol—“Andy Warhol” starts the title of nearly every poem to reminisce verbally upon the multiple images of Mao or Monroe or Campbell’s Soup in Warhol’s work.
And some of these poems are rather inventive and witty and spiritually connected to the thoughtful kitsch of Warhol. Poems like “Andy Warhol for Bollywood on Dueling Screens above the Bar at India Garden Café, Durham, England, July 2006”interlace two different texts in inconvenient ways for a pleasurable effect, and some poems present themselves as Village Voice classifieds or fictional letters. Other poems, probably the strongest poems in here, like “Andy Warhol for Beginners” or “Andy Warhol for the FBI” or “Andy Warhol for the Andy Warhol in the Vanity Mirror,” offer humor and high energy and sensibilities that all come together quite exquisitely to make them not just tributes to Warhol, or flights through pop culture, or experiments in form, but all three concurrently, letting the work rise to something higher as well.
But other poems simply don’t do much more than poke at a single dimension of the three mentioned above, and they come across as experiments more interesting to the poet than to me, or streams of information that are the typical mistake of research (Oresick includes an explanation at the end [a bad move, to include explanations on poetry] of the kind of research he did, but even before I came across this, I had the feeling of reading someone who was ‘too into’ Warhol, who can rifle off all kinds of information but has little capacity to filter it in a way that proves most interesting—Oresick reads this sycophantically at times). Some poems also lapse into treatises of praise, which are less interesting than seeing Warhol’s philosophy in action.
Perhaps many of my above criticisms could be couched into a philosophical ideal in the book, and I don’t dispute that Oserick has thought through the implications of this book and the rationales behind this cycle, but rationales do not poetry make, and sometimes it’s the resistance to rationale that creates poetry. By the final section of this book, “Warholastalgia,” Oserick’s method has become a little tiresome—the fault of many themed collections is that the theme does not change, but instead runs along into attrition. I waited for the theme to step up to the next level, to work against its initial intentions and create something that I had not previously expected, but this did not prove so by the end.

[abcdefg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was way too fun.

Peter Oresick pays homage to the pioneer of serial art via serial art pastiches creating a quirky and highly entertaining serial portrait of the one and only Andy Warhol.

I really *really* liked this. I found myself actually laughing outloud at pieces like "Andy Warhol for Interviewers" and "Andy Warhol for Urban Legends, III".

Oresick imitates William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" in "Andy Warhol for Pilgrims" and cleverly plays with form in "Andy Warhol for Believers" and, one of my favorites, "Andy Warhol for Familiar Quotations".

With a sense of humor, wit, and irony, this is probably one of my favorite "poetry" collections (although I hesitate to call it poetry. I liken it to written art pieces or perhaps "written exhibits") because of the way in which it emulates Andy Warhol's own serial pop art repetition, which ironically creates something singularly unique.

Here's one that's so superfluously repetitious, that it's sardonic, but actually pretty funny to me:

Andy Warhol for Willem de Kooning

I hate Andy Warhol I hate Andy
Warhol I hate Andy Warhol I
hate Andy Warhol I hate Andy
Warhol I hate Andy Warhol I
hate Andy Warhol I hate An-
dy Warhol I hate Andy Warhol I
hate Andy Warhol I hate Andy War-
hol I hate Andy Warhol I hate
Andy Warhol I hate Andy Warhol
I hate Andy Warhol I hate Andy
Andy Warhol I hate Andy Warhol
I hate Andy Warhol I hate Andy
Andy Warhol I hate Andy Warhol.
And that is why I hate Andy Warhol.

If you don't appreciate form for the sake of form, or silliness for the sake of silliness, you're not going to appreciate this book.

But I found it so much fun and incredibly playful.

It actually brightened my mood.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Oresick, Warhol-o-rama (Carnegie Mellon, 2008)

It's a credit to Peter Oresick that I feel exactly the way about Andy Warhol's art as I do about this book; in that sense, Warhol-o-rama does its job exceptionally well, and thus I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to it fans of Warhol's art. For those like me, though, who have always been stuck on that line of considering Warhol's work art and considering it crass opportunism, well, that makes for a much more difficult recommendation. Oresick uses many of the same techniques Warhol did (and makes no bones about pieces that are readymade, or heavily influenced by, say, Allen Ginsberg [“Andy Warhol for the Taj Warhol”]). Which makes it quite clever, to be sure, but does it make this poetry? I've gone off on this discussion long enough that the horse is now just skin and bones, so I'm not going to whip it any more here. I'll just say that you should be looking at it for content and subject matter, not for craft or artistry. But then, again, I'd say the same thing about Andy Warhol's stuff (and have). So you be the judge. ***

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a unique and creative volumn of poetry---words, works that capture the life of Andy Warhol written in a variety of forms--and some with no form at all. Oresick, at times, writes the way Warhol himself would create. To understand exactly what he is doing you are at an advantage if you have some understanding of Warhol. If you don't understand Warhol, this book gives you background and knowledge of the man and his life. Andy himself would have loved this collection.

Nah-sayers may be on alert, the same way they were when Pop Art became popular but remember Art is and always will be subjective to the viewer.

My only criticism is when Oresick "reports" some of the poems in a newsclip form. I understood what he was doing but it fell kind of flat to me. The rest of it flies in originality and creativity.

Point to note: While toting around this book, people took unusual notice and interest in it. The ones that flipped through were both amused and fascinated by the work. Conclusively, this is a book worth a read for many, many reasons.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reviewed this on my blog, My 3,000 Loving Arms: http://my3000lovingarms.blogspot.com/...

[John Burroughs · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this book via Karen Lillis' Small Press Roulette project and I'm so glad I did.