O'HaraPoetry PDF

Frank O'Hara's "Fired" Self
Author(s): Caleb Crain

Source: American Literary History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 287-308
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/490288
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Frank O'Hara's "Fired" Self
Caleb Crain
Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident
but agent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
A generation ago, gay male poets were supposed to be meek
and ethereal. Frank O'Hara was not. O'Hara was aggressively
present in his poems; he aspired to "the immediacy of a bad
movie" (Collected 231). When David Bergman wrote an essay
about "the egolessness of the gay male poet," he was forced to
omit O'Hara as the exception that proved his rule (47). As
O'Hara's more diffident friend John Ashbery wrote, "One fre-
quently feels that the poet [O'Hara] is trying on various pairs of
brass knuckles until he finds the one which fits comfortably"
(126).
This brash, anomalous ego strength has an unfortunate side
effect: O'Hara's poems focus on his experience in the here and
now so intensely that their constituent elements can seem trivial,
and their structure as cavalier and casual as telephone gossip or
lunch conversation. O'Hara succeeds because his seductive per-
sona sweeps the reader along, but once the poet himself has de-
parted, the poem left behind may seem as unglossable as a
drawerful of ticket stubs and restaurant receipts, mementos of
an ended love affair. The poems' elements do not seem amenable
to analysis and a new synthesis in the classroom.
Literary criticism must, however, find some way to talk
about the slick new pleasure O'Hara gave his readers. And
O'Hara's gay persona-expressing anger and desire, insisting on
a full emotional presence-deserves the attention of gay studies.
This paper will argue that object-relations psychology, in particu-
lar the work of the child psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott, sheds light
on the structures underlying O'Hara's poetry and Personism, his
theory of composition. It hopes to join O'Hara in the project he
names in "Homosexuality": "It is the law of my own voice I shall
investigate" (Collected 182).
Violence runs through O'Hara's work like a spring river un-
288 Frank O'Haras "Fired" Self
der thin ice. Consider the metaphor that opens "Personism: A
Manifesto." Someone has accused O'Hara of obscurity in his
poems. O'Hara wants to convince the reader that his poetry is
difficult for good reason. Unlike T. S. Eliot, he is too honest or
too self-aware to project his own troubles into a grim pronounce-
ment about modern civilization, and unlike Gerard Manley Hop-
kins, he is too much of an extrovert to respond to the accusation
only by curling another hedgehog twist in his peculiar soul. He
wants to make it clear his poetic decisions are lighthearted, but
not frivolous: "Now, come on. I don't believe in god, so I don't
have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lind-
say, always have; I don't even like rhythm, assonance, all that
stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down
the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and
shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep"' (Col-
lected 498). Beneath the humor, O'Hara is declaring that his mo-
tives are dead serious: writing poetry feels like being chased by
someone armed with a knife. The joke savages O'Hara himself:
it mocks him for his cowardice, needles him for his upper-class
education, and reveals a state of psychic pain, which it preemp-
tively ridicules lest its exposure be mistaken for vulnerability.
But from whom is O'Hara running? O'Hara's metaphor as-
serts the sincerity of his response but does not specify the threat
he is fleeing. The answer closest to hand is criticism. If pursued
by Cleanth Brooks, one ought to run away, not wait to be stabbed
with a close reading. The answer just beneath the surface is ho-
mophobia. After all, the awkwardness of the manifesto's title,
"Personism," is an extended joke at the expense of O'Hara's ho-
mosexual desire. In explaining how he has reinvented the love
poem, O'Hara harps on the word "person," stressing its neuter
gender:
[Personism] was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi
Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with
someone (not Roi, 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.... It puts the poem squarely between the poet and
the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspond-
ingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons in-
stead of two pages. (Collected 499)
The overuse of "person" and "someone" here is faux caution,
because O'Hara deliberately gives the game away by letting slip
American Literary History 289
that this "someone" is "not Roi"-since Roi is an option, the
love in question is gay-and by tumbling the poet, poem, and
"person" into a gay (or at least bisexual) sex act. Personism's
joke turns on a repression O'Hara does not quite accept. Society
requires him to love a "person" rather than a twenty-year-old
blond ballet dancer named Vincent Warren; O'Hara toes the
line, but not entirely without protest.
Because that protest is legible, homophobia alone does not
satisfy as an explanation of the man with the knife. After all,
O'Hara does allow his gay desire to surface; although he pre-
tends to veil it for decorum's sake, his veil is something between
a demurely fluttering curtain and a waving flag. Simple homo-
phobia does not seem to have been such a menacing ogre to
O'Hara. When friends squirmed at his gay lust, he was capable
of giving as good as he got-for instance, needling Kenneth
Koch for his case of "H.D.," or "homosexual dread" (Selected
136).
One suspects rather that the man with the knife is an aspect
of O'Hara himself, an aspect aroused by violence. Bruce Boone
has suggested that O'Hara, like other homosexual men in the
pre-gay liberation 1950s, undercuts the authority of the aggres-
sion he expresses by trivializing it and by redirecting it at himself.
Boone compares the self-violence of O'Hara's language to the
self-violence that Frantz Fanon identified among African intel-
lectuals before the advent of openly anti-imperial protest. By
doubling back on itself, the aggression of an oppressed group
avoids a direct confrontation with the aggression of the he-
gemony.
The man with the knife would therefore be a nucleus of ag-
gressive energy split off from O'Hara's image of his self. Paradox-
ically, under a regime of homophobia, the great taboo for a self-
identified gay man is not the expression of his gayness, that is,
his desire for a man as a sexual object; it is the expression of his
manhood, that is, the ownership and managed use of his aggres-
sive energies. In "Personism: A Manifesto," Vincent Warren
peeks coyly from behind a "personality" that flatters him by not
hiding all that much, but Frank O'Hara, the assertive and ambi-
tious poet whose experiments baffled and frustrated envious col-
leagues, is wearing a mask to keep us from recognizing him as
the hoodlum with the knife.
"Personism," however, is a dynamic text, during which
O'Hara manages to take the knife into his own hands. By the
end O'Hara is gloating over his potency as a violent figure with
the smugness of James Bond: "In all modesty, I confess that it
may be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain
regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did."
He even closes with a threatening flourish: "The recent propa-
gandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the
other, had better watch out." The poet who started by running
away, panicky and breathless, now struts, brandishing his ambi-
tion: "better watch out."
The process by which O'Hara's fragmented self integrates,
as it moves through the manifesto, remains mysterious. Maybe
he drew courage, in the course of writing, from the success of the
piece itself as a bravura performance. Maybe Warren, or the idea
of Warren as an audience, focused his energies. Maybe Per-
sonism, as a philosophy that opposes "personal removal by the
poet," as he thought it through, encouraged him to assume a
fuller presence. Or maybe the impending arrival of Don Allen,
due to collect the manifesto just as soon as the radio had finished
playing Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto and O'Hara had fin-
ished drinking his bourbon and water, who promised to install
O'Hara prominently in the new pantheon of his anthology of
New American Poetry, gave O'Hara enough faith in his own am-
bition to experience that ambition openly and, as an object-
