CROSSROADS | A Tribute to Frank O'Hara

A Tribute to Frank O'Hara

Memorial Day 1950

—John Ashbery

I've always felt a special connection to Frank's "Memorial Day 1950." For one thing, I rescued it from oblivion. It wasn't in his papers when he died. Then I remembered I had once typed it out in a letter to Kenneth Koch when he was in France on a Fulbright. I had been trying to persuade Kenneth, who at that time was insisting that he and I were the only important young American poets, to include Frank in our mini-cenacle, and sent him Frank's poems in an effort to convince him. I was successful since Kenneth returned persuaded and kept the letter in his files.

I first read the poem in the summer of 1950 (I assume it had been written on Memorial Day of that year), on a trip to visit Frank in Boston. He was staying in a house on the back of Beacon Hill that belonged to his friend Cervin ("Cerv") Robinson's family, who were away. I had graduated from Harvard in 1949 and was living in New York. Frank, though a year older than I, graduated in 1950 since he had spent two years in the Navy during the war. I was missing him and Boston, and I remember our going to lots of movies ("Panic in the Streets" and Olivier's "Hamlet" among them) and drinking zombies (a newly invented drink, I think) at a bar near the State House. I too stayed at the Robinsons' and remember admiring Frank's room for the kind of Spartan chic he always managed to create around him. The room looked out on a courtyard of trees and was practically bare except for an army cot and blanket and a frying pan on the floor, used as an ashtray, an idea he got from George Montgomery, a sort of arbiter of Spartan chic who had been at Harvard with us. Hence, no doubt, the line: "How many trees and frying pans I've loved and lost." There were probably reproductions from MOMA and maybe a clay candelabra, but I don't remember them.

The poem's aggressively modernist tone may seem a little dated today, but at the time such figures as Max Ernst, Gertrude Stein, Boris Pasternak, Paul Klee, Auden and Rimbaud were far from being accepted cultural icons, at least in the world of Boston-Cambridge. (The year before, Frank and I had attended a concert that featured the premier of Schoenberg's String Trio. We both loved it, but I remember Frank getting into an argument with a young member of the Harvard music faculty who insisted that Schoenberg was literally crazy, and that Frank was too for liking him.)

If his truculent modernist stance, through no fault of his, inevitably seems old-fashioned today, his political incorrectness, as illustrated in the passage about the sewage singing under his bright white toilet seat, was decades ahead of its time.

To paraphrase his Lana Turner poem: "oh Frank O'Hara we love you get up."

from Memorial Day 1950¹

Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world;
just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down
outside my window by a crew of creators.
Once he got his axe going everyone was upset
enough to fight for the last ditch and heap
of rubbish.

Through all that surgery I thought
I had a lot to say, and named several last things
Gertrude Stein hadn't had time for; but then
the war was over, those things had survived
and even when you're scared art is no dictionary.
Max Ernst told us that.

How many trees and frying pans
I loved and lost! Guernica hollered look out!
but we were all busy hoping our eyes were talking
to Paul Klee. My mother and father asked me and
I told them from my tight blue pants we should
love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures.
Wasted child! I'll club you on the shins! I
wasn't surprised when the older people entered
my cheap hotel room and broke my guitar and my can
of blue paint.

At that time all of us began to think
with our bare hands and even with blood all over
them, we knew vertical from horizontal, we never
smeared anything except to find out how it lived.
Fathers of Dada! You carried shining erector sets
in your rough bony pockets, you were generous
and they were lovely as chewing gum or flowers!
Thank you! [. . .]

The Dirty Poems of Frank O'Hara

—Elaine Equi

I have always found the idea that poetry should be uplifting .a depressing one. Our ideal self is our most boring self, except perhaps as a study in how far we will go to maintain clean hands, a clear conscience and an unequivocal demarcation between our nobler (or at least our more politically correct) instincts and our baser ones. For the most part, "negative" emotions such as greed, envy, cruelty or pettiness are rarely allowed in poetry except as bad guys to be killed off, then transcended. Occasionally, a poet (particularly a confessional poet) will confess to them, but always with a sense that he or she has sinned. Unfortunately even lust, with its blatant objectification of the other, no longer seems quite acceptable.

Of course, not all poetry makes human emotion the focal point of its content. But even in more abstract and experimental styles, poets often assume the moral high-ground of being set apart from the world of industry, ambition and back-stabbing aggression.

Perhaps that is why, when looking over all of Frank O'Hara's most impressive body of work, I keep returning to the two following rather modest lyrics on "dirt" and "hate." First of all, consider how amazing it is to even find "dirt" in a poem. Easily, nonchalantly, it locates us within the urban experience. In poems extolling nature, one finds "earth." In the country, there is rich "loam." But in Frank O'Hara (and in New York City) one finds simple and unpretentious dirt. Dirt is pollution, the inevitable by-product of commerce. And in poetry, commerce (as we know) is a dirty word. Yet here there is no need to separate the two worlds. In fact, it would be impossible to do so. "You don't refuse to breathe do you"?

Dirt is also slang for gossip, dish, the juicy lowdown. Dirt, like talk, is cheap. This connotation of the word seems exceedingly appropriate in helping to characterize O'Hara's style and contribution to contemporary poetry. In his work, he gossiped about everything from artists and parties to the weather, creating an aura of intimacy, excitement and expectation around whatever he chose to discuss. Today we have the tabloids to satisfy our prodigious appetite for dirt. But perhaps, if we were less threatened by our own ambiguity, the need to vilify others wouldn't be quite so strong.

In "Song" the literal and figurative qualities of dirt morph into a single character familiar to all of us: the bad influence ("attractive as his character is bad"). It is typical of O'Hara that the poem, in its way, celebrates the whole idea of bad influences, finding them to be both seductive and necessary— even educational ("is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly"). Obviously, Frank is ready and willing to avail himself of this and, we may assume, many other bad influences. True, he was writing in the '50s and '60s when smoking, drinking and promiscuity all seemed more sensible modes of behavior, but the underlying message of finding nothing pure or uncompromised has wider applications. While hinting at a sexual encounter, the poem itself is about those things.

In "Poem" on the other hand, Frank assumes the role of bad influence by encouraging the person he's addressing, as well as the reader, to experience (actually, enjoy) darker emotions such as hate, unkindness and selfishness. Surprisingly, it turns out to be a sweet and gentle poem of assurance that one need not always be good in order to be loved.

I must admit that this has always been a favorite poem. Poets look to other, more well-known poets for permission—and for me, this permission feels retroactively custom made. To a woman who is tired of being passive and nurturing, and to a poet who is tired of being sensitive, and finally to someone who is just plain tired, living in our relentlessly competitive and upbeat times, it offers relief. "Don't be shy of unkindness, either/ it's cleansing and allows you to be direct."

O'Hara is also a great one for mocking the heroic notion that artists feel more deeply than your average individual and suffer more because of it. "Think of filth, is it really awesome/ Neither is hate." Absurd as the idea of "poet as Designated Empath" sounds, variations of it continue to live in the public imagination of what a poet is and does. That's why refusing to take such notions seriously is still a radical step.

Art stays art by maintaining strict borders between itself and the rest of life. Like Duchamp who came before him, and Andy Warhol who came after him, Frank O'Hara, whether intentionally or not, is one of the figures who questioned and minimized borders. In the sacred temple of fifties art, O'Hara's work was like a window that let in, not only fresh air, but also dirt.

Maybe if the battle between high and low culture had ended back then, Frank's poems might be merely interesting or just terribly entertaining to us today. They would have served their purpose. Instead, when I reread them, they strike me with a now-more-than-ever vitality.

Art is not so easily democratized. It continues to seek new ways to reclaim its privileged status and frighten worshippers into hushed subservience. But if there is a way to be both an aesthete and a populist, Frank O'Hara found it.

In addition to the great pleasure his work gives, it also teaches a valuable lesson. Thanks to him, when art becomes religion (whether of the traditional or avant-garde variety), I know what to do. I light a candle to dirt.

Poem

Hate is only one of many responses
true, hurt and hate go hand in hand
but why be afraid of hate, it is only there
think of filth, is it really awesome
neither is hate
don't be shy of unkindness, either
it's cleansing and allows you to be direct
like an arrow that feels something

out and out meanness, too, lets love breathe
you don't have to fight off getting in too deep
you can always get out if you're not too scared

an ounce of prevention's
enough to poison the heart
don't think of others
until you have thought of yourself, are true

all of these things, if you feel them
will be graced by a certain reluctance
and turn into gold

if felt by me, will be smilingly deflected
by your mysterious concern

Song

Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that's what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirty
that's what you think of in the city
you don't refuse to breathe do you

someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very
he's attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes

that's what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that's not a thought that's soot

and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don't refuse to breathe do you

The Sanity of Frank O'Hara

—Thom Gunn

At first I found it difficult relating "To the Harbormaster" with what I had already read by Frank O'Hara. I knew, I suppose, mainly the Lunch Poems, written in a relaxed free verse with a gentle jokey tone, full of the trivia of his lunch-hour, which is somehow never boring. He enjoys himself in those poems, and we enjoy ourselves too, his style being immensely seductive (it's the rhetoric of pretending to have no rhetoric).

But "To the Harbormaster" is so sad! This one does not seem improvised but is written, like late Shakespeare, in iambic lines moving irregularly between tetrameter and pentameter, which gives the poem a solemn and deliberate sound. "I am always tying up/ and then deciding to depart." Such an undecorated statement may sound like the bemused self- deprecation of the Lunch Poems, but it has more disastrous consequences. The mastering image of the poem is of the body as boat— O'Hara is both boat and captain of the boat: "with the metallic coils of the tide/ around my fathomless arms" (the arms as ship's screws? He sounds a little like Inspector Gadget), "or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder/ in my hand and the sun sinking" he is comically at a loss, with his penis useless in his hand: it is too late, too late for anything, he is unable to understand the forms of his vanity, and by that word he does not mean self-conceit, but the essential triviality of human affairs, vanitas vanitatem. The rhetoric of this poetry subsumes the jokes and the slightly grotesque images in a quiet yearning despair.

After the sun has started sinking, the poem is able to accommodate even the offer of his will to the Harbormaster. But who is the Harbormaster? Before I read Brad Gooch's book, I couldn't make out if the poem was addressed to a lover or to God. Gooch tells us it is to the painter Larry Rivers, but that still does not eliminate the presence of other possibilities: it is spoken, after all, to one who is in charge, or seems to be, the lover with whom he can find no repose, lover as god, rather like the addressee of Rochester's poem "Absent from Thee" (his wife, perhaps, spoken in terms of a God from whom he has estranged himself through his vanity).

All of which sets us up for the admirable stoicism of the ending—sturdy, brave and truthful:

Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Waves are the medium for a ship as the air is the medium for a human being. They exist in an eternity different from God's, and different again from the life-span of the ship or the man, and opposed to both, in a sense. That is the way things are, and O'Hara had better trust in the sanity of his body. "Sanity"—what a great word! It appears that both the light-hearted hedonism of other poems and the stoicism of this are equally based on this common sense, this steady health of mind.

To The Harbormaster

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

¹All citations from Collected Poems by Frank O'Hara. Copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratix of the Estate of Frank O'Hara. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Random House, Inc.