Before I got up this morning, I spent some time in bed reading through Joe LeSueur’s delicious new memoir, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, a wonderfully intimate & informal portