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8-2001
Frank O'Hara's oranges : poetry, painters and painting.
Karen Ware 1973University of Louisville
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FRANK O'HARA'S ORANGES:
Poetry, Painters and Painting
By
Karen Ware
B.A., Spalding University, 1994
A Thesis
Submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of the University of Louisville
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
Master of Arts
Department of English
University of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky
August 2001
FRANK O'HARA'S ORANGES:
Poetry, Painters and Painting
By
Karen Ware
B.A., Spalding University, 1994
A Thesis Approved on
by the following Reading Committee:
Thesis MrectO'r
11
DEDICATION
This thesis is dedicated to Clare Pearce,
because I promised,
and to Kyle,
through all things.
III
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many amazing individuals have taken a seat in the roller
coaster construction of this long-awaited project.
Many thanks
to Dr. Golding for not running away when I cornered him in
Brian's kitchen two years ago and asked him to direct me.
Thank
you to Dr. Tom Byers and Dr. Jay Kloner who so graciously agreed
to be my readers.
I also happily mention Dr. David Garrison,
whose 1992 poetry seminar introduced me to O'Hara and set the
wheels in motion.
I wish a special note for Linda Baldwin,
without whom I would never have had a single plece of paper in
the right spot.
My pursuit of the study of literature is strongly
influenced by my family, especially my parents.
As a child I
was always granted a new book or a trip to the library whenever
I wanted, no matter how often I asked, or how inconvenient the
timing.
Mom, Dad, thank you.
I am grateful to Brian Huot, Kim Burton and David Overbey:
my teaching mentors and companions.
They have each been
encouraging, inspiring, and blessfully distracting.
IV
Thank you to my friends and co-workers at Governor's
Scholars.
I greatly appreciate the respect given to my work.
Thanks, as well, to everyone at Peter Pan Cleaners who endured
my academic chatter and chided,
"when will you be finished?"
just enough.
lowe more praise than I can express to my husband Kyle,
who buckled into the seat beside me and held my hand through
every climb and descent.
v
ABSTRACT
This thesis focuses on twentieth-century poet Frank O'Hara
and his relationship to painting and painters in New York in the
1950s.
An examination of the concept of ekphrasis functions as
a theoretical frame and substantiation for the discussion of
O'Hara's life and poems.
Painters Larry Rivers, Jane
Freilicher, and Grace Hartigan had significant relationships
with O'Hara, both personally and artistically.
Michael
Goldberg, Norman Bluhm, and Joe Brainard collaborated with him
on several projects, each of which are discussed In terms of
their combination of verbal and visual elements, of poet and
painter working together or in tandem.
Another example included
in the exploration of O'Hara's connection to visual expression
is a series of Apollinaire-inspired calligrams.
Each element of
the discussion helps define the specific context in which O'Hara
worked, functioning as an example himself of the significant
link painting and poetry have historically shared.
VI
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i v
ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTERS
I.
EKPHRASIS: A Fresh Look at an Old Theoretical Frame .... 11
II.
PAINTING POEMS: O'Hara's Relationship with Visual Art .. 26
III. PAINTER POEMS: Inspiration from Personal Relationships.39
IV.
COLLABORATIONS: Friendship and Work Manifested in
Ekphrastic Expression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
APPENDICES
A. Laokoon sculpture group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
B. Apollinaire calligrams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
1. "It's Raining"
2. "The Bleeding Heart Dove and the Fountain"
3. "Fan of Flavors"
C. 0' Hara calligrams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
1. "A Small Bouquet"
Vll
2. "Automobiles"
3. "A Calligram"
4. "Poem (WHE EWHEE) "
D. Jackson Pollock "Number I, 1948" .................... 73
E. Michael Goldberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
1. "Sardines"
2. Cover/Title page for O'Hara's Odes
F. Larry Rivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
1. "Cedar Bar Menu I"
2. "In Memory of the Dead, 1966"
3. "Stones: Berdie"
4. "Stones: Energy"
G. Grace Hartigan "Oranges No.7" ...................... 79
H. Joe Brainard and Frank O'Hara ....................... 80
"I'm Not Flying I'm Thinking"
I. Norman Bluhm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
1. "Meet Me in the Park"
2. "There I Was"
VITA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
viii
Frank O'Hara's Oranges: Poetry, Painting and Painters
INTRODUCTION
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.
O'Hara "Why I Am Not A Painter" CP 262
In the mid-twentieth century, one New York art circle
developed their work in the context of a multifaceted network of
poets and painters of around the same age, all connected by
varying degrees of friendship.
The poets included Frank O'Hara,
John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Bill Berkson.
The
painters included Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock,
Robert Motherwell, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher
and Michael Goldberg, to name a few.
O'Hara's body of work In
particular achieves cohesiveness through this interrelation of
artists and writers, and their styles.
O'Hara related passages
in his poems to portions of his own previous poems, the poems of
1
others, or the visual art of others.
New York was his studio and
the napkins he scribbled across at lunch were his canvases.
This
thesis looks at O'Hara as a poet in terms of his specific
relationships to painters and painting, in order to explore how
understanding the intricacies of O'Hara's relationships with
visual artists leads to a more complex reading of his work.
Much current scholarship on O'Hara emphasizes the social
context of New York or is preoccupied with his sexuality.
Many
critics engage in close readings that focus on the meaning the
poems might hold for the gay community; Jim Elledge's "Lack of
Gender in Frank O'Hara's Love Poems to Vincent Warren" is a wellexecuted example of such an examination.
Caleb Crain's "Frank
O'Hara's 'Fired' Self" discusses "Personism: A Manifesto" and
several poems in light of the psychological and philosophical
search for a gay sense of self, showing how "O'Hara's gay
persona--expressing anger and desire, insisting on a full
emotional presence--deserves the attention of gay studies"
(287).
Other criticism is more concerned with O'Hara's poems themselves,
intent on the implications of the body of work of the New York
poets in general.
Geoff Ward's Statutes of Liberty defines and
explores the New York School, rather than examining O'Hara alone.
David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde, while full of wonderful
details and anecdotes, is confined in its self-serving definition
of "avant-garde," a definition that views the poetry of the New
York School as leading up to Lehman's own.
2
Marjorie Perloff's
Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters is the best example of a more
holistic approach to O'Hara's poetry, focusing primarily on
critical interpretation of his poems, with personal and social
information included only when she sees it as integral to her
interpretation.
My project continues the exploration of the large portion of
O'Hara's life and work that deals with visual art.
The recent
exhibition In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American
Art, which debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
in July 1999, helps contextualize and validate these concerns.
In the catalogue to accompany the exhibition, Russell Ferguson
explains the purpose of the project: "to use the charismatic
figure of O'Hara as a lens
throug~
which to take another look at
the most mythologized period in American art"
(15).
Ferguson
also attempts to answer the question "why O'Hara, why now?": "the
milieu that is visible in O'Hara's writing and in the work
gathered for this exhibition will, I hope, be compelling enough
to communicate with those who look back at it today from a
distance of almost forty years"
(16). Ferguson concludes his
description of O'Hara's influence with the pronouncement that
"his poetry, of course, has lasted, and is more widely read today
than ever before.
and to artists"
He remains an inspiring figure to young poets,
(56).
A further testament to the timeliness of
continued work on O'Hara is the publication of a new collection,
3
r
Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller's The Scene of My Selves:
New Work on the New York School Poets.
I have found a helpful theoretical frame for approaching
O'Hara in the current discussion of the time-honored concept of
ekphrasis. 1
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
defines the term narrowly in a section on visual arts and poetry,
remarking that "poems or parts of poems that describe specific
paintings are traditionally said to partake of ekphrasis.
Ekphrastic poems (literally)
[sic] speak to, for, or about a work
of art; they are verbal representations of visual
representations"
(1361).
Most texts dealing with ekphrastic
theory cite two important works, the second a direct response to
the first.
They are G. E. Lessing's "Laokoon: An Essay on the
Limits of Painting and Poetry"
(1776) and Murray Krieger's
"Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry, or Laokoon
Revisited"
(1967).
Each source deals with the classical idea of
ekphrasis as the representation of visual art, including
painting, ln poetry.
Some more contemporary writers have wrestled with this
narrow classical definition in an attempt to broaden the
applicability of the term, while others maintain the critical
tradition.
In Chapter I,
"Ekphrasis: A Fresh Look at an Old
Theoretical Approach," I discuss both Lessing and Krieger as well
as more recent work by James Heffernan and Valerie Robillard.
4
I
find Robillard's parameters for ekphrasis the most useful in my
examination of O'Hara's work, although concepts from the other
theorists also enter the discussion.
Robillard frames ekphrasis in terms of what she sees as an
often intricate intertextuality between the verbal and the
visual.
This idea of ekphrasis as a sort of intertextual
relationship applies easily to O'Hara's poetry.
This concern
with intertextuality, like most discussion of O'Hara and his
associates, tends to begin with an attempt to define "New York
School."
Dore Ashton describes it as a movement similar to the
European concept of a school of painting, with the style of
Abstract Expressionism as the dominating force (2).
Artists
living and working in New York in the 1950s and early 60s are
grouped together due to similarities in their aesthetic ideas and
their place in the same social milieu.
David Perkins explains
that the same applies to the poets of the time: "These poets were
friends, referred to one another in their poems, lived in New
York City, and described or alluded in their verses to its
sophisticated pleasures"
(529).
(More skeptically, Geoff Ward
describes the labeling of the New York poets as a school a "halfjoke" that stuck [277].)
Even though the genesis of the New York
School lies in painting, the poets grow to occupy an integral
position in a system of mutual influence.
The painters, in fact,
were acutely aware of the traditional segregation of the arts in
1
"Composed from the Greek words ek (out) and phrazein (tell, declare,
5
America and looked for voices in poetry to serve as inspiration
in a way similar to the schools of European (especially Parisian)
tradition.
Ashton states that "the lack of poetic voices that
did so much to stimulate and advertise the School of Paris was
keenly felt in New York" and artists at the time seemed
responsive to, if not respectful or even envious of, "French
traditions that made the poet the natural ally of the painter"
(134).
As a result, such writers as Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery,
James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch were quickly accepted and added
to the cultur'e of New York.
Once interrelations between the two worlds of art have a
chance to germinate, an intricate intertextuality is formed.
Perkins writes that "much in the styles [of the New York School
Poets] might be explained by reference to Abstract Expressionism
and collage"
(529).