relations psychologist might say, ego-syntonically. O'Hara's
famous generosity to other poets, his insouciance as to the pub-
lication of his poems, and his denigration of poetry in favor of
painting are not signs that O'Hara's poetic ambition was small.
On the contrary, they are calculated compensations to a person-
ality who feared the consequences of his ambition once frus-
trated. At heart, he knew, he was fierce. This was a man who
once flatly told his roommate, "There's nobody writing better
poetry than I am" (qtd. in LeSueur 55).
According to the reports of O'Hara's peers, O'Hara han-
dled his aggression with rigorous honesty, as if the forthrightness
of his anger guaranteed, rather than threatened, the integrity of
the friendships within which he expressed it. Bill Berkson called
it "a grand permission to be direct and pertinent" (161). Kenneth
Koch recalled being impressed by "the kind of smartness you
can see in a poem like 'Hate is one of many responses"' (qtd. in
Gooch 337). That poem lectures O'Hara's twenty-year-old lover
Warren on the transformative power of hate. The blunt disillu-
sionment of its lines must have felt like a smack to the pretty
young dancer:
... why be afraid of hate, it is only there
think of filth, is it really awesome
neither is hate (Collected 333-34)
Oddly, though, the poem acts in ignorance of the wisdom that
impressed Koch. Its closing lines promise to shield Warren him-
self from any experience of O'Hara's hate, and they dismiss, by
sentimentalization, any hatred Warren might feel toward
O'Hara:
all of these things, if you feel them
will be graced by a certain reluctance
and turn into gold
if felt by me, will be smilingly deflected
by your mysterious concern (Collected 334)
If hatred is truly "cleansing and allows you to be direct," as the
poem condescendingly explains, then unfortunately that direct-
ness will never cleanse the relationship between the poet and his
beloved. The same poet who praises the virtue of "out and out
meanness" has smothered his beloved's impulse to experiment
with "meanness" by idealizing his "reluctance." O'Hara places
himself in a paternal relation to Warren; he plays the older man
who has learned not to be afraid of hostility. Not only was
O'Hara older than Warren, but at Warren's age, O'Hara had al-
ready served in the US Navy during World War II, where he had
witnessed, for example, a murdered mess cook, "his hands cut
off, his testicles tucked neatly in his cheeks, his lips sewed shut"
(Early 125). He reminded Warren of the disparity between their
experiences by titling another poem "Poem V (F) W" (Collected
346). O'Hara claimed that he changed Warren's middle initial
from P to F to allay Warren's fear that the poem would out him,
but the alteration within parentheses also signaled that Warren
was not a veteran of foreign wars.
Warren's "mysterious concern" was meant to provoke. War-
ren had once seen O'Hara make Joe LeSueur cry, and he must
have wondered-partly in apprehension, partly in envy-why
his own relationship with O'Hara lacked that intensity (Gooch
336). Despite his posturing, however, the war veteran could not
respond to Warren's provocation except by rendering the rela-
tionship even more brittle and even less real, erasing the possibil-
ity of animosity and intimating that his own authority on the
issue should not be challenged.
But even in this poem, where his knack for confrontation
slips away from him, O'Hara is struggling to use violence as his
tool. He knew the danger early on:
292 Frank O'Hara's "Fired" Self
Mackie's knife has a false
handle so it can express
its meaning as well as
his. (32)
This struggle is the matter of many of his poems, as titles such
as "Hatred," "Aggression," and "Spleen" indicate. In "Memorial
Day 1950," O'Hara conflates his nation's finest school of destruc-
tion, the military, with a cadre of honored "soldiers" who pre-
ceded him in the battles of art: Gertrude Stein, Max Ernst, Pablo
Picasso, and Paul Klee (Collected 17). Like the navy he served in,
the modernist artists give lessons in self-making and in violence.
"Picasso made me tough and quick," just as the military promises
to turn boys into men. Hopkins was squeamish about the axe
that felled his "Binsey Poplars": "O if we but knew what we do /
When we delve or hew- / Hack and rack the growing green!"
(39). But the red-blooded new recruit O'Hara is thrilled to watch
while "in a minute plane trees are knocked down / outside my
window by a crew of creators." Auden and Rimbaud are the co-
chairmen of O'Hara's V.F.W. post; fighting with them, he learns
how to be all he can be: how to destroy and choose artistic fa-
thers and rivals.
"Memorial Day 1950" is an early poem; "Poem (Hate is
only one of many responses)" (1959) comes relatively late.
Throughout his career, O'Hara's handling of aggression swings
wildly between exhilarated confidence and doubling over in self-
doubt. He is able to find the courage to act as master of his de-
structive energies, but this courage is fragile. The source of this
fragility might lie in societal and internalized homophobia, the
poet's early relation to his parents, or psychic predisposition-
but, leaving this biographical investigation to one side, I would
like to turn to the question of the strength of O'Hara's self and
his poetic practice by examining the field in which O'Hara exer-
cises, or loses hold of, this courage.
Although O'Hara rarely second-guesses his erotic desire,
the castration anxiety he succumbs to if someone checks or chal-
lenges his ambition is crippling. When, for example, Don Allen
turned down "Personism" and asked O'Hara to write another
statement that would better match O'Hara's odes, O'Hara lapsed
into a sulkiness that bordered on a suicide threat. "I am mainly
preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times when
I would rather be dead the thought that I could never write an-
other poem has so far stopped me," he wrote in "Statement for
The New American Poetry" (Collected 500). O'Hara was no
longer flashing his knife at the world; he was dawdling it along
the veins of his own wrist. He disavowed any personal ambition,
claiming that "I don't think of fame or posterity," and instead
of jabbing playfully at literary rivals like Robbe-Grillet or "the
propagandists for technique ... and for content," O'Hara
suffered his enemies with petulant masochism: "contemporary
poetry ... is a useful thorn to have in one's side."
In yet a third personal statement, "Statement for Paterson
Society," O'Hara distanced himself from this despondent mood,
calling it "even more mistaken, pompous, and quite untrue, as
compared to the manifesto ['Personism']" (Collected 511). Aware
of his own vicissitudes, however, O'Hara did not disown the sec-
ond statement or its despair. He explained that it was "a diary of
a particular day and the depressed mood of that day (it's a pretty
depressing day, you must admit, when you feel you relate more
importantly to poetry than to life)." O'Hara's parenthesis refers
to the passage in his New American Poetry statement where he
wrote that "It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events
tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry
brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too
concrete and circumstantial" (Collected 500). Except through
poetry, the external world and O'Hara's interior world remain
divorced, inaccessible to each other. This sentiment, however, is
not peculiar to O'Hara's depression; the same idea is at the heart
of his exuberant "Personism." Personism, after all, has nothing
to do with intimacy-"far from it!" In fact, in the delicate, sexu-
alized juggling act of Personism, the poem both conveys the po-
et's emotions toward his beloved and "prevent[s] love from dis-
tracting him [the poet] into feeling about the person" (Collected
499). The poem screens the poet's love. It is both the fabric where
the story of the love shows up and a barrier to direct contact.
While writing the poem, O'Hara is buoyed by the gleeful thought
that direct communication is possible, but although O'Hara real-
izes "that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of
writing the poem," he does not use the telephone. He is relating
more importantly to poetry than life.
This positioning, common to O'Hara in elation and despair,
resembles the placement of what Winnicott called the transi-
tional object. Winnicott observed that all healthy infants pass
through a stage where they insist on carrying with them every-
where a soft but sturdy object that they fiercely own. He believed
that this "transitional object" was essential to a child's devel-
oping sense of reality, an important step on the path from the
infant's indulged fantasy of omnipotence to the adult's resigned
acceptance of an object world beyond his control. The transi-
tional object is not purely imaginary; there is a real blanket or
stuffed animal under the infant's control. However, the transi-
tional object is not the object of desire it represents-the mother
or her breast-which is not under the infant's control: "Its not
being the breast (or the mother), although real, is as important
as the fact that it stands for the breast (or mother)" (Playing 6).
Winnicott's developmental theory may seem out of place in
the grown-up world of critical theory. As one scholar has put it,
to some "it seems perverse to suggest that literature is a teddy
bear" (Schwartz 60). Nonetheless, Winnicott linked the child's
transitional object to the adult's field of cultural expression, and
others have followed his lead. Let me spell out the parallel, in
this case, to Personism. In O'Hara's manifesto, it is important
that the poem is not, in fact, Warren. O'Hara has not picked
up the telephone, that modern umbilical. This nonconnectedness
gives him control over his object, the poem; love has not "dis-
tract[ed] him into feeling about the person." And yet if the poem
did not in some way represent Warren, if it did not "address itself
to one person ... thus evoking overtones of love without de-
stroying love's life-giving vulgarity," the poem would have no
meaning for O'Hara (499).
In Winnicott's terminology, the field where O'Hara finds
and loses the courage to act is a "potential space": "a resting-
place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of
keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated" (Play-
ing 2). When O'Hara finds the courage to act as a whole and
potent self in the course of a poem, he has not built a new psychic
structure or solved a problem. Rather, through free-moving and
disorganized play, something within O'Hara has spontaneously
gestured toward the outer world, in an expression that may sur-
prise the poet himself. This gesture, and the state of creative play
that permits it to arise, are fragile. According to Winnicott, how-
ever, this "experience ... of a non-purposive state" is the only
way to reach a new level of integrated selfhood (Playing 55). The
analyst (or in this case, critic) who insists on a determinant
meaning will fragment the experience prematurely. The analyst
must resist the temptation to be clever and instead allow a certain
level of disorganization. To paraphrase a pun in O'Hara's poem
"The Critic," the "confusion between penises and / snakes" must
not be "met[ed] out" (Collected 48). The critic must mercifully
allow the confusion to be fruitful and multiply, until the poet
reaches his own conclusion. "Creativity," Winnicott writes, is "a
coming together after relaxation, which is the opposite of inte-
gration" (Playing 64). When the poet and critic Richard Howard
discusses the terms on which he is able to enjoy O'Hara's chaotic
odes, he takes an attitude that resembles Winnicott's in its reluc-
tance to impose order: "Each time I read 'Second Avenue' I bear
off a handful of glittering lines, gold flakes that have ... panned
out of the sand, but they are never the same lines and never sug-
gest anything converging, opposing, or even subordinating in the
kind of tension that makes for a unity: 'as in a rainbow the end
keeps leaping toward the middle,' and perhaps the iridescence is
enough" (114-115).
During play, the gesture of the true self is easily interrupted.
An adult may break the illusion by demanding that the child test
reality. If the adult asks, "Did you conceive of this [the transi-
tional object] or was it presented to you from without?" then the
potential space splits, to conform to the "real" state of the world,
into internal emotions and external facts (Playing 12). Winnicott
registers a plea that "paradox accepted can have positive value"
(Playing 14); in O'Hara's terms, "Pain always produces logic,
which is very bad for you" (Collected 498).
An adult may also frustrate the infant self's gesture by a
less intellectual intervention. To suit his own needs, the adult
may force his own interpretation onto a child's gesture, which
the child, in order to survive, will substitute for his own. Winni-
cott calls this state "compliance"; it gives rise to a false self-
organization. To protect his own spontaneous gesture, which he
has learned will not be respected, the infant constructs a set of
responses that will please the adults around him and allow him
to survive (Maturational 140-52). O'Hara struggled with the
problem of compliance in a journal entry during college: "In ret-
rospect, the saddest moment of one's life would seem to be that
in which one first became aware that sensibility must be pro-
tected by intelligence if it is to survive living" (Early 109).
As a gay child, O'Hara had a "sensibility" that would have
needed special protection, even if O'Hara's parents had been ex-
emplars of child-rearing. As an adult, O'Hara continued to rely
upon compliance, despite the sorrow and pain it brought him. In
a college paper, O'Hara described hiding his real self while in the
navy. Dissociation, he felt, was his only option; there was "noth-
ing to do but say this isn't really me because the real me slipped
away just before you got here" (Early 112). In his poems, O'Hara
is often attempting to recuperate a true self that many false selves
have occluded. He attempts a regression, without nostalgia, to a
potential space where his spontaneous gesture can move through
the clutter of false selves toward the world that these false selves
have taken it upon themselves to manage.
In O'Hara's poetry, therefore, the reader meets these false
selves in the process of rupture. They appear as transitional ob-
jects that have betrayed their function and lost their vitality: toys
used to "murder angels" (Collected 53), "dolls [who] meant
death" (Collected 17), masks that the poet is discarding. They
may also appear as weapons-"so many pistols I have borrowed
to protect myselves / from creatures who too readily recognize
my weapons / and have murder in their heart" (Collected 253).
In "Military Cemetery," O'Hara chose the grave to symbolize
compliance. "There was but one man in every grave," the true
self buried inside a necropolis of false selves, while the usurping
undead unfairly roam the world (Collected 262).
Whether the false self is a doll, mask, casket, or gun, it must
be set aside. "Here beneath this yew I dig a hole for wooden
playthings" O'Hara vowed in "Oranges: 12 Pastorals" (Collected
8). Masks fall at the start of "Homosexuality" (Collected 181-
82). According to a note on the manuscript of that poem, a
James Ensor self-portrait inspired the opening conceit. In Por-
trait of the Artist with Masks (1899), Ensor had painted his own
face as the only one unhidden in a sea of bobbing masks-
although the skulls in a jagged row behind him might also be
authentic. O'Hara angrily exposes all the faces in the crowd: "So
we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping / our mouths
shut?" He then catalogs the tearooms of Manhattan, as if yellow
journalism could muckrake himself and every other gay out of
the closet.
Toward the close of "In Memory of My Feelings," O'Hara
boasts that "The conception / of the masque barely suggests the
sordid identifications" (Collected 256) and then launches into a
Whitmanian ego trip of merging his soul with others. By the final
lines, though, O'Hara has embarked on a holy quest like a nega-
tive Saint Patrick, chasing the Christians, not the snakes, out of
Ireland:
... I have lost what is always, and 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. (Collected 257)
Selfhood is strewn Selfhood is strewn through O'Hara's poems, but many of these
through O'Hara's poems, selves are decoys that the poet is noisily liquidating. Despite the
but many of these selves bravado and the battle cries, O'Hara is often as much in search
are decoys that the poet of a self as the gay poets that Bergman labeled egoless. To borrow
is noisily liquidating.
another image from "In Memory of My Feelings" what we hear
is the blast as the gun of a false self is "fired": the false self re-
leases its violence and its contents, demoted from a job it failed
to perform, and a new meaning is forged (Collected 253).
O'Hara's self is heard, not seen. The selves of "In Memory
of My Feelings" are transparent. The vampires who gamble their
amours in "Hotel Transylvanie" presumably do not reflect (Col-
