Before Optimism Turned to Ashes
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry Before Optimism Turned to Ashes By Phoebe Pettingell Frank O’hara was the John Keats of the New York School of Poets. Two of its larger figures, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, lived...
...O’Hara, who ultimately worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and wrote reviews for ART news, was equally affected by painting and sculpture...
...Writing this review, for instance, I have transposed sentences and whole paragraphs in seconds...
...Similarly, in “Geraniums Before Blue Mountain” the poet examines a picture by the little-known German Expressionist painter August Macke, but only in the final stanza does she reveal that this budding talent died in the trenches of World War I before he could further develop his gifts...
...In the new collection’s opening poem, “Wake-Up Call,” she observes: the longer you live there’s more not to go back to, and what you demand in your gratitude and greed is more life in which to get so attached to something, someone or someplace, you’re sure you’ll die right then when you can’t have it back, something you don’t even know the name of yet, but will be yours before receding as an indispensable ache...
...Try!, written for the Cambridge Poets’ Theater—where Gorey designed the sets and so many of the young writers of that period composed plays—is enormously witty...
...or conversely that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial,” O’Hara wrote in another of his teasing statements...
...After demobilization he matriculated at Harvard, where Edward Gorey was his roommate...
...If O’Hara’s work lacks the gravitas ultimately achieved by Koch and Ashbery, his clear, youthful voice will nonetheless continue to evoke a heady, hopeful time in our cultural history—before optimism turned to ashes...
...As Ford observes, he would have loved cell phones: Not infrequently, one has a sense of being in the presence of someone who is textmessaging while listening to his iPod and watching television...
...The closer one reads him, the more one discovers the breadth of his own reading and concerns...
...As our lives speed up, we observe the passing scene in flashes...
...These inspirations provided antidotes to the increasingly rigid neoformalism then afflicting verse written in English...
...Salter takes us back to an era when people read poetry for pleasure— “in canoes,” as Randall Jarrell remarked wistfully...
...I don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? Unfortunately, death eventually sets our boundaries, making a writer’s work finite and fixed...
...He started out as a musician at the New England Conservatory...
...Now its bumptious, campy inflections fill the pages of a newly issued volume, Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems (Knopf, 264 pp., $30.00), edited by Mark Ford...
...You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things...
...The console television with three channels...
...Back in the days of the typewriter, I could not make those changes, unless I was ready to laboriously retype the whole piece...
...Eliot...
...Salter, as she experiences the present, often seems to be imagining how it will appear in retrospect...
...In other words, the decades when we were growing up have already receded into a different world—almost “Martian,” Salter observes...
...People bored with or intimidated by formalism found his cheeky spontaneity a breath of fresh air, of a piece with women who were giving up girdles and men who were abandoning fedoras...
...There are always e-mails to read, videos to watch, people to call...
...His acute eye and finely tuned ear combined with his breezy idiolect and thoughtful intelligence to create a style expressive of a generation that returned from a brutal war intent on throwing off old conventions and seeking new sensations...
...His fascination with Dada provoked the effusion, “Oh...
...Our responsibilities did not begin/ in dreams, though they began in bed,” O’Hara wrote, tweaking Delmore Schwartz’ seriousness...
...Kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas...
...Browning was a master of this, and his disciple Lowell intermittently mounted a similar project in the mid-20th century...
...You have to leave the house to mail a letter...
...One of the pleasures of reading A Phone Call to the Future is watching her psyche transition from youth to middle age and tracing her developing perceptions...
...in silence and slow motion it crept up, a gloved fist of darkness This description is not mere whimsy...
...Salter has always possessed an eye for detail and an instinct for juxtaposition...
...what you’re saying is Lord, surprise me with even more to miss...
...We have already forgotten “the patience of the past,” when conventional ovens took hours to cook and you had to be home to receive phone calls, or even to know someone had called...
...Black-and-white picture...
...What appeared to be a somewhat breathless musing on love and art suddenly turns into a shocking instance of violence as eroticism...