O'Hara gleans from the painters the idea of
art as a process that is not only changing, but evolutionary:
the abstract expressionists in particular and
then later other artists ... gave me the
feeling that one should work harder and
should really try to do something other than
just polish whatever talent one had been
recognized for,
that one should go
further. (Standing Still 3)
pronounce"
(Heffernan 191) .
6
Geoff Ward describes the relationship between the painters
and poets of this time and their respective ideologies as a
combination of synchronicity and difference:
insofar as the poets named here [including
O'Hara] may be read as a group, that group
did emerge in a historical relationship to
the painters of the Abstract Expressionist
movement.
That relationship was defined by
antithesis as much as continuation.
Where
Abstract Expressionism denotes an art often
of monumental severity, the poets are witty,
sociable, and bored with alienation and tooheavy symbols (Statutes 7).
O'Hara entered into a New York where the Abstract Expressionists
were thriving.
But his writing more closely relates to the
painters referred to as the "2nd Generation": Rivers, Johns,
Rauschenberg, Hartigan, Freilicher, Goldberg.
O'Hara pushes the
form of the poem in several directions, often within the same
poem.
Perkins explicates part of "Second Avenue" as Surrealist,
while a few lines later it becomes a presentation of wit (532).
Perhaps due to these elements, perhaps due to the way in which
O'Hara wrote (at lunches on napkins, on scraps of paper at any
moment), his poems evoke a sense of spontaneity and urgency,
similar to the work of these painters.
7
The playfulness of the images and language of "Today" serves
as almost an anthem for this poetic approach:
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful!
harmonicas,
Pearls,
jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
(CP 15) .
This wonder and fascination at the ordinary and the everyday is
present in O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems (CP 341),
narrated in a "flatly factual voice telling of his literal, small
doings on an ordinary day"
(Perkins 534).
These poems recount
the buying of alcohol, walks down the street, lunches and
conversations with friends.
unexplained.
The friends are named, but left
A researched explication of one of the "I do this I
do that" poems would most likely identify the persons mentioned
as members of the New York School.
In "A Step Away From Them," a
poem written in 1956, O'Hara laments "First/ Bunny died, then
John Latouche,
/ then Jackson Pollock.
as life was full,
of them?"
(CP 258) .
But is the/ earth as full
Pollock, of course, refers
to the artist; Latouche was a musician and writer, and "Bunny" is
O'Hara's friend and fellow poet Violet Lang.
"Portrait of Grace"
refers to a work by Larry Rivers of fellow artist Grace Hartigan.
"[DEAR JAP,]" is a poem-letter for artist Jasper Johns.
8
These "named names" hold a level of significance on their
own, as representatives of O'Hara's life and, by extension, the
New York art milieu, and it is easy to see through signals such
as this sort of name-dropping how much of O'Hara's work either
responds to or stems from the work of other artists.
A healthy
chunk of the Collected Poems was originally sent in letters to
these poets and painters and never published, but kept as a part
of his private manuscripts.
In a 1965 interview with Edward
Lucie-Smith, O'Hara himself states that he does not feel as if he
ever really "collaborated" with a painter.
O'Hara did, however,
construct texts of visual and verbal elements in conjunction with
particular artists.
To name a few:
"Stones," lithographs with
Larry Rivers (1958); a series on paper with Norman Bluhm (1960);
and collages with Joe Brainard (1964).
definition of collaboration?
What, then, is O'Hara's
In Ch. 4 "Collaborations," I will
approach this issue, using some of Lessing's original ideas on
the limits of each genre, and thus the limits of connections
between them.
Wallace Stevens' "The Relations between Poetry and
Painting," presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on
January 15, 1951 and published later that year by the Museum as a
pamphlet, was surely known by this group, including O'Hara, and
is helpful in its discussion of the similarities in the modern
arts, places where painting and poetry easily intersect in
dialogue.
(Alan Feldman utilizes Stevens as a means of
introduction to his critical text on O'Hara.)
9
O'Hara's personal and professional life includes too many
connections to artists and their work for the thesis to be
inclusive.
I focus on figures whose ties with O'Hara are well
enough documented to suggest general applicability to the poet's
artistic framework.
Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Grace
Hartigan and Willem and Elaine de Kooning had significant
relationships with O'Hara, both personally and artistically.
Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm, and Joe Brainard collaborated
with him on several projects.
My chapter arrangement will move
from my theoretical framework down to a closer look at particular
poems and painters: 1. Ekphrasis: A Fresh Look at an Old
Theoretical Frame, 2. Painting Poems: O'Hara's Relationship with
Visual Art, 3. Painter Poems: Inspiration from Personal
Relationships and 4. Collaborations: Friendship and Work
Manifested in Ekphrasis. The section on collaborations, as
previously mentioned, will be concerned with defining
collaboration in order to discuss work O'Hara actually
constructed together with an artist.
The discussion will include
the oft anthologized "Why I Am Not A Painter" as well as "In
Memory of My Feelings" and "Second Avenue."
I will also mention
several of the less often discussed poems of the "I do this I do
that" type, exemplified by "Poem (Now it is the 27th)."
These
will help illustrate both representations of painting in general
in O'Hara's poems (Chapter 2), as well as his relationship to
specific painters and their styles (Chapter 3).
10
The aim is not
to closely explicate individual poems, but to use a few in order
to address the larger issue of contextualizing O'Hara in
reference to painters and painting.
11
Chapter I
EKPHRASIS: A Fresh Look at an Old Theoretical Frame
From Horace's ut pictura
to Aristotle's proposal of
poes~
composition for the imitative arts in the Poetics, poetry and
painting have enjoyed attention in tandem.
Wallace Stevens
concludes that such study not only is useful to each of the
particular art forms, but also is reflective of art's current
climate and universal in its application:
It is enough to have brought poetry and
painting into relation as sources of our
present conception of reality, without
asserting that they are the sole sources, and
as supports a kind of life, which it seems to
be worth living, with their support, even if
doing so is only a stage in the endless study
of an existence, which is the heroic subject
of all study.
(175-76)
However overly rhetorical Stevens' statement may seem, it is
effective in conveying the magnitude many attribute to these
explorations.
Such discussion also serves to substantiate
further applications and arguments, including my current
exploration of O'Hara and painting.
O'Hara's fellow poet Ashbery wryly expresses his own
perspective in "And Ut Pictura Poesis is Her Name":
About what to put in your poem-painting:
12
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium,
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good-do they still exist?
There are a lot of other things of the same quality
As those I've mentioned.
Now one must
Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,
Dull sounding ones (Selected Poems 235) .
Whether the discussion is pedantic or ironic, the written and
plastic arts have historically been linked, particularly in the
arenas of criticism and theory.
Ekphrasis has emerged to narrow the examination of how a
poem describes, uses, or refers to a particular work of art.
G.E. Lessing's late eighteenth-century work on ekphrasis is cited
by nearly every writer dealing with ekphrasis since, from
definitive resources like The New Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics to recent essays that examine specific works.
It is important, then, for my use of the idea of ekphrasis to
begin with Lessing as well.
Lessing sees visual representations (painting, sculpture) as
limited due to a concern for the concept of beauty.
He speaks of
classical considerations, established by "the Ancients," as
indicating particular stylistic demands, according to which
"screams must be reduced to sighs, not because screams would
betray weakness, but because they would deform the countenance to
a repulsive degree"
(13).
Lessing is referring to the central
13
figure of the first-century Hellenistic sculpture of the Laokoon
group. 2
In Virgil's Aeneid, the father screams horribly as the
serpents attack, while the sculpture shows lips parted in silent
pain, far from the shrieks the poet describes.
Lessing stresses, almost exclusively, such differences
between poetry and painting, rather than delineating similarities
or opportunities for close connection. The two arts, visual and
poetical, are described by Lessing as having markedly different
rules and capabilities.
He sees poetry, in the hands of a
master, as surpassing painting in its ability to provide truly
vivid depiction.
Though most of his text looks at Virgil's
Laokoon, it is in Lessing's discussion of Horner that this
polarity
1S
clearest:
The poet here is as far beyond the painter,
as life is better than a picture ... It is
impossible to translate into any other
language the musical painting heard in the
poet's words.
Equally impossible would it be
to infer it from the canvas.
Yet this is the
least of the advantages possessed by the
poetical picture.
Its chief superiority is
that it leads us through a whole gallery of
pictures up to the point depicted by the
artist.
2
(84-5)
See Appendix A.
14
Lessing further discusses Homer's poetry in terms of how
artists have tried to represent the stories of the Iliad and the
Odyssey through their own visual means.
Lessing gives a certain
amount of credit to the artist, but reserves his highest praise
for the poet: "Painted pictures drawn from the poems of Homer,
however numerous and however admirable they may be, can give us
no idea of the descriptive talent of the poet"
(86).
_ Lessing significantly limits the range of relation possible
between poets and painters, indicating only a system of object
and response, rather than the many possibilities that exist for
influence, commentary, appreciation and dialogue.
Lessing
assumes his audience will agree, stating that "when we speak of
an artist as imitating a poet or a poet an artist we may mean one
of two things,-- either that one makes the work of the other his
actual model, or that the same original is before them both, and
one borrows from the other the manner of copying it"
(49).
By
thus distilling the ways in which poetry and art may be
connected, Lessing truncates the realm of ekphrasis.
Part of
this limitation is due to the boundaries of his own culture, of
working in a time and space unable to anticipate the growing
complexity of art and writing relations that would characterize
later modern and contemporary eras.
Lessing's understanding of
painting is one of a single time and place, similar to what he
sees as the means available to the visual artists he critiques:
15
Lessing further discusses Homer's poetry in terms of how
artists have tried to represent the stories of the Iliad and the
Odyssey through their own visual means.
Lessing gives a certain
amount of credit to the artist, but reserves his highest praise
for the poet: "Painted pictures drawn from the poems of Homer,
however numerous and however admirable they may be, can give us
no idea of the descriptive talent of the poet"
(86).
Lessing significantly limits the range of relation possible
between poets and painters, indicating only a system of object
and response, rather than the many possibilities that exist for
influence, commentary, appreciation and dialogue.
Lessing
assumes his audience will agree, stating that "when we speak of
an artist as imitating a poet or a poet an artist we may mean one
of two things,-- either that one makes the work of the other his
actual model, or that the same original is before them both, and
one borrows from the other the manner of copying it"
(49).
By
thus distilling the ways in which poetry and art may be
connected, Lessing truncates the realm of ekphrasis.
Part of
this limitation is due to the boundaries of his own culture, of
working in a time and space unable to anticipate the growing
complexity of art and writing relations that would characterize
later modern and contemporary eras.