lected 350). "All the mirrors in the world / don't help" O'Hara in
an early poem, where he fails to find himself as he cruises men
through the mirror at a gay bar:
... my eyes in, say, the glass
of a public bar, become a
depraved hunt for other re-
flections. (Collected 39)
The eyes of the debauched sailor in "Poem (Now it is light, now
it is the calm)" do reflect, but only sterility and exhaustion: "oil
scum / fills his tearless eyes with a / nonchalant reflection, sun-
less, harmless" (Collected 171).
The reflections that O'Hara misses may correspond to a
sense that as a gay man, he was unrecognized by his culture.
Winnicott believed that an infant finds the strength to express
and integrate a true self only if, as it emerges, he sees it mirrored
in his mother's face as she watches him (Playing 111-118). How-
ever, in an essay about "Gender and Voice in Transitional Phe-
nomena," Claire Kahane has noted that a mother's ability to mir-
ror her child may be tarnished not only by her own neediness or
sadism, but also by her culture's representations of selfhood. In
particular, Kahane worries that a daughter may find herself mis-
represented in her mother's gaze by preconceptions about femi-
ninity. In a footnote, Kahane further suggests that "the conse-
quences of negative mirroring also are relevant to other
nonhegemonic groups who are represented in the dominant cul-
ture as symbols of otherness" (289n6). Although Bergman is not
explicitly writing within the framework of object-relations the-
ory, his understanding of the troubled emergence of the gay self
dovetails nicely with Winnicott and Kahane: "The child who will
grow up to be gay gazes at himself through a cracked mirror"
(45). O'Hara put the problem even more bluntly. "I wonder if
the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any
different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably
did" (Early 97).
As the self-psychologist Heinz Kohut has suggested, an
adult's secondary narcissism may be an attempt to heal him-
self-to supplement a development stunted by a lack of proper
mirroring in childhood. If O'Hara's personal "course of narcis-
sism" was marred because he looked for his reflection in sewage
instead of a clear lake, then perhaps some of his poems' special
urgency derives from a desire to be seen. O'Hara loathed the
thought that this desire might be mistaken for self-pity. In poem
after poem, he fended off this accusation. When Larry Rivers
alluded to O'Hara's "gorgeous self-pity," O'Hara protested, play-
ing up his faux naivete:
... I think of myself
as a cheerful type who pretends to
be hurt to get a little depth into
things that interest me (Collected 336)
There's no need to feel sorry for O'Hara because, he claims, he
fakes the hurt to get attention. Ordinarily, readers censure self-
pity because it uses pain to manipulate their emotions; O'Hara's
apology admits the manipulation but deprecates the pain. In
effect, he claims that he is too superficial and dishonest to be
accused of self-pity. His "wounded beauty / which at best is only
a talent / for poetry" (Collected 201) does not actually need the
sympathy it seems to be angling for.
O'Hara spat venom at the self-pity he saw in Robert Low-
ell's poetry. He resented Lowell's "confessional manner which
[lets him] get away with things that are really just plain bad but
you're supposed to be interested because he's supposed to be so
upset" (Standing 13). How distant was confessional poetry from
O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems? In the privacy of a diary,
O'Hara could write, "Oh I hate myself and I'm afraid to die!"
(Early 104) but when it moves into his poetry, the exclamation
point in that line switches its valence, from bald anguish into an
urgent cheerfulness, into what Helen Vendler calls an "inveterate
air of resolute comedy" (241). The real but strangely flat pain of
"I'm afraid to die!" metamorphoses into a series of determinedly
upbeat proclamations:
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine! (Collected 11)
Projection-seeing in another what he could not see in himself-
may have sharpened the vehemence of O'Hara's response to
Lowell. Lowell did not feel compelled to shield the reader from
his pain with mockery or redirection, and O'Hara may have en-
vied this. But perhaps there is another distinction to be made. At
least in O'Hara's characterization of it, "Skunk Hour" transfers
some of the animus of Lowell's own despair onto the "lovers in
a parking lot necking," turning them into "skunks putting their
noses into garbage pails" (Standing 13). O'Hara would have fo-
cused that hostile metaphoric energy back onto himself. A voy-
eur, although debased, is still a seer, and by peeping on a third
party, Lowell restores himself to a position of power at the ex-
pense of the lovers he snoops on. O'Hara would never have al-
lowed himself that out.
It may even be possible to take O'Hara at his word. Perhaps
he really does not want pity. He wants someone to perceive him
accurately as a sad person, to hold his fragmented self in an inte-
grating gaze, to give him an honest return glance. As he put it in
"Poem (I don't know as I get what D. H. Lawrence is driving at)":
... now and then it all comes clear
and I can see myself
as other luckily sometimes see me
in a good light (Collected 335)
Pity alone would be inadequate, too distanced and too fixed,
compared to the relation O'Hara is seeking. Casting himself as
Dido, O'Hara hints that his "own self-ignited pyre" might be the
signal fire to attract a desperately desired passion. "Somebody's
got to ruin the queen," he sighs wistfully; "my ship's just got to
come in" (Collected 75). And in "Should We Legalize Abortion?"
he impersonates the lover who would take the appropriately
amoral action to remedy O'Hara's brooding:
So stop thinking about how
badly you're hurt... Stop coddling yourself. You can
do something about all this and I'm here to help
you do it! I'll start by getting your clothes off...
(Collected 483)
The opportunism of O'Hara's samaritan hides the poet's real in-
tent behind yet another self-protective joke. O'Hara's self-pity is
not a ruse for sex alone, but the sexual response here does indi-
cate the intensity of the relation he desires. Berkson, one of
O'Hara's platonic lovers, recalled that "Attention was Frank's
gift and his requirement" (161). A man who could only grieve
for his best friend by "impersonating some wretch weeping over
a 1956 date book" (Collected 318), to quote a particularly dis-
turbing example of O'Hara's habit of dissociation, would have
needed profound and devoted attention to restore a sense of his
self's unity.
Let me summarize my model, so far, of the psychological
dynamic of O'Hara's poetry. When O'Hara writes a poem, he
postulates an other who is capable of intense attention, a "per-
son" he is in love with. That person must mirror O'Hara as he
really is; in poetic terms, this means the poem has permission
to indulge in a disorganization that mimics real experience-the
Dadaism of everyday life. That person must also stand as a goal
toward which the poem points, giving vitality to O'Hara's inter-
action with the poem. In the act of writing, O'Hara plays along
the border of two worlds: between on the one hand compliance,
the false self's accumulation of hollow and arbitrary detail,
and on the other hand what Winnicott called "fantasying"-
suppressed processes of desire that may have lost touch with the
outside world. The obverse of compliance is not a healthy, robust
self waiting patiently in the wings for its cue, but rather a dissoci-
ated, rigidly structured, compulsively repeated set of fantasies,
also devoid of the quality of play (Playing 26-37). The playing
is supervised, as it were, by the listening presence of O'Hara's
"person." In the reassuring presence (which may be fictive) of
this person, O'Hara has the confidence to enter a state of disor-
ganization where he can play along the border between compli-
ance and fantasying, which the gesture of his true self may
break through.
Like a child playing with her dolls, O'Hara while writing a
poem gains access to his inner life. In "On Rachmaninoff's Birth-
day #158," for example, he writes,
I better hurry up and finish this
before your 3rd goes off the radio
or I won't know what I'm feeling
tonight
tonight
anytime
or
ever (Collected 418)
Whenever O'Hara doubts his poetic gift, he also worries that he
will lose touch with his self. He frets about this danger in "At
Joan's":
I am lonely for myself
I can't find a real poem
if it won't happen to me
what shall I do (Collected 328)
Usually the fantasying under an O'Hara poem is homosexual in
content. For example, just beneath the goofy surrealism of
"Poem (At night Chinamen jump)" gay men are making love.
The "affectionate games" that "bruise / our knees like China's
shoes" probably include blow jobs. The poem's birds and apples
represent male genitalia, and when "birds sing out of sight," the
lovers have put their cocks where the sun proverbially doesn't
shine (Collected 13-14). The pleasure the poem gives does not
come from this fantasying material, however, but from the glanc-
ing, somewhat coy interaction between this material and the
poem's apparently trivial surface. The pornography alone, or the
Chinamen alone, would not be so entertaining.
In "Walking to Work," compliance and fantasying appear
not in a metaphoric relation where one represents the other, but
as two sides of a street O'Hara must walk. At the outset, the poet
heads toward the "sunny side" of the street, believing he will find
happiness in the world of daylight. He is, after all, walking to
work. But he can't quite leave behind "my traffic over the night."
Despite the forcefulness of the last line-"Straight against the
light I cross"-the poem never decides between night and day. In
fact, O'Hara seems to be "becoming / the street" between them
(Collected 126). He crosses "against the light" as well as toward
it. His decision is literally between the two sides. The poem fore-
shadows the later "I do this I do that" poems, because darker
and more private matters-here, of O'Hara's promiscuity and
drinking-occur to the poet in a setting that is banal, well lit,
and everyday. O'Hara ends by crossing when he is not supposed
to, while the light is red, breaking the law that would separate
the compliant man on his way to the museum from the drunken
casual sex he had the night before.
It is in O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems proper, how-
ever, that compliant reality appears in its most stunning desha-
bille. The poet seems to have abdicated his duty to order and
winnow his recollections; instead, he bobs along on a buoyant
gush of detail:
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 ... (Collected 335)
The word personal in the title "Personal Poem" refers to O'Hara's
theory of Personism, but it also marks this poem as willfully his
own, as idiosyncratic in its meanings as the charms he is carrying
in his pocket. Like religion, poetry is supposed to be an illusion
that you share, but O'Hara is keeping his totems to himself. As
O'Hara wrote in "Personism," the poem is "so totally opposed
to this kind of abstract removal [of the poet himself] that it is
verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the his-
tory of poetry" (Collected 498). The details are so particular and
concrete that they become as weightless and immaterial as the
abstract. An outsider might not "get" the story behind this glib,
chatty, undirected monologue. He might not understand that he
is reading a love poem-that waiting at the end of this laundry
list is a lover's ear that unifies O'Hara's I:
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so
(Collected 336)
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 me-
morialized in bronze, O'Hara's trivial day is electroplated with
the charge of knowing he is loved.
The burden on O'Hara's beloveds is enormous. As O'Hara
quips, "I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless
love" (Collected 197). The person at whom O'Hara aims his Per-
sonism must serve as a distinctive individual whose love anchors
O'Hara in the world, but this person must also become "gen-
eral," to use a word that has a strangely erotic force in O'Hara's
verse. Jane Freilicher, for example, radiates a beauty that "is gen-
eral, as sun and air / are secretly near" (Collected 185), and War-
ren "is everywhere, he is not / a character, he is a person, and
therefore general" (Collected 373). It cannot have been easy for
O'Hara's beloveds to act as another adult's holding environment,
but O'Hara doomed these relationships anyway by choosing
people unlikely to live up to a gay lover's most modest expecta-
tions: women (Bunny Lang, Freilicher, Grace Hartigan), straight
men (Berkson), bisexuals (Larry Rivers), and a twenty-year-old
(Warren).1 Acting out a common pattern, O'Hara was so afraid
he would be deserted that he chose people he knew would desert
him, but this tack did not deliver him from loneliness or fear.
The poem "October 26 1952 10:30 o'clock" records the terror
and disintegration O'Hara felt when he thought he had lost his
"person." The crisis: he tried to call Freilicher and she wasn't
home. The emotional response: a panicked lack of selfhood-
"This minute I've not been able not been / you know simply not
been like positively being dead"-ending, without consolation,
in a childlike, anguished cry-"Where are you? where are you?
where are you?" (Collected 105-6)
O'Hara's uncertain grip on his aggression, discussed above,
corresponds to his uncertain hold on his beloveds. O'Hara erases
the possibility that hate will be one of the responses he has to
Warren, because he cannot tolerate the depressive anxiety that
would accompany the release of any anger he felt toward War-
ren. He is too afraid Warren would flee. He prefers not to take
the risk, and so relationships where O'Hara becomes truly vul-
nerable must be either brief or stilted. In "Poetry," for instance,
O'Hara knows he can't keep his mouth shut, so "the only way to
be quiet / is to be quick." But the poet will never be quick enough;
he will never break the speed of light to enter the Einsteinian
thought experiment where it would be
... as if
you would never leave me
and were the inexorable
product of my own time. (Collected 49)
To recast the problem in terms of object relations: O'Hara
sometimes acts like a child who is afraid to play with his toys for
fear he will break them. As Winnicott defined it, the transitional
object must be the sort of thing that can be not only "affection-
ately cuddled" but also "excitedly loved and mutilated" (Playing
5). Only if it can withstand both affection and abuse can the
object help the child cope with his depressive anxiety, that is, his
fear that his violent urges will either destroy the object he loves
or provoke it to retaliate against him.
As Melanie Klein observed, "the child's attitude towards a
toy he has damaged" is crucial to understanding how the child
relates to his world (42). If guilt and fear are too great, the child
slips back to an earlier mental state where affection and anger
are split from each other-a split that divides the child's ego as
well as his experience of the object. It was Winnicott's innovation
to point out that the state of play itself offered the child an alter-
native means of responding to depressive anxiety. In a state of
disorganization, rather than disintegration, the child might sur-
prise himself with a discovery: the object may survive his attacks.
Winnicott described a one-year-old who at first was tormented
by her destructive impulses. She cried nonstop as she bit spatulas
and threw them to the ground. Winnicott allowed her to bite his
knuckles without punishing her; he then introduced her to her
toes. She was fascinated. "It looked as if she was discovering and
proving over and over again, to her great satisfaction, that
whereas spatulas can be put to the mouth, thrown away and lost,
toes cannot be pulled off" (Playing 49).
Unlike the girl who discovered her toes, O'Hara lives in a
world without permanence. In the language of object relations,
O'Hara is afraid he will destroy his object and therefore never
finds an object that can survive destruction, which is the only
kind of object that can be used (Playing 86-94). He may feel he
can cuddle and mutilate his poems, but he is never confident he
can successfully hate the people behind them. He never quite
makes good on "our promise to destroy something but not us"
(Collected 149), and he must therefore live in the moment, con-
tingently, relating to its details through a mode he somewhat
disparagingly calls his "I do this I do that" poems. Soren Kier-
kegaard would have called him a "man of immediacy," and Kier-
kegaard's description of this state, although unflattering, fits
O'Hara eerily well. "Immediacy actually has no self," Kierke-
gaard writes: "The appearance of such words as 'the self' and
'despair' in the language of immediacy is due, if you will, to an
innocent abuse of language, a playing with words, like the chil-
dren's game of playing soldier.... The self is bound up in imme-
diacy with the other in desiring, craving, enjoying, etc., yet pas-