...But for the most part, modernists and postmodernists have seen history as a collection of shards so broken they defy reconstruction: Any mosaic must be assembled from fragments...
...The approach is vividly apparent in the title poem of her new collection, which begins: Who says science fiction is only set in the future...
...His youthful, exuberant voice never darkened...
...O’Hara also admired the work of Jackson Pollock, and the violent energy expressed in his paintings is reproduced in some of the poet’s linguistic effects...
...Much anthologized pieces like “The Day Lady Died” or “Poem” (which begins “Lana Turner has collapsed...
...Formalists initially reacted to the New York School much the way they responded to the Beats: as know-nothings focusing on trivial themes when they bothered to write about anything discernable...
...Writers as diverse as Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill and W.S...
...O’Hara enjoyed inserting his friends in poems that bristle with references to the writers and painters of his circle...
...He hated to be pinned down...
...The “I do this, I do that” poems, as he called them, captured the way we respond to immediate stimuli: It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs...
...One suspects that Robert Lowell’s switch from the high formalism of Lord Weary’s Castle to the unbuttoned confessional verse of Life Studies o w es more than a little to reading O’Hara...
...After a while, the story that looks least believable is the past...
...Striking up a friendship with Ashbery, he began to explore the works of French poets—in particular Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy, who would remain lifelong influences...
...Like Koch, O’Hara was fond of cracking jokes...
...A baby being taught by its parents to wave good-bye to a departing train points “vaguely at a world of things/ she’s just come to know, and which now must go away...
...Mark Ford rhapsodizes on how much O’Hara would have loved cell phones, but if he had been text-messaging his lyrics instead of sending them off via old-fashioned snail mail, their ephemera would probably have been lost within moments...
...Salter’s understated emotional currents and wry perspectives often invoke the 1920s, when Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie and others of their ilk buoyed readers before the more aggressive, masculine tones of modernism took over...
...In “My Heart,” he proclaims: And if some aficionado of my mess says “That’s not like Frank!,” all to the good...
...Constanza Bonarelli” describes a bust the sculptor Bernini carved, portraying his nubile mistress: from the blind intensity of her gaze to the somewhat swollen parted lips, to the parting, above her rumpled chemise, of two soft breasts his hands lifted from stone After five sensuous verses imagining the artist’s feelings about his model portrayed in marble, Salter tells how, when he discovered Constanza was cuckolding him with his brother, Bernini sent one of his apprentices to slash the face of the living woman “with a tool/ not so unlike the one” he used to sculpt her ravishing image...
...once this country entered World War II, he enlisted in the Navy and served as a sonar man in the South Pacific...
...First, down the sidewalk where the laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on...
...Memorial Day 1950” begins fiercely: Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world...
...Whether describing falling rain as dotted pencil lines (“Point of View”) or musing on the work of some artist preserving a scene or expression in paint or stone, she is fascinated with the way humans try to snatch up the impermanent...
...Perhaps in the future we will have little devices implanted in our brains that chant verse to us whenever we long for it...
...He also succumbed to the spell of the Russians Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak, and the Spaniards Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado, revolutionary poets who appealed to his yearning for a more romantic and experiential kind of modernism...
...One has the feeling Eugène Ionesco’s surreal The Bald Soprano is out on the town with Noel Coward’s Private Lives...
...Merwin—not to mention Koch and Ashbery—display different aspects of his inspiration...
...Therefore subsequent works, though they may evince emotional maturing, rarely display much formal advancement...
...It may be that poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail...
...He also mentioned lovers and heroes like Mayakovsky, who seemed just as present to him as the people he saw every day...
...the former died in 2002, the latter remains at the height of his powers...
...Until that time, such poets as there are will likely continue to wax nostalgic for the passing moment...
...But this is not a case of artistic stasis...
...Two of its larger figures, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, lived to become Grand Old Men...
...Frank O’Hara’s “seize the moment” style exudes, at the same time, nostalgia for what is already passing...
...O’Hara was only 40 when he was killed in 1966 in an accident on a Fire Island beach...