Lessing's understanding of
painting is one of a single time and place, similar to what he
sees as the means available to the visual artists he critiques:
15
Since the artist can use but a single moment
of ever-changing nature, and the painter must
further confine his study of this one moment
to a single point of view, while their works
are made not simply to be looked at, but to
be contemplated long and often, evidently the
most fruitful moment and the most fruitful
aspect of that moment must be chosen.
(16)
Lessing's discourse reflects the canon of art and literature as
available to him in his own time.
Were he able to see the
Cubists of the early twentieth century, he would be confronted
with paintings whose compositions rely on multiple perspectives
and the fusion of separate moments in time.
Lessing's
delineation of what art can and cannot do would certainly be
altered by the energy and emotion of the Abstract Expressionist
and Action Painters who so influenced O'Hara and his work.
Artistic evolution of the last two centuries antiquates some of
Lessing's argument, rendering it inadequate as a solitary means
of interpretation.
I turn, therefore, to subsequent discussions
of ekphrasis in order to develop my understanding of the concept
as it might apply to O'Hara.
Murray Krieger's 1967 response,
"Ekphrasis and the Still
Movement of Poetry; or, Laokoon Revisited," addresses his
departure from Lessing's "insistence on keeping distinct among
the arts what belonged to Peter and what to Paul, what to space
16
and what to time"
(4).
He defines ekphrasis as "the imitation ln
literature of a work of plastic art"
(5).
Unlike Lessing,
Krieger stresses the similarities between poetry and painting,
rather than the distinctions.
The "still movement" to which he
refers in his title is meant to be inclusive: "I have freely used
it as adjective, adverb, and verb; as still movement, still
moving and more forcefully,
the stilling of movement" (7).
Defined in this manner, Krieger sees still movement as an
integral part of the relationship between literature and art.
Where Lessing describes art only in terms of a carefully
selected frozen moment in time, Krieger proposes poetry can be
described in much the same way, as this "still movement."
Krieger's counterpoint to Lessing lies in the expansion of the
possibilities of ekphrasis as a useful critical term: "ekphrasis,
no longer a narrow kind of poem defined by its object of
imitation, broadens to become a general principle of poetics,
asserted by every poem in the assertion of its integrity"
(22).
The reconsideration of Lessing's confining separation of poetry
and painting is welcome, but to call every poem of formal
"integrity" ekphrastic would be inaccurate.
The genesis of the
term "ekphrasis, " however debated its definition and parameters,
lies in the struggle of literary critics to describe those poems
whose form or subject delves into the realm of visual arts.
Krieger visits the subject again in 1992 in Ekphrasis: The
Illusion of the Natural Sign,
this time expanding his original
17
ideas on ekphrasis and speaking in terms of an "ekphrastic
principle" that no longer limits the poetic representation to
visual art or painting, but expands the possibilities to "the
visual" in general.
Two decades after the publication of his
first article, Krieger still finds the subject of ekphrasis to be
"maddeningly elusive" and fraught with "theoretical evasiveness"
(1).
He subsequently delivers a rather lengthy list of what his
theory of ekphrasis seems to include.
His claim that "a study
that parades under the name ekphrasis can be many things" is
obviously qualitative, nudging the reader to accept his current
mode as most genuine (3).
He does, however, choose to situate
his discussion within the context of a larger measure of
possibilities the term ekphrasis may cover.
Krieger's list
suggests one might examine the poetry and painting of a
particular period of time to look for connections between the
two, or "as a slight variation of such a study, we could look at
the attitudes of individual poets or schools of poets toward
painting or contemporary painters, or the reverse, the attitudes
of painters toward poems or contemporary poets, tracing
friendships and enmities, influences and aversions"
(3).
Here I
see the beginning of how ekphrasis might be useful in reading
O'Hara.
Of all the writers living and working in New York at his
time, he
1S
acknowledged as the most closely connected to the
pulse of the art world.
Anyone who seeks to "trace friendships
18
and enmities, influence and aversions" in the New York School
will find O'Hara at every turn.
In 1993, James Heffernan redefines ekphrasis again, calling
for movement away from Krieger's ekphrastic principle, back to a
less generalized conception.
Heffernan looks to the roots of the
term: "composed from the Greek words eke (out) and phrazein
(tell, declare, pronounce), ekphrasis originally meant 'telling
in full'"
(191).
His working definition is "simple in form but
complex in its implications: ekphrasis is the verbal
representation of visual representation" (3).
The novelty to
Heffernan's approach lies in the texts he chooses, moving from
classical to contemporary.
John Ashbery's "Self Portrait ln a
Convex Mirror" is given particular attention as "probably the
most resoundingly ekphrastic poem ever written"
(170).
Heffernan
calls Ashbery "the premier combination of art critic and poet in
our time" with one qualification: "the exception of Frank O'Hara"
(169).
He justifies his pursuit of Ashbery partially through a
chronology of Ashbery's critical work on art and artists,
explaining that "the full story of what Ashbery's poetry owes to
his experience of visual art would probably require careful
be~
scrutiny of all these
items~
however ephemeral some of them may
as well as the volumes of poetry he has published under
titles drawn from paintings ... and all of the other allusions to
painters and painting that ripple through Ashbery's poems"
Such an allowance seems at odds with Heffernan's
19
self~impod
(170).
narrow definition of ekphrasis and more in line with Krieger's
1992 work.
This discrepancy and unwitting agreement with Krieger
lead towards more of a consensus on how to talk about ekphrasis
than Heffernan's text would first suggest.
Heffernan draws his
title Museum of Words from part of his definition of ekphrasis,
saying that "in a sense, the whole collection of ekphrastic
poetry treated in this book can be seen as a museum of words-- a
gallery of art constructed by language alone" (8).
In each of these discussions of the concept of ekphrasis , I
find useful vocabulary with which to examine O'Hara, his work,
and his relationships with painters and painting.
Lessing's
preference for poetry over painting is inversely related to some
of O'Hara's thoughts on how painters are capable of modes of
expression that he, as a poet, is not.
Krieger's broadening of
the concept of ekphrasis sets a precedent for further discussion.
Heffernan's vision of a "museum of words" could be seen in
several of O'Hara's descriptive painting poems.
This is in line
with ekphrasis as "verbal representation of visual
representation."
I contend, however, that a work does not have
to be strictly descriptive in order to fall into the realm of
ekphrasis.
O'Hara's writing is so often referential that
Heffernan would not explicitly term the poems ekphrastic, even
though his discussion of Ashbery gives an implicit nod to
O'Hara's work.
20
Lessing's preference for poetry over painting, for instance,
lS
inversely related to some of O'Hara's thoughts on how painters
are capable of modes of expression that he, as a poet, is not.
Where Lessing values poetry over the visual arts, O'Hara sees
painting as capable of "immediacy": "He accepted that his poetry- any poetry-- could never achieve the direct immediacy in itself
of a brushstroke across a piece of canvas"
(Ferguson 25) .
Krieger's broadening of the concept of ekphrasis, as Heffernan
says,
"gives this moribund term a new lease on life" and sets a
precedent for further discussion (2).
Heffernan's vision of a
"museum of words" can be seen in several of O'Hara's descriptive
painting poems.
Meanwhile, a 1998 collection, Valerie Robillard and Els
Jongeneel's Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive
Approaches to Ekphrasis, provides the broadest and most
applicable variation on the traditional definition of ekphrasis.
Robillard both includes and questions previous definitions:
if we continue to base our understanding of
ekphrasis primarily on the attempt of the
verbal to represent or describe a visual work
of art, or even its ability to do this at
all, then how do we account for the myriad of
alternative ways In which contemporary
literary works touch on the visual arts, some
21
of which are themselves non-representational?
(53-54)
Robillard's solution is to look at ekphrastic work in terms of
its intertextuality.
Her terms allow significant freedom in the
definition of a text's range of references.
A written text may
refer to a visual text (i.e. painting), the ideology from which a
visual text stems or the artists who create the visual text.
This version of ekphrasis as intertextuality is integral to
approaching O'Hara's writing.
Robillard proceeds to apply Manfred Pfister's 1985 model of
intertextuality to ekphrasis.
She presents pfister's model and
her adaptation of it in great detail:
Pfister proposes an intertextual framework
consisting of six points which measure the
manner and degree to which an intertext is
present within a new text.
He visualizes his
model as a system of concentric circles,
where the highest possible intertextual'
intensity is located at the center; the
further from this center, the weaker the
intertextual relationship.
(57)
Robillard's subsequent model for ekphrasis based on
intertextuality between verbal and visual texts allows, then, for
one work to be "more" ekphrastic, another "less."
22
She uses the
same six labels as Pfister for her scalar model, modifying each
category as necessary:
1.
Communicativity
2.
Referentiality
3.
Structurality
4.
Selectivity
5.
Dialogicity and
6.
Autoreflexivity.
Cammunicativity is the basic use of allusion to a pretext in an
intertext.
Robillard clarifies that "this ranges from vague
allusions to a direct reference in a title,
in the body of the text"
(57).
Beach," for instance, obviously
to explicit marking
O'Hara's "Study for Women on a
r~fes
to a pictorial work, but
does not explicitly name the artist nor can we trust O'Hara's
imagery of "flaming parachutes/ of praise, and walruses wear[ing]
sables" as literal (128).
Referentiality, as used by Robillard, is "quantitative"
measuring "the extent to which a poet actually uses an artwork in
the text"
(58).
Structurality applies to poems of ekphrasis in
which the writer actively appropriates the form of the pretext
art through imitation of structure.
The category of selectivity
looks at what specific elements of the pretext are chosen and
emphasized.
Robillard explains that "this category also refers
to the transposition of certain topics, myths, or norms and
conventions of particular periods or styles of pictorial
23
representation"
(59).
Many of O'Hara's poems are products of his
immediate culture, the artistic climate of New York at the time
of his writing.
His selectivity is often expressed in loosely
mentioned names of artists and galleries, emphasizing not always
a particular artist or work, but the general milieu with whom
O'Hara associated and their "particular period."
In "Lines for
the Fortune Cookies" O'Hara asks "Have you been to Mike
Goldberg's show?
Al Leslie's?"
(CP 466) .
"Bill's School of New
York" not only includes a highly referential title, but the line
"He is most at home at the Sidney Janis Gallery," a common
showcase for the work of O'Hara's friends (CP 415).
In Robillard's model, dialogicity addresses the tension
created between two texts that may handle their subject matter ln
An intertext that
the frame of very different ideologies.
intentionally criticizes or evaluates its pretext in some way is
of a higher degree of intertextual intensity, or dialogicity
(59).
O'Hara's "Digression on Number 1, 1948" is a lovingly
rendered exploration of Jackson Pollock's 68" x 104" drip
painting:
There is the Pollock, white, harm
will not fall, his perfect hand
and the many short voyages.
They'll
never fence the silver range.
Stars are out and there is sea
24
enough beneath the glistening earth
To bear me toward the future
which is not so dark.
I see (CP 260) .
Here the ekphrasis of the poem can be explored in terms of its
dialogicity of admiration and appreciation of the pretext of
Pollock's painting, as well as being high in communicativity (the
title of the painting and artist's name are clear) and
referentiality (the bulk of the poem itself appears to describe
both the visual appearance of the painting and the poet's
response) .
Autoreflexivity, according to Robillard, is found when "the
poet specifically reflects on and problematizes the connection
between his poem and its pictoral source(s), or, for example,
between his own medium and that of the plastic arts" (59).
"To
Larry Rivers" expresses a criticism of poetry that O'Hara often
brings forth, as writing is only able to name that which the
painter does (CP 128) .
Within Robillard's parameters, the personal relationship
between an artist and a writer might be read as a text that may
enter into the text of their visual or verbal work, thus creating
the sort of intertextual connection she deems as part of
ekphrasis.
I do not use Robillard's amalgam of the Pfister model
in direct application to O'Hara's poetry, but as a more general
justification for my interest in the intricate web formed by the
subject and forms he chose and the artists he knew.
25
This is not
the place for determining if a particular poem fits into level 3
or 3a of the Robillard/Pfister scales; but it is through the
suggestion of the importance of intertextuality that my
understanding of the applicability of ekphrasis is complete.
term seems an excellent, if not obvious, one to connect to the
work of O'Hara.
26
The
Chapter II
PAINTING POEMS: O'Hara's Relationship with Visual Art
Frank O'Hara moved to New York in August of 1951 after
finishing his BA at Harvard and MA at the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor.
In the 1993 biography City Poet: The Life and Times
of Frank O'Hara, Brad Gooch describes O'Hara's immersion in the
artistic culture of New York as immediate: "Within three months
of his arrival, O'Hara figured out a clever way to combine his
need for art, money,
friendship, and poetry.
He needed a job,
and he found one that exposed him to painting and painters while
still allowing him time to write poems"
(208).
A retrospective
show of Matisse opened at the Museum of Modern Art in November of
1951.
O'Hara took a job at the front desk "selling postcards,
publications and tickets" in early December so he could see the
show repeatedly (207).
He would return to the Museum of Modern
Art in 1955, this time as a special assistant to the
International Program.
His tenure at the museum culminated In
his appointment as Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture
Exhibitions in 1965.
O'Hara was not a poet who merely liked art
or was fascinated with painting; his daily working life was
consumed with visual art.
In "A False Account of Talking with
Frank O'Hara and Roland Barthes in Philadelphia" Bob Perelman
wittily remarks on the poet/curator combination by having Barthes
question O'Hara about the tone of his poem "A Step Away From
Them" :
27
"Were you writing there as curator or poet?"
"Neither" [O'Hara answers] .
"You really can't say that."
(62)
I contend that in saying "neither" O'Hara (or one of his critics,
Perelman, myself) could just as easily say "both," for that is
ultimately and inescapably how he wrote: as both curator and
poet.
Stevens' "The Relations Between Poetry and Painting,"
presented at the Museum of Modern Art the same year O'Hara moved
to the city, is a good barometer of the connectivity of the arts
at the time.
Stevens justifies the importance of the study of
these relationships (and, according to the definitions we have
discussed, ekphrasis) through the apparent importance each
artisan places on his counterpart:
The truth is that there seems to exist a
corpus of remarks in respect to painting,
most often the remarks of painters
themselves, which are as significant to poets
as to painters.
All of the details, to the
extent that they have meaning for poets as
well as painters, are specific instances of
relations between poetry and painting.
I
suppose, therefore, that it would be possible
to study poetry by studying painting.
28
(160)
More specifically, it is effective to study O'Hara through
studying the painting he knew and with which he worked.
This
echoes one form of ekphrastic theory put forth by Krieger in
Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign:
"we could relate the
actual painting being produced in a give period with the poetry
being written and trace the relationships, if any, between these
products"
(3).
Thus, we look towards the efforts of painters in
New York in the early 1950s to see with what attitudes O'Hara was
confronted, to grasp what Stevens terms "the coercing influences
of time and space"
(172).
Abstract Expressionism emerged in American art in the 1940s
as many painters began to strive for spontaneity and energy as
the driving forces for their work.
Also known as the Action
Painters, members of what would come to be called The New York
School are well known: Jackson Pollock, willem de Kooning, Robert
Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, among others.
These
artists were enormously successful, enjoying increasingly public
attention.
By 1949 Pollock paintings, for instance, were in five
museums across the states and in forty private collections, a
testament to the movement as well as his own popularity (Ashton
154).
Their success affected not only other painters, but all
manner of artists, including writers.
Von Hallberg indicates a
level of intimidation involved in the measure of their success;
for some that circle seemed unattainable, yet attractive, and
artists and writers responded accordingly:
29
The enthusiasm of the New York poets in the
1950s was mostly for the so-called second
generation-- Larry Rivers, Helen
Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Robert
Rauschenberg and others-- who were not making
a radical break with the art institutions of
their time, but rather were trying to clear
professional space for their own careers in
the shadow of the immediately preceding
generation.
(104)
In Statutes of Liberty Geoff Ward agrees that "the poets had
before them the conspicuously successful example of the New York
painters, whose encouragement and interests may have been a
stimulus, but whose success cast a shadow over the writers'
efforts to 'de-provincialize' poetry and reach a wider public
than their own coterie"
(7). At the center of the twentieth
century Frank O'Hara entered into what seemed to be the center of
artistic creativity.
Both first and second generation Abstract
Expressionists sought to build not just individual pieces of art,
but whole new methods of construction.
In her discussion of the
year 1950 as a "turning point" in American art, April Kingsley
suggests the label of "Action Painting" for the Abstract
Expressionist movement "speaks of its physicality, its base in
the process of making, rather than in an intellectual esthetic
position"
(11).
These painters were interested not only in the
30
final product, but the methods, materials and movements necessary
to create the end result as well.
for painting was changing.
The definition of materials
In this area, too, the emphasis was
on openness, newness and experimentation.
Kingsley mentions the
innovative methods utilized by the painters: "dripping, throwing,
squirting, squeegeeing, and spattering-- using crude,
untraditional tools like unwieldy house-painters' brushes,
sticks, basting syringes and trowels"
(12).
The painting of the time reflects images of a particular
time and space and these materials helped reinforce the transient
nature of the work; it could not be repeated in exactly the same
way.
O'Hara was attracted to the time-bound and process-centered
nature of the work, to the expression of a single instant.
Many
of the poems contain exact references to places or time of the
day.
"A Step Away From Them" recounts what he sees and buys
during the hour he has taken for lunch: "Everything/ suddenly
honks: it is 12:40 of a Thursday"
(Collected 257). The poem
titled "October 26 1952 10:30 O'Clock" is a beautiful lament on
waiting for a friend; it ends "Where are you? where are you?
where are you?"
(Collected 105-6).
We can only guess the friend
(unnamed, but obviously Jane Freilicher) eventually arrives and
the two roar off into the night, the pain of the poem a product
of simply that moment.
dating his drafts,
O'Hara was also often meticulous in
including his location at the time of writing.
31
Other effects of contemporary philosophies of painting are
found elsewhere in the poems.
James Breslin tells us the work of
the Abstract Expressionists "sometimes inspired particular O'Hara
poems, and their inventions and theories, particularly those of
the 'action painters,' stimulated O'Hara to push his own medium
in new and adventuresome directions"
(212).
"Adventuresome" is
an excellent term for O'Hara's playful use of language in his
writing.
No word is too unpoetic for an O'Hara poem.
The very
first line of "Oranges," for instance, reads "Black crows in the
burnt mauve grass, as intimate as rotting rice, snot on a white
linen field"
'bullshit'
farthead"
(CP 5)
"Biotherm" mentions both 'horseshit' and
(CP 439) and admonishes "better a faggot than a
(CP 441).
O'Hara even has a penchant for rendering any
manner of sound or utterance in the text.
An early poem from his
days as a student at Harvard entitled "God!" ends not with some
religious or spiritual commentary, as the title might imply, but
with a sneeze: "Pfui!" (Early writing 62).
O'Hara's facility with language was not limited to novelty,
however, anymore than the Expressionists were incapable of
realism.
He could just as easily manipulate difficult textual
phrasings, often peppering the lines with bits of German or
French.
"Choses Passageres," for instance, is entirely 1D
French.
O'Hara's occasional use of sound words and
conversational speech is a choice of experimental material, just
32
as the painters were using fantastically large canvases and cheap
paints.
In his insightful article,
"O'Hara on the Silver Range,"
Anthony Libby provides a metaphor that aptly connects the
awareness of moments of time, places and people in the poetry to
the concepts of painting.
Libby suggests that "visualizing
O'Hara as an Action Painter operating in essentially abstract
realms leads not only to a sense of the richness of his trivia
but to the depths in his deliberately flat surfaces"
(241).
helps support my argument that much of O'Hara's work
1S
ekphrastic.
This
In what better way can poetry reflect art than for
the poet to express artistic sensibilities similar to a
painter's?
O'Hara recognizes the tension in himself as a poet so
surrounded and immersed in the ideas of painting in " 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.
(Collected 261-2)
The poem proceeds to discuss his writing in tandem with a
painting project of Michael Goldberg. 3
The simultaneous
discussion leads the reader to look for comparisons as well as
contrasts between the acts of writing and painting.
O'Hara
signals just how connected are the two seemingly separate acts of
creation by indicating that the painter (Goldberg) has begun with
3
See Appendix El.
33
a word (sardines), while he, the poet, began his writing
~thinkg
ofl a color:
orange."
O'Hara may not be a painter, but
his poem so resoundingly echoes the awareness of a painter, it is
best described through the recent definitions of ekphrasis.
O'Hara rather passionately describes the emotion of the
post-World War II art movement in his 1959 volume Jackson
Pollock:
This new painting does have qualities of
passion and lyrical desperation, unmasked and
unirihibited, not found in other recorded
eras; it is not surprising that faced with
universal destruction, as we are told, art
should at last speak with unimpeded force and
unveiled honesty to a future which well may
be non-existent, in a last effort of
recognition which is the justification of
being.
(22)
It is as apparent to O'Hara as to the other art critics that the
frenzy,
the emotion, the emphasis on the moment of the Action
Painters was a natural, necessary response to the seriousness of
world war and the inherent threat of the atomic bomb.