sively; in its craving, this self is a dative, like the 'me' of a child.
Its dialectic is: the pleasant and the unpleasant; its concepts are:
good luck, bad luck, fate" (51, 53). Although I would not adopt
Kierkegaard's tone of condemnation, his view of the immediate
man's self matches my view of O'Hara. The poet does play sol-
dier in his poems; he rehearses, endlessly, the act of taking up his
gun. His play is as fragile as a child's, because he is carried along
by "desiring, craving, enjoying" that master him more than he
them. What a stabler self would regard as trivial, only a matter
of luck, O'Hara, in his immediacy, sees as the warp and woof of
reality. Luck is central to his "Personal Poem," which starts with
the charms in his pocket, and then reminds us that in English,
happiness derives from hap. The poem lists merely what hap-
pened on a lunch break, and it ends with the magical words "pos-
sibly so."
But if chance alone decides happiness-"the least and best
of human attainments" (Collected 267)-what becomes of the
man of immediacy in unhappiness? According to Kierkegaard,
the immediate man either plays dead until the conditions of hap-
piness return, or else desires to become someone else. "As a rule,
one who despairs in this way is very comical. Imagine a self...
and then imagine that it suddenly occurs to a self that it might
become someone other-than itself. And yet one in despair this
way, whose sole desire is this most lunatic of lunatic metamor-
phoses, is infatuated with the illusion that this change can be
accomplished as easily as one changes clothes" (53). Indeed,
O'Hara in despair is comical, smiling through his tears, and his
instinct is to "become someone other." "Am I to become profli-
gate as if I were a blonde?" O'Hara asks in "Meditations in an
Emergency" (Collected 197-98). "Or religious as if I were
French?" Like an old queen rummaging through her closet,
O'Hara snatches up his blonde outfit and his French outfit and
holds them to the light. Will this do? But the humor and the
poignancy of this prose-poem come from the awareness O'Hara
betrays that "becom[ing] someone other" is in fact not as easy as
"choos[ing] a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans."
"Meditations in an Emergency" is Personism without the
person. If there is any "life-giving vulgarity" here, it is not im-
parted by love, or not by love directly. By writing a poem, O'Hara
has reentered a potential space, a state of disorganization and
playfulness, but there is no longer any reassuring figure who
would anchor this play and infuse it with meaning. The play is
unauthorized. To return one last time to Winnicott's schema, if
"Meditations in an Emergency" is a transitional object, O'Hara
is still the one who plays, but it is no longer clear whom the
object represents. There is real danger that the disorganization
could descend into psychosis and that the object could come to
represent an absence, which would at last be permanent and reli-
able, but dead. As O'Hara, always the good sport, realizes, this
kind of poem is a true adventure. "Each time my heart is broken
it makes me feel more adventurous ... but one of these days
there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth."
In the phrase venture forth there is again the dialectic of
"good luck, bad luck, fate" but there is another pun as well,
elaborated further on. "I've tried love," O'Hara continues, "but
that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always spring-
ing forth from it like the lotus-the ecstasy of always bursting
forth!" Venturing forth, springing forth, bursting forth-in
"Meditations in an Emergency," O'Hara is emerging. "Medita-
tions on Re-Emergent Occasions" was the original title of
O'Hara's piece, in homage to John Donne's Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions and to the fact that Rivers had broken his
heart before. An emergency, like an adventure, is something that
comes up, something that happens, but it is also an occasion for
emerging, for the discovery of what happens within as well as
without, or for crossing the boundary between within and with-
out. Although Kierkegaard laughed at the immediate man's de-
sire to change his self like a worn-out suit, he too saw despair as
a transformative experience, which would bring the self to itself
and to God. O'Hara, as he is expelled from his beloved's bosom,
launches into a new, if not different, sense of himself. "Nothing
remains" O'Hara wrote in "Death," "let alone 'to be said,' I ex-
cept that when I fall backwards / I am trying something new and
shall succeed, as in the past" (Collected 187).
O'Hara seems O'Hara seems exceptionally present in his poetry because
exceptionally present in
he has to struggle to be there. If a Winnicottian reading suggests
his poetry because he has
that his best poems are struggles, or even failures, rather than
to struggle to be there.
victories, this does not turn O'Hara into a patient rather than a
poet. True, O'Hara remains disorganized and playful in part to
allay the depressive anxiety that might accompany a more ma-
ture and responsible voicing of the violence latent in his poetic
ambition. It is easier if the Sun admires Frank O'Hara's poetry-
"I see a lot / on my rounds and you're okay" (Collected 306)-
than if O'Hara crows about it himself. But "A True Account of
Talking to the Sun at Fire Island" charms because the ruse is
transparent. The strategy would only seem pathological if one
confused play with delusion.
O'Hara's willful disorganization also serves to resist com-
pliance. The flotsam of the "I do this I do that" poems and the
free associations of the odes take refuge in their triviality and
idiosyncrasy against the reader's desire to pin O'Hara down.
O'Hara wants to communicate not the identity of the poet but
the moment of improvisation-the gesture, in Winnicott's terms,
that surprises the playing child as well as anyone watching. Any
resolution or ordering of experience runs the Emersonian risk of
imprisoning the speaker in his own expression.2
O'Hara plays even with heartbreak. In "Meditations in an
Emergency," his play is deepening to encompass depression,
which he is learning to tolerate. The man of immediacy is begin-
ning to experience depression the way he experienced play: to
find a touchstone in sadness, as before he found one in pleasure
and luck. While happy, the man of immediacy was anxious,
because he knew he relied on the chance of what comes up. In
Donne's words, "How busie, and perplexed a Cobweb, is the Hap-
pinesse of Man here, that must be made up with a Watchfulnesse,
to lay hold upon Occasion, which is but a little piece of that,
which is Nothing, Tyme?" (72). But the depressive must learn to
abandon himself to the same chance, unsure what he will dis-
cover. Thom Gunn described the state with these lines:
So I remained alert, confused and uncomforted.
I fared on and, though the landscape did not change,
it came to seem after a while like a place of recuperation.
(20)
"I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley," O'Hara
sings (Collected 198). In "Meditations in an Emergency," the sur-
prise is that O'Hara is trusting himself to survive.3
Notes
1. These are names that made it into the history books. There were probably
others, less reportable. According to John Bernard Myers, "He seemed prone to
establish friendships with people who can only be described as horrible" (37).
2. "As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed
person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections
must now enter into his account" (Emerson 261).
3. Lucy B. Smith and Lucy LaFarge first drew my attention to the under-
standing Winnicott's theories could offer of the difficulties peculiar to gay
selfhood.
Works Cited
Ashbery, John. "Introduction to The Elledge, Jim, ed. Frank O'Hara: To Be
Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara." True to a City. Ann Arbor: U of
Elledge 125-30. Michigan P, 1990.
Bergman, David. Gaiety Transfigured: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Self-
Gay Self-Representation in American Reliance." Essays and Lectures. New
Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin York: Library of America, 1983.
P, 1991.
Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and
Berkson, Bill. "Frank O'Hara and His Times of Frank O'Hara. New York:
Poems." Berkson and LeSueur 161-65. Knopf, 1993.
Berkson, Bill, and Joe LeSueur, eds. Gunn, Thom. The Man with Night
Homage to Frank O'Hara. Bolinas: Sweats. New York: Farrar, 1992.
Big Sky, 1988.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems and
Prose. Ed. W. H. Gardner. New York:

Boone, Bruce. "Gay Language as Po-
litical Praxis: The Poetry of Frank Penguin, 1985.
O'Hara." Social Text 1 (1979): 59-92.
Howard, Richard. "Frank O'Hara:
Donne, John. Devotions upon Emer- 'Since Once We Are We Always Will
gent Occasions. Ed. Anthony Raspa. Be in This Life Come What May."'
Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1975. Elledge 105-24.
Kahane, Claire. "Gender and Voice in . Selected Plays. New York:
Transitional Phenomena." Rudnytsky Full Court, 1978.
278-91.
.Standing Still and Walking in
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness New York. Ed. Donald Allen. San
unto Death. A Christian Psychological Francisco: Grey Fox, 1983.
Exposition for Upbuilding and Awak-
ening. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Rudnytsky, Peter L., ed. Transitional
Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton Objects and Potential Spaces. Literary
UP, 1983. Uses of D. W Winnicott. New York:
Columbia UP, 1993.
Klein, Melanie. The Selected Melanie
Klein. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. New York: Schwartz, Murray M. "Where is Lit-
Free, 1986. erature?" Rudnytsky 50-62.
LeSueur, Joe. "Four Apartments." Vendler, Helen. "Frank O'Hara: The
Berkson and LeSueur 46-56. Virtue of the Alterable." Elledge
234-52.
Myers, John Bernard. "Frank
O'Hara: A Memoir." Berkson and Winnicott, D. W. The Maturational
LeSueur 34-38. Processes and the Facilitating Environ-
ment. Studies in the Theory of Emo-
O'Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems tional Development. New York: Inter-
of Frank O'Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. national Universities, 1965.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
. Playing and Reality. New
.Early Writing. Ed. Donald York: Routledge, 1971.
Allen. Bolinas: Grey Fox, 1977.