...His play Try...
...They protect them from falling bricks, I guess...
...In this, he resembled Edna St...
...O’Hara soon switched from music to English and began writing poems...
...In retrospect, these criticisms sound like those of unsophisticated museum-goers who, when confronted with Abstract Expressionist paintings, scornfully claim their three-year-old could do better...
...just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down outside my window by a crew of creators...
...Perhaps this is why so much poetry has become “academic”—only apt to be read in classrooms and workshops where readers can spend 10 minutes unpacking and discussing a single line...
...That is Salter’s point...
...Mary Jo Salter’s graceful formalism derives from a countermovement among O’Hara’s contemporaries: writers like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Mona Van Duyn, and Howard Nemerov, who kept metrical poetry and even rhyme fresh while others experimented wildly...
...A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 222 pp., $26.95), Salter’s sixth collection, includes the best from her five previous volumes plus 18 new offerings...
...The Young Turk poets of the ’50s and ’60s often tried their hands at stream-ofconsciousness and drug-driven lyrics...
...In the new “Lunar Eclipse,” she sees how A shadow-boxer’s blow had caught the moon’s left jaw...
...A lengthy paper could be written on his use of musical effects...
...Once he got his axe going everyone was upset enough to fight for the last ditch and heap of rubbish...
...O’Hara came of age among a generation of poets trying to break free of what he called the “deadening and obscuring and precious effect” of T.S...
...The poem is a eulogy for the late Anthony Hecht, whose brilliant verse sparred with the darkest themes...
...Their technical skills and ear for music are honed early on...
...His distractible attention flitted around so much that some of his longer poems seem merely a jumble of ideas and images...
...Toward the end of his short life he wrote odes that show the influence of his foreign models...
...But they were just as addicted to literary allusions as the members of the Neometaphysical School...
...Manual controls: the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven...
...Salter is always attempting to memorialize the fleeting moment...
...In “The Accordionist,” Salter watches the windows of a subway car pulling away from the platform and suddenly imagines life as frames of a sped-up film...
...A Phone Call to the Future” shows us how rapidly expanding technology causes us to perceive the world—and respond to it—in new ways...
...Today we tend to be distracted as well from reading anything that does not grab our attention immediately...
...when mnemonic devices like rhyme and meter made verse easy to memorize and people could recall stanzas at will...
...The spoof lets us in on the secret of O’Hara’s tone: He wrote as if communicating with a good friend...
...Victorian poets often tried to revivify history in order to place their own era in perspective...
...Vincent Millay, whose intimate, conversational voice made her the darling of the poetry world in her time...
...Like Millay, O’Hara often resorted to sentimentality when deeper emotion eluded him...
...Lyric poets tend to be precocious...
...Some later poems render the boxes of Joseph Cornell in rectangular stanzas, while the expansive broad streaks of Willem de Kooning are echoed in lines sweeping across the page...
...The poems in Salter’s debut volume, Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), are as technically accomplished as her latest work...
...and similar absurdist lists...
...The Selected Poems Ford has put together is a salutary reminder that there was much more to O’Hara than “I do this, I do that...
...Yet at his strongest O’Hara profoundly affected the development of American poetry...
...His 1959 “Personism: A Manifesto” skewers the grandiose statements founders of new schools of poetry published in their small magazines: “Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody yet knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to . . . abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry...
...It brims with references to popular culture, the joys of cruising and camp admiration for sultry female stars: As Marilyn Monroe says, it’s a responsibility being a sexual symbol, and as everyone says, it’s the property of a symbol to be sexual...
...Like the shining surface of a pond, Salter’s calmness sometimes lulls the reader into a false sense of dreamy pleasure— until she suddenly reveals what lies underneath the sunlit dazzle...
...Inevitably, however, it reveals some of his limitations too...
...Actually, the easygoing, throwaway manner was only one of O’Hara’s many modes, as this anthology demonstrates...
...have made this accessible style the one most associated with O’Hara...
Vol. 91 • January 2008 • No. 1