These
artists lived and played with as much vigor as their work
expressed: they felt,
in some ways, that they had to do so.
An aspect that is most clear in O'Hara's writing on Pollock
lS
that he absolutely adores the Action Painters and their work.
34
He calls Pollock's Blue Poles
Western Art" and
~the
bountiful and rigid"
of the great masterpieces of
~one
drama of an American conscience, lavish
(30-31).
The Deep is
~a
work which
contemporary esthetic conjecture had cried out for"
1, 1948 is
~one
Number
of the most perfect works of his life [Pollock's]
or anyone else's, viewer or artist"
~Digreson
(30).
(25).4
O'Hara's poem
on Number 1, 1948"" expresses his admiration for
Pollock,
general.
for this particular painting, and for art and artists in
~A
The second stanza chronicles
fine day for seeing" in
which he observes and mentions several works by artists,
including Miro and Picasso (Collected 260).
Number 1, 1948
elevates his mood:
I am tired today but I am not
too tired.
I am not tired at all.
There is the Pollock, white, harm
will not fall,
his perfect hand
and the many short voyages.
The poem closes lyrically, simply:
~I
see."
O'Hara's interest in the dialogue between the verbal and the
visual is emphasized by his experiments with imitations of the
calligram form.
The calligram is a visual poem in which the
composition of the verse forms the shape of its subject.
Guillaume Apollinaire's 1918 collection Calligrammes is the
4
See Appendix D.
35
benchmark for the form (Preminger and Brogan 160).
The four
lines of "It's Raining," for example, snake their way down the
page vertically in waves to simulate the fall of drops of water. 5
"The Bleeding-Heart Dove and the Fountain" is as mournful
visually as it is in tone, the shaking symmetrical arcs of the
fountain filled with words for "THOSE WHO LEFT FOR THE WAR IN THE
NORTH [who] ARE FIGHTING NOW"
(Calligrammes 123).6
Other images
formed by the Calligrammes include rifles, hearts, stars, a
necktie and watch, and the Eiffel Tower.
Apollinaire was also a
figure in his own art culture, as famous for posing for numerous
portraits as for his poetry.
The Calligrammes reflect the
influence of the Cubists, who had incorporated the written word
into some of their paintings.
O'Hara cites Apollinaire's
relationship with cubism as one of the French influences on
American painting and one of the reasons poetry and painting
found themselves linked in New York (Standing Still 3).
O'Hara's dalliance with the form lies in a handful of poems
dated November 1950.
At this time he was finishing graduate
study in Ann Arbor and making regular trips to New York.
His
burgeoning interest in visual expression is exhibited by these
imitations of Apollinaire.
"A Small Bouquet" begins with "we do
not know what violet calls to us in the wet woods"
8).7
(Retrieved
"We do not know what violet" forms the closed blossom of a
See Appendix Bl.
See Appendix B2.
See Appendix Cl.
36
flower while "calls to us in the" serves for the stem, and "wet"
and "woods" are each a leaf.
A final lines of simple sentiment
complete the classically sentimental image as the container for
the flowers:
"Believe me that all is not easy! and I surely adore
you! winter and daytime, too."
Not only does O'Hara use "violet"
and "rose" in the blossom shapes in fulfillment of the calligram
form, his presiding tone matches the Victorian poesy echo of the
image of a small bouquet of flowers.
Another calligram in a
different vein, but within the bounds of the visual themes found
in Apollinaire's work, is "Automobiles."s
Apollinaire's
calligrams included mechanical forms as well.
O'Hara does depart
from the style, or rather creates an addition to the form by
linking words together in crossword-puzzle fashion. In order to
form the door of the car, the vertical word "paradise" shares the
letter "p" with the hiss of "psst!" and the "e" in "we" of "are
we not happy riding?"
(Retrieved 10) .
Two works remain, but share the closest connection in image
to each other and to Apollinaire's "Fan of Flavors": one entitled
"A Calligram," the other "Poem (WHE EWHEE).
the features of a face.
All three poems form
The eyebrow of "Fan of Flavors" also
resembles a handgun, situating the piece within Apollinaire's
series of war poems. 9
The subject of O'Hara's "A Calligram" not
only fits the calligram form, but exhibits his playfulnes.s with
words.
8
The hat is formed by the lines "Under this hat I say!
See Appendix C2.
37
this dry yellow straw piece" (Retrieved 8)
.10
Here also is the
crossword puzzle intersection of words: "say" and "yellow" share
the "y."
The tie under the chin holds the line "the tie makes
the man yeah!", an exclamation whose urgency seems very much of
the moment.
face,
"Poem (WHE EWHEE)" forms the shape of a woman's
the outline of the lips its most prominent suggestion 11 •
In terms of Robillard's hierarchy of forms of ekphrasis, this
calligram would be the most ekphrastic.
The visual nature of the
calligram form itself instantly invokes the sort of relationship
between the verbal and the visual that the broader definition of
ekphrasis is meant to envelop.
The woman represented in the
poem's words and shape is Jane Freilicher, a painter friend of
O'Hara's.
Her full name on the page makes the shape of her nose.
A third item to elevate the level of ekphrasis in this particular
calligram is the poem's request of a portrait in the line "You
are the genre your sweet self, don't forget to paint my trait"
(Collected 25).
O'Hara is calling for an exchange of portraits.
He submits his verbal-visual portrait of Jane through this rather
exuberant and affectionate calligram, while her portrait of
O'Hara would be, we assume, a painting.
Such an exchange links
verbal and visual, painting and poetry, painter and poet through
the act of portraiture.
Freilicher did, indeed, paint several
images of O'Hara, as he wrote many poems about, or dedicated to,
See Appendix B3.
See Appendix C3.
11 See Appendix C4.
9
10
38
Jane.
12
The calligrams, this one especially, exhibit the working
concepts of ekphrasis in O'Hara's writing due to the close
knowledge of painting, its theories and its forms not only
through his time at the Museum of Modern Art, but as a personal
fan of the visual and those who create it.
12 Significant Freilicher-inspired poems include:
"Poem (WHE EWHEE)," "A Party
Full of Friends," Interior (With Jane) ," "Jane Awake," "Jane Bathing," "Poem
(The distinguished)" (sent to Freilicher in an August 8, 1952 letter), "Chez
Jane," "To Jane, An in Imitation of Coleridge," and "To Jane, Some Air." The
latter, dated April 1954, is commonly referred to as the last of the Jane
poems.
It begins "Now what we desire is space" (CP192).
39
Chapter III
PAINTER POEMS: Inspiration from Personal Relationships
Frank O'Hara's reputation as a representative of the
creative energy and spirit of New York City is well established
in the body of criticism on his life and work.
He adored life ln
the city--his poems are a clear catalogue of that love affair.
But that particular relationship, while of the utmost importance,
is only the beginning.
O'Hara had many affairs of the heart:
some emotional, some physical, some intellectual, some artistic.
His most passionate ones, which are evident in his writing and
directly influenced it, included several if not all of these
aspects.
The poems that include the details of his motion-filled
daily existence are amazingly approachable despite the many injokes and personal references.
His life itself was sufficiently
open and recorded by friends and family that most, if not all, of
these personal references can be uncovered for the original
source: a conversation at the Cedar Tavern, an exhibit at MOMA, a
weekend getaway at Sneden's landing.
More often than not, each drop of a name ln O'Hara's work
reveals a poet, painter or other integral figure in New York
artistic culture of the 1950s and early 60s.
Russell Ferguson's
catalogue to the In Memory of My Feelings exhibit addresses this
aspect of the poems:
40
O'Hara's poetry begins in the middle of real
lives, casually dropping names as if they
were as familiar to the reader as to the
poet.
While the informality of the tone can
at first seem baffling, as a reader one
1S
quickly drawn into O'Hara's world, access to
which is surprisingly easy to obtain.
He
simply assumes that people will be interested
enough to find their way in, as he himself
had·quickly found his way into the worlds of
avant-garde painting and poetry after he came
to New York.
(39)
When O'Hara mentions "Bill" he either means Bill Berkson, a young
poet, or painter Willem de Kooning.
Larry Rivers.
"Larry" refers to artist
Many of New York's artists shared their interests
in such ways, despite the differences in the nature of their
disciplines.
In his essay,
"Larry Rivers: A Memoir," O'Hara
states they "divided time between the literary bar, the San Remo,
and the artist's 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"
(Standing Still 169).
The "we" in question are one poet circle of New York, all within
the same age range, and all friends: O'Hara, V.R. Lang, John
Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and others.
The poets are friends as well
with New York's abstract expressionist painting circle: Larry
41
Rivers, Jackson Pollock, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Robert
Motherwell, to name a few.
Quite often, the artists would utilize the resource of their
friends and peers.
After they worked together on a play, Frank
O'Hara was "amused" enough to pose for an eight-foot-tall nude
portrait by Larry Rivers.
A guide book to one of Larry Rivers'
shows describes his tendency to become involved in
"collaborations with his poet-friends, as in Pyrography: Poem and
Portrait of John Ashbery, 1977-82.
Throughout his career, words
have been an integral part of Rivers' art"
(Remer 23).
The
portrait of Ashbery shows the poet sitting at a typewriter with
an enlarged, typed text of a poem for the background.
Similarly,
Franz Kline incorporates a handwritten version of Frank O'Hara's
work "Poem (I will always love you)" into an etching he made for
the portfolio 21 Etchings and Poems, published by the Morris
Gallery in 1960.
O'Hara originally dedicated the poem to Kline.
Painters, sculptors, writers, and poets interchanged
philosophies, ideas, and styles.
They constructed projects for
one another, and used each other's work as a source of
inspiration.
O'Hara's manuscript of the poem "Portrait of Grace"
has a side note that reads "Rivers' drawing of Grace as a girl
monk."
O'Hara is referring to Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers.
The poem "Berdie" is about Rivers' mother-in-law from his first
marriage.
paintings.
Berdie serves as the model for many of Rivers'
She was also familiar with O'Hara and her former son-
42
in-law's other artistic friends.
The street name in line two of
"Berdie" is one of the locations frequented by Rivers and O'Hara.
O'Hara's poem "Second Avenue" describes the views of the street.
Larry Rivers comments: "His long marvelous poem 'Second Avenue',
1953, was written in my plaster garden studio overlooking that
avenue.
One night I was working on a piece of sculpture of him.
Between poses he was finishing his long poem" (CP 529).
O'Hara's
"Notes on 'Second Avenue' " are a clear indication of the
interrelation of the writers and artists.
O'Hara describes the
sources on the poem as
a newspaper clipping report of [poet] Bunny
Lang's trip to the Caribbean ... a talk with a
sculptor (Larry Rivers, who also sculpts)
about a piece in progress ... a description of
Grace Hartigan painting ... a little
description of a de Kooning WOMAN which I'd
seen recently at his studio ... You see how it
makes it seem very jumbled, while actually
everything
in it either happened to me or I
felt happening ... (Standing Still 39).
The complexities of the relationships and the subsequent
descriptive poem have the same feel as paint that has been
layered to achieve depth: many colors show through, but it is the
whole that forms the image.
43
"Second Avenue"
is one of many O'Hara poems written in
connection to Larry Rivers.
His relationship with Rivers is an
excellent example of how O'Hara's personal and professional lives
often collided within his relations to artistic companions.
Rivers was a friend,
distraction.
a lover, a collaborator, inspiration and a
Rivers produced several portraits of O'Hara,
including a rather infamous full size nude in which the poet is
depicted wearing only a palr of leather boots.
The two worked
together on a series of prints called "Stones," which paired
visual and text elements into one work.
The finished effect is
one that is visual art and poetry, one, the other and
simultaneously.
In his autobiography Rivers writes about their
relationship in terms of reciprocity: "Frank O'Hara was a big
influence on me, but I think I influenced him too; I was already
a working artist in New York [when we met]"
(230).
One of the modes of mutual inspiration shared by O'Hara and
Rivers is the tendency for the immediacy of the moment and its
environment to overtake other factors in their work.
Just as
lunch with a friend might send O'Hara scrambling for a writing
utensil, so Rivers would find inspiration for his paintings and
constructions in the times and places of his daily life.
Abby
Remer describes such an incident in the catalogue to Rivers' 1991
exhibition Public and Private: "In 1959 Rivers walked out of the
Cedar Bar, the popular downtown New York City haunt of the
Abstract Expressionists, with a poem wrapped in a menu.
44
His
initial intention was to illustrate the poem, but this painting
[Cedar Bar Menu I] resul ted ins tead"
(20).13
On a whi te ground
with swatches of bright green, red, and blue in stylized,
stabbing letters Cedar Bar Menu I renders the list of food
choices and their prices: Beef Goulash 1.25 Hawaiian Ham Steak
1.35.
O'Hara does much the same thing in his 1965 poem "Spring's
First Day".
In a white space between stanzas, it reads "BEANS!
regularly 2 cans 35cents" and TUNAFISH! regularly 2 cans 35cents"
(CP245).
Rivers and O'Hara also debated the competing merits of
expression through painting and writing.
In what feels like an
immediate verbal response, one half of a dialogue, O'Hara praises
painting in "To Larry Rivers":
You are worried that you don't write?
Don't be.
It's the tribute of the air that
your paintings don't just let go
of you.
And what poet ever sat down
ln front of a Titian, pulled out
his versifying tablet and began
to drone?
Don't complain, my dear,
You do what I can only name.
(Collected 128)
O'Hara speaks here not only as a somewhat self-effacing art
museum employee, but as a devoted aficionado and still more
devoted friend of a painter.
13
See Appendix Fl.
45
Their relationship, of course, was not one of constant
seriousness and work.
Both men were extremely social creatures,
carousing as if mixing business with pleasure was not just
preferable, but vital.
Rivers comments on typical banter with
O'Hara, saying "So how long can you discuss any subject,
especially behind three martinis?
If any moment of our getting
together began to resemble a seminar, we'd switch to social
gossip, art gossip"
(230).
In a recent article for Modern
Painters Bill Berkson, a younger poet-friend of O'Hara's,
recounts an anecdote that helps indicate the playful regard
O'Hara had for Rivers.
Berkson says "I thought from seeing his
paintings that Larry Rivers must be the sharpest person alive,
but when I got to know him he seemed as confused as anyone else,
not sophisticated at all.
How could that be?
'Maybe he's just come out the other side'"(51).
Frank O'Hara said:
O'Hara's
affection for Rivers extended to his mother-in-law and often
model, Berdie.
She enters as the subject of several poems,
including "Song of Ending," dated October 29, 1957 in which
O'Hara laments:
Berdie, Berdie
where are you, and why?
sometimes I see you in the earth
sometimes in the sky (Collected 279)
46
Berdie had died In August of 1957.
Rivers said that O'Hara's
eulogy made the entire attendance of the funeral cry (331).
Later, Rivers'
In Memory of the Dead, 1966 would serve as a
visual eulogy in remembrance of both Berdie and O'Hara. 14
The
collage shows Berdie seated in a large chair, a familiar pose
used in other paintings.
Below her are tacked up sketch studies
for other paintings including repetitions of the Camel cigarette
camel and one of Rivers' birds.
O'Hara sits at the low center of
the collage, this image taken from a photograph of him while he
was working on the Stones lithographs.
Such intense intermingling of friendship, passion, work and
craft was not unusual in O'Hara's life.
O'Hara moved from muse
to muse, lending insight and inspiration of his own as much as he
took such energy from others.
Through a poem like "Why I Am Not
A Painter," it is possible to understand further some of the ways
in which the painters and poets related. The lines "It's twelve
poems,
I calli it ORANGES" refer to one of O'Hara's earlier
works.
"Oranges: 12 Pastorals" is, as described in "Why I Am Not
A Painter," divided into twelve sections, none of which embraces
orange as a concept, color, or fruit.
O'Hara links the two
poems, yet does not cause them to depend on one another for
meaning.
O'Hara has no intention of creating dependency between
any of his texts.
In response to a request from an editor of a
literary magazine for an explanation of meaning and subject for a
14
See Appendix F2.
47
particular poem, O'Hara expresses a desire for "the poem to be
the subject, not just about it"
97).
("Notes on Second Avenue," 495-
Here again O'Hara shares philosophies with painters.
Wallace Stevens says that modern art "has a reason for
everything.
Even the lack of reason becomes a reason.
Picasso
expresses surprise that people should ask what a picture means
and says that pictures are not intended to have meanings.
explains everything"
(167).
This
While it is overstatement to say
Picasso's position "explains everything," it does lend insight
into how O'Ha'ra worked.
When reading "Why I Am Not A Painter" it
is not necessary to know there actually is a set of twelve poems
called "Oranges".
The detail is not required for clarification.
The connection does, however, lend the two poems a certain sense
of fluid evolution.
The poems prove strong enough individually
to serve as catalysts and descriptors of other works of art.
This particular poem is exemplary of the depth of
intertextuality in O'Hara's work.
The initial manuscript draft
of "Oranges: 12 Pastorals" is dated June-August 1949, during
O'Hara's years at Harvard.
The first publication occurs in 1953
by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in a pamphlet for Grace Hartigan's
twelve-painting exhibition aptly titled "Oranges."
In his volume
on the artist, Robert Mattison confirms O'Hara is the impetus for
Hartigan's Oranges series: "Hartigan remembers telling him in one
of their many conversation over drinks that she would like to do
'a lot of something.'
O'Hara whimsically replied 'How about
48
oranges?
I have a dozen'"
(28).
What we do not know is if
O'Hara had his poems in mind from the beginning or was being
literal about fruit in his kitchen, or both.
The resulting
paintings certainly have as little to do with fruit as the poems.
Each painting has one of O'Hara's pastoral poems rendered in part
or whole in paint, letters and words of varying size, line of the
letters in varying thicknesses.
Some hint at the shape of a
figure or other recognizable form, others are completely
abstract; many contain bright swatches of blue.
Mattison admires
the series for the intensity of the connections between O'Hara's
verbal and Hartigan's visual productions, saying that "her mood
parallels his; sensuous and ironic passages alternate with each
other in the paintings"
(28).
Oranges No.
7 shows a nude male in
flesh tone and white, a large yellow-orange sun encircling his
head like a halo. ls
Large deep blue letters spell out the first
half of the first line of the poem: "As I waded through inky
alfalfa the sun seemed empty"
(Ferguson 45).
The paintings and
poems combine to form a complete presentation not achieved
separately.
The painter teams with the poet again in 1957 for the
publication of O'Hara's Meditations In An Emergency.
A special
edition of fifteen copies includes original drawings by Grace
Hartigan as frontispieces.
Mattison deems the pair a good match
because "O'Hara's ideas paralleled and informed the modernity and
15
See Appendix G.
49
ardor of Hartigan's contemporary paintings"
(35).
O'Hara
dedicates "In Memory of My Feelings" to Hartigan, a poem in which
"the energy is distributed in a pattern of looping enunciations,
without linear impulse or accumulated tension, but rather with
the obsessive ubiquity of a Pollock drip-painting"
(Howard 472) .
A similar situation is found in the case of "Why I Am Not A
Painter," which is included in the catalog for Michael Goldberg's
show at the Martha Jackson Gallery in March and April of 1966.
The In Memory of My Feelings exhibit features Goldberg's Sardines
displayed with O'Hara's poem.
Goldberg executes the cover and
title page of O'Hara's 1960 Odes in ink.16
The pages mix
brightly splashed colors of grass green and ultra pink with
contrasting solid black.
The few stabs O'Hara took at painting himself exhibit both
his fascination with the color that many of the Abstract
Expressionists around him used so vividly and an inability to
produce the kind of layered effects with the paint that he
desired.
O'Hara recognized this inadequacy, but found himself so
often in the studios of his friends,
surrounded by painting
materials, picking up a brush every so often was inevitable.
Equally inevitable, it would seem,
is the influence of O'Hara's
writing on the work of his painter friends.
16
See Appendix E2.
50
r
,
[
Chapter IV
COLLABORATIONS: Friendship and Work Manifested in Ekphrasis
Here the discussion leads us to an important aspect of
O'Hara's connection with painters and painting and, I propose, an
issue central to shaping the contemporary definition of
ekphrasis.
I am referring to the act of collaboration between
artists and writers, which I have mentioned as part of O'Hara's
working life.
Thus far I have looked at the tacit ways in which
particular works of art, the style of the Abstract Expressionist
movement, and personal references to particular Action Painters
enter O'Hara's poems.
But what happens when O'Hara turns his
writing efforts specifically in the same direction as the
creative energy of an artist, so that the two are together on the
same project?
In his Art in America review of the "In Memory of
My Feelings" exhibit, David Lehman answers that such work
reflects exactly the energy of both the artist and the poet, as
well as, more expansively, the movement:
Two great and related themes emerge in the
O'Hara show.
One has to do with the true
nature of improvisation, the other with
collaboration as the tribute art pays to
friendship.