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Frank O'Hara's "Fired" Self

Author(s): Caleb Crain

Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

A generation ago, gay male poets were supposed to be meek

and ethereal. Frank O'Hara was not. O'Hara was aggressively

present in his poems; he aspired to "the immediacy of a bad

movie" (Collected 231). When David Bergman wrote an essay

about "the egolessness of the gay male poet," he was forced to

omit O'Hara as the exception that proved his rule (47). As

O'Hara's more diffident friend John Ashbery wrote, "One fre-

quently feels that the poet [O'Hara] is trying on various pairs of

brass knuckles until he finds the one which fits comfortably"

This brash, anomalous ego strength has an unfortunate side

effect: O'Hara's poems focus on his experience in the here and

now so intensely that their constituent elements can seem trivial,

and their structure as cavalier and casual as telephone gossip or

lunch conversation. O'Hara succeeds because his seductive per-

parted, the poem left behind may seem as unglossable as a

drawerful of ticket stubs and restaurant receipts, mementos of

an ended love affair. The poems' elements do not seem amenable

to analysis and a new synthesis in the classroom.

Literary criticism must, however, find some way to talk

O'Hara's gay persona-expressing anger and desire, insisting on

a full emotional presence-deserves the attention of gay studies.

This paper will argue that object-relations psychology, in particu-

lar the work of the child psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott, sheds light

on the structures underlying O'Hara's poetry and Personism, his

theory of composition. It hopes to join O'Hara in the project he

names in "Homosexuality": "It is the law of my own voice I shall

investigate" (Collected 182).

Violence runs through O'Hara's work like a spring river un-

der thin ice. Consider the metaphor that opens "Personism: A

Manifesto." Someone has accused O'Hara of obscurity in his

poems. O'Hara wants to convince the reader that his poetry is

difficult for good reason. Unlike T. S. Eliot, he is too honest or

too self-aware to project his own troubles into a grim pronounce-

ment about modern civilization, and unlike Gerard Manley Hop-

kins, he is too much of an extrovert to respond to the accusation

only by curling another hedgehog twist in his peculiar soul. He

wants to make it clear his poetic decisions are lighthearted, but

not frivolous: "Now, come on. I don't believe in god, so I don't

have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lind-

stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down

someone armed with a knife. The joke savages O'Hara himself:

education, and reveals a state of psychic pain, which it preemp-

tively ridicules lest its exposure be mistaken for vulnerability.

But from whom is O'Hara running? O'Hara's metaphor as-

he is fleeing. The answer closest to hand is criticism. If pursued

by Cleanth Brooks, one ought to run away, not wait to be stabbed

mophobia. After all, the awkwardness of the manifesto's title,

"Personism," is an extended joke at the expense of O'Hara's ho-

mosexual desire. In explaining how he has reinvented the love

poem, O'Hara harps on the word "person," stressing its neuter

[Personism] was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi

Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with

someone (not Roi, 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.... It puts the poem squarely between the poet and

the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspond-

ingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons in-