Many of O'Hara's collaborations
with visual artists are odes to spontaneity,
recklessness, accident and chance.
51
(121)
This "spontaneity, recklessness, accident and chance" are typical
of Abstract Expressionist style, where gravity may, just as
easily as the artist, choose where paint would fall.
The Action
Painters' penchant for experiment supported those planned
accidents.
But Lehman's concept of collaboration as "tribute" to
friendship ln art does not entirely cover the sort of
collaboration in which O'Hara participated as a poet.
Two visual
artists working together produce a tribute to their friendship
or, at the least, to their complicity with one another, in art.
An artist and poet working together produce a work of ekphrasis:
a visual and verbal combination representing the intersection not
just of their poetry and painting, but all poetry and painting.
If ekphrasis can include intertextuality in which both the visual
and verbal exist as potential texts, then painters and poets
creating texts together for simultaneous combination is the
ultimate act of ekphrasis.
It is important to consult here what O'Hara himself says
about collaboration in the Lucie-Smith interview:
Larry Rivers and I actually did physically
collaborate on some lithographs called
Stones.
Which were called Stones because we
both did work on them.
I learned how to
write backwards, for instance.
use any transfers.
together.
We did not
We worked on the stones
He did not work on the stone if I
52
wasn't there and I didn't work on the stone
if he wasn't there to see what
I
was doing.
Sometimes we would discuss the placement of
an image which would leave me enough room to
write a text, or I would say where I wanted
the text and then he would decorate the rest
of the stone.
But that's the only time I
think that I've really collaborated.
I've
done other things there some-- well Grace
Hartigan has used some of my poems in
painting.
Or
I
have made pages of words for
Michael Goldberg which he then completed, but
I delivered them in those cases, and then
they went on and did what they wanted.
I
didn't have any say about what they would do
with them.
results.
I was very pleased with the
I think the Rivers thing is the
only thing I really did collaborate on, that
I consider to be a collaboration (4).
Many would say that the intertextual work that O'Hara downplays
in this talk as not "really" collaboration falls well within
conventional definitions.
To say that he has no "say" in what
the artists use in conjunction with his writing is erroneous, not
taking into account the intense visuals signaled by his poetry.
Hartigan's work in the Oranges series, for instance, is certainly
53
not independent of the text.
The work of the two is inextricably
combined into one product.
O'Hara's privileging of the collaboration with Rivers is a
product of the preference for immediacy, of working together in
the moment.
The genesis of the collaboration reflects the sort
of creative spontaneity possible when friends both play and work
together.
Gooch's City Poet chronicles the impetus for Stones in
a rather humorous anecdote:
The project came about one day that summer
[1957] when Tatanya Grossman, whose Universal
Art Editions printmaking workshop was located
in West Islip, Long Island visited Rivers in
Southampton to ask him to work on a series of
lithographs in collaboration with a poet.
O'Hara had been suggested to her as the best
poet to work with Rivers by Barney Rossett,
who was busily preparing Meditations in an
Emergency for Fall publication.
Not knowing
that O'Hara was Rivers' houseguest, Grossman
made her request to Rivers, who responded by
calling out 'Hey Frank!' whereupon O'Hara
appeared in blue jeans.
(297-8).
Gooch indicates the decision to embark on the collaborative
adventure was quick and purposeful: "Always sizing themselves up
against the poets and painters of Paris in the earlier part of
54
the century, when Apollinaire had pasted his poem 'Les Fenetres'
on the back of Delaunay's painting of the same title to establish
an equivalence,
they [O'Hara and Rivers]
immediately agreed to
Grossman's request (298).
It
lS
interesting to note the dates of the Stones range from
1957 to 1960, indicating that O'Hara and Rivers' promise to each
other to truly work together necessitated coming together in
intervals separated by other concerns.
The nature of the
construction, as well, influenced its timing.
The words could
not immediately spring from pen to page, as was O'Hara's usual
inclination.
the images.
Rivers also had to plan adeptly the execution of
The resulting pages are purposeful in composition,
often playful in tone, and wonderfully wild and scattered
visually, an effect that belies the time, attention, and form
O'Hara and Rivers gave to the project.
Stones: Berdie from 1959 visits again the familiar muse of
Rivers' mother-in-Iaw. 17
Her nude figure is suggested in waving
black streaks that outline just the round of her breast and
thighs; the nipples are two dots,
are brief marks.
the nose and lips of the face
Another from the same year, Stones: Energy,
looks and reads like an anthem for the artist, the poet, and the
climate of New York.18
A large hand-drawn graph of squares is
peppered with colors: yellows, reds, and blues.
17
18
See Appendix F3.
See Appendix F4.
55
A starburst or
firework or flower blooms in black and greys.
Energy
lS
found in
O'Hara's words, as well:
we are neither up nor down
red! you are nothing but red
and just as red at midnight as at noon, at dusk maybe
(Ferguson 57)
The final line expresses an attribute of the artists and their
creations, that they have "the ability to absorb attention when
no one is there."
The Stones are works of art, poems of
ekphrasis, equally at home on the wall of a gallery and printed
in a collection of poems 19 •
Having spent some time with the work that O'Hara himself
called collaboration, I would like to turn attention to two
projects O'Hara did not (or would not) mention.
The first is
with artist Joe Brainard, who also wonders what collaboration
between artists really means in his reminiscence in Homage to
Frank O'Hara:
Actually,
in the strict sense of the word,
Frank and I never really collaborated.
(Alas) never on the spot, starting together
from scratch.
Giving and taking.
bouncing off each other.
And
What we did do was
19 The lithographs were printed in a series of portfolios published by
Grossman in 1960, but titled "Tabloscripts." The complete Stones series
toured with the In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art
exhibit in 1999 and selections are presented in Ferguson's text of the same
name as full-color plates.
56
that I'd do something (a collage or cartoon)
incorporating spaces for words, which I'd
give to Frank to 'fill in.'
Usually he would
do so right away, with seemingly little
effort.
(108)
Here Brainard buys into the same definition as O'Hara, one that
locates the two persons in the same physical time and space in
order for the work to be a "true" collaboration.
The collages
constructed can certainly be viewed, however, as both
collaborative and ekphrastic in nature: O'Hara's captions are
witty responses to the visuals put forth by Brainard.
A work
from 1964 uses 1953 Easter Seals to frame a victorian cutout of
flowers and a butterfly that Brainard has shaded in ink. 2o
O'Hara's word balloon reads "I'm not flying I'm thinking."
The
collage is incomplete without the words, the line less
interesting outside of the visual of the butterfly and the blue
Easter Seals.
collaboration.
This mutual dependence is inherent in
The work requires the creativity of each
participant; otherwise the individual could continue with solo
work of image or poem alone.
The end result is something more, a
commentary on words and pictures through the act of their use
together: contemporary ekphrasis.
The second collaboration that O'Hara does not mention in the
interview is a series of black and whites on paper with Norman
20
See Appendix H.
57
Bluhm.
Russell Ferguson recounts that the spontaneous
construction occured on "one rainy Sunday in October of 1960,
[when] O'Hara visited Bluhm in his studio on Park Avenue South,
as he often did"
music.
(60).
The two were talking and listening to
At one point in the conversation, Bluhm used a paintbrush
to "illustrate a point he was making about the music" on a large
sheet of paper tacked to the studio wall.
writing a few words on the same sheet.
O'Hara joined him,
The two proceeded with
other sheets of paper, alternately splashing the surface with
paint and words.
Meet Me in the Park has an emphatic radiating
black swatch of paint with the words "meet me in the park/ if you
love me"
(Ferguson 64) .21
In There I Was a wriggle of white
paint serves as a visual stanza between the black looping letters
of "there I was minding my own business when--" and "buses always
do that to me.,,22
Bluhm and O'Hara crisscrossed the studio from
paper to paper, responding and initiating at the same time.
This
collaboration thoroughly expresses the urgency of the work, and
the sort of close connection with both the painter and his form
that is so integral to O'Hara poems.
Stevens calls this sort of connection a "relation."
I
propose that In contexts where it seems appropriate to use
Stevens' phrase "the relations between poetry and painting," we
might substitute the term "ekphrasis" instead.
My understanding
of O'Hara's work, his responses to and the representation of the
21
See Appendix II.
58
minutiae of his life in New York in his poems, is richer for this
attempt to understand what ekphrasis means and how it might apply
to O'Hara.
Arming oneself with biographical and contextual
information is obviously often useful when approaching any
written work-- in the case of O'Hara's poetry it is necessary.
Since O'Hara biography yields a vast image of poetry in
conjunction with painting, it has been vital to the reading of
O'Hara to discover the philosophy of his painter friends in
addition to uncovering specific painter names.
He was not
influenced solely by a specific movement, such as the first
Abstract Expressionists or the 2 nd Generation that followedi
O'Hara's body of "work reflects an over-arching concern for the
visual, with a special emphasis on painting.
His work as a poet
is an act of ekphrasis, delivering his personal experiences as an
inside member of the New York art scene in sometimes carefully
structured, but more often spontaneous verbal terms.
As an
active participant in both verbal and visual arenas, O'Hara
perpetuates the relation between poetry and painting.
22
See Appendix 12.
59
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Altieri, Charles.
Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in
American Poetry during the 1960s.
Cranbury, NJ: Associated
UP, 1979.
Apollinaire, Guillaume.
(1913-1916).
Ashbery, John.
Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War
Berkeley: U of California P, 1980.
Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987.
Ed. David Bergman.
Selected Poems.
Ashton, Dore.
New York: Knopf, 1989.
New York: Viking, 1985.
The New York School.
Berkeley: U of California P,
1972.
Berkson, Bill.
"A New York Beginner.
/I
Modern Painters 11.3
(1998): 49-53.
and Joe LeSueur, eds.
Homage to Frank O'Hara. Bolinas: Big
Sky, 1988.
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk.
American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Form.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.
Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O'Hara, Bishop,
Ashbery and Merrill.
Breslin, James E. B.
Poetry 1945-1965.
Carroll, Paul.
Crain, Caleb.
New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.
From Modern to Contemporary: American
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.
The Poem in Its Skin. Chicago: Big Table, 1968.
"Frank O'Hara's 'Fired' Self./1
History 9.2
(1997): 287-308.
60
American Literary
,
~
f
i
De La Croix, Horst, Richard G. Tansey and Diane Kirkpatrick, eds.
Gardner's Art through the Ages. 9th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1991.
de Kooning, Elaine.
The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism.
New
York: George Braziller, 1994.
Du Val, Frank.
"Ri vers 75.
II
Larry Ri vers February 1975.
Philadelphia: Olympia Galleries, ltd., 1975. 8-14.
Elledge, Jim, ed.
Frank O'Hara: To Be True to a City.
Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990.
"The La'ck of Gender in Frank O'Hara's Love Poems to Vincent
Warren.
II
Fictions of Masculini ty: Crossing Cul tures,
Crossing Sexualities.
York UP, 1994.
Feldman, Alan.
Ed. Peter F. Murphy.
New York: New
226-37.
Frank O'Hara. Boston: Twayne, 1979.
Ferguson, Russell.
American Art.
In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and
Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art,
1999.
Finkelstein, Norman.
Poetry. 2nd ed.
Gooch, Brad.
The utopian Moment in Contemporary American
Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 1993.
City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara.
New
York: Knopf, 1993.
Heffernan, James A. W.
Museum of words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis
from Homer to Ashbery.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
61
Howard, Richard.
Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry
in the United States Since 1950.
Enlarged edition. New
York: Atheneum, 1980.
Hunter, Sam.
Larry Rivers.
New York: Poses Institute of Fine
Arts, 1965.
New York: Rizzoli, 1989.
Larry Rivers.
Kingsley, April.
The Turning Point: The Abstract Expressionist
and the Transformation of American Art.
New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1992.
Krieger, Murray.
Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
"Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or, Laokoon
Revisited."
McDowell.
Lehman, David.
The Poet as Critic. Ed. Frederick P. W.
Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1967. 3-26.
The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York
School of Poets.
New York: Anchor Books, 1999.
"O'Hara's Artful Life." Art in America February 2000: 11621, 143.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim.
Painting and Poetry.
Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of
Trans. Ellen Frothingham.
Boston:
Roberts Brothers, 1887.
LeSueur, Joe.
Introduction.
Selected Plays.
By Frank O'Hara.
New York: Full Court, 1978. v-vii.
Libby, Anthony.
"O'Hara on the Silver Range." Contemporary
Literature 17 (1976): 240-62.
62
Lowney, John.
"The 'Post-Anti-Esthetic' Poetics of Frank
O'Hara. /I
Contemporary Literature 32 (1991): 244-64.
Lucie-Smith, Edward.
"An Interview with Frank O'Hara./I Standing
Still and Walking in New York. Ed. Donald Allen. Bolinas:
Grey Fox, 1975.
Mattison, Robert Saltonstall.
Grace Hartigan: A Painter's World.
New York: Hodson Hills, 1990.
Molesworth, Charles.
The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary
American Poetry. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1979.
Moramarco, Fred.
Poets./I
O'Hara, Frank.
"John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara: The Painterly
Journal of Modern Literature 5 (1976): 436-62.
Art Chronicles 1954-1966.
1975.
New York:
George Braziller, 1990.
Collected Poems. Ed. Donald Allen.
New York: U of
California P, 1995.
Early Writing.
Jackson Pollock.
Ed. Donald Allen.
Bolinas: Grey Fox, 1977.
New York: George Braziller, 1959.
"Larry Rivers: Why I Paint As I Do./I
Horizon Sept 1959:
95-102.
Poems Retrieved.
Ed. Donald Allen.
Bolinas: Grey Fox,
1977.
Standing Still and Walking in New York.
Bolinas: Grey Fox,
1975.
Perelman, Bob.
The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing
and Literary History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, UP, 1996.
63
Perloff, Marjorie.
Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters.
New York:
George Braziller, 1977.
Preminger, Alex and T.V.F. Brogan, eds.
The New Princeton
Princeton, N.J.:
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
Princeton UP, 1993.
Remer, Abby.
Larry Rivers: Public and Private.
New York:
Studley, 1990.
Rivers, Larry.
What Did I Do?: The Unauthorized Autobiography.
With Arnold Weinstein.
New York: Harper Collins, 1992.
Robillard, Valerie and Els Jongeneel, eds.
Pictures into Words:
Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis.
Amsterdam:
vu UP, 1998.
Stevens, Wallace.
The Necessary Angel.
New York: Knopf, 1951.
Varnedoe, Kirk.
Jackson Pollock.
Vendler, Helen.
Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American
Poets.
New York: MOMA, 1998.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.
Von Hallberg, Robert.
"Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals."
The Cambridge History of American Literature.
Sacvan Bercovitch.
Ward, Geoff.
Vol. 8.
Ed.
New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. 11-212.
Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets.
New York: St. Martin's, 1993.
" 'Why It's Right There in the Process Verbal': The New
York School of Poets." The Cambridge Quarterly 21 (1992):
273-82.
64
Weaver, William.
79.1
"Remembering Frank O'Hara."
(1994): 139-46.
65
Southwest Review
Appendix A
"Laokoon"
(De La Croix 176)
Appendix Bl
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Appendix Cl
A SMALL BOUQUET
must.·
we
ao
t.rusted
hellrtn
not
~now
III
VIolet
be
ftul
what
c
r
a
the ro~@'a
soft
lOVI!!
y
Sa
\l
1
1
t
d
o
u
,.
r
s
r
e
e
h
t
Y
J"
o
5e
11 eve
that all
me
not
h
n
I!!H"Y
Ii
11
II
1
Y
t
1
n
t
e
d
1:1
rae
I
II
U
"A Small Bouquet"
n
8
n
w
e
f
a
h
t
low
r
t
b
e
h
me8D1nF.~
m
0
0
n
a
you.
0
,1,
t
love
Y t
s
e
1I'Y
but
whole
1 11(0'8
1
1
1
w
to
~en
s
~hole
our
u
r
e
0
ly euore
y
(O'Hara Retrieved 9)
n •
t!
t
0
0
er-
Appendix C2
AUTOMOBILES
Thle
or .Y IIdol ••c4nce.
~poh1n.
"~d,
111 fl.lch II tnl'llt to 014
II
b
Obttl.. sell
at WI"
r
reSt" 111 oil
to
r
fI
r
P
.,
r
1
p ••
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to
y
n
V
II t
•
1 h
n
"
81!l!U.'
"Automobiles"
III
II
1
l
"
•r
h
a
1
@'
II
t:
f '"
are we not happy rld~?
•
(O'Hara Retrieved 10)
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t
r
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1.
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r
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r
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11
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t
1.
a
d
t.
80
b~.UI"
perlol' to v"de.trUne in it:-
J
do not lean out of m,
door ~J d.l'~
bouis
d P-
tl
1
e
II
r
r
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8
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11
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e
80 II
1
"0
Appendix C3
ACALLIGRAM
Under this hat. 1
(nuts!
s
oh
a
t.ry
thl!i! dry yellow
1t
straw
consternation
piecg
e~B
you)
resides the coneclence of my friend, 1~&
g tortoise 1n th~
het sun
0)"
Gs
Nmlt!09ry~
Bron~
:tina. -
b
e
Irt"
s
e
lDeet
~r3he
~bot-
eyes
whOE'e
not
I shou14
me~dl
with.
i
1
e
n
t
b
r
It
o
thls
w
it
ae..
is haugh-
tJ,-
lnt
sometimea
n
l1mlt-
.., 1
II
it'
thaer
"A Calligram
lt
the
tie
o
m
a
k
It
8
the
llIan
7e.h~
(O'Hara Retrieved 8)
t!
Appendix C4
POEM
WHE
EWHEE
d
ry never
g
alw.lY$ perhaps
n
never alwayi
W
bee whee
e
J
-cd
r, wick ;1.1
wicked- . gold, w
y
0
aukn
a
like:
i\
lire blue velvet
11in one wind
uttering
a
n
t
F
t
e
y
o
u
u
h
er yo
a
r
e
t
g
r
e w
not i
t
h
It v
e
be
oh
e
()
f
0
mm,pretty.
S
y
c
r
heh!e3Zade
'0
g
o
boo
a
n
0
e
d
f
1
n
paint
r
l!-
my
e
S
o
pots
n
o
(';
y
e
our
a
ts
swe
r
p
t
a
really
()
for ever!
please
n
P
S
It
t
•1
my
r
"Poem (WHE EWHEE)"
(O'Hara CP 25)
Appendix D
OJ
o
'd
OJ
>=:
H
cti
>
rl
~
u
o
rl
rl
o
p.,
>=:
~
o
Ul
U
cti
I-)
Appendix El
Michael Goldberg "Sardines" (Ferguson 23)
Appendix E2
o I) ~ ~ S
1\1 111 "1"£"" IIL\
, ""',,
I'n l"
nl \lILII U I (;"1 11111 '"
,
Michael Goldberg "Odes"
(Ferguson 69)
Appendix Fl
Larry Rivers "Cedar Bar Menu I"
(Hunter 73)
Appendix F2
Larry Rivers "In Memory of the Dead. 1966 n
(Hunter 240)
Appendix F3 and F4
Larry Rivers "Stones: Berdie"
(Ferguson 55)
~ ,-
-~
-~
-
....
"
"00". <It J44S ...11 ~ 1.E
U
IS
}Our Jjv4,._~d
I as IS ~o
~ib
..t-
~
'I \;t,
r
~ 1 bClst~r;"
» cl ho"1; SIlJ'cC: l'Ioth I~ '
£ i$it;r
\",~bcl
1iI1i s.~
10 abstJr!, ~ltO\
tnO~E
O ~"
\"""r'J
oU~r
IS
To
1i
"ih
t:t-
, stlnc., . alld
w~a.
~
()h~
oM
is
.- ......,
Larry Rivers "Stones : Energy"
(Ferguson 57)
Appendix G
Grace Hartigan "Oranges No.7"
(Ferguson 45)
Appendix H
Joe Brainard and Frank O'Hara "I'm Not Really Flying I'm
Thinking" (Ferguson 111)
Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara
"Meet Me In The Park"
(Ferguson 64)
Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara
"There I Was" (Ferguson 66)
VITA
Karen Ware was born to Diane and Greg O'Connell in Lexington,
Kentucky on November 19, 1973; fourth of five children, second
of two daughters.
After graduating from Presentation Academy in
1991, she received a B.A. in English and Psychology with a minor
in Art History from Spalding University in Louisville in 1994.
In December of 1994 she married Kyle Ware.
Karen began graduate work at the University of Louisville as a
Graduate Assistant to the Office of the President in 1996.
In
the Fall of 1997. she was granted a Teaching Assistantship and
began work as an instructor of Composition.
She joined the
staff of UofL's Effective Learning Program and the Kentucky
Governor's Scholars Program in 1999.
Karen will begin coursework at UofL in the Ph.D. program in
Rhetoric and Composition in the fall of 2001.
She currently
resides in Old Louisville with Kyle, Sasha and Kitty.
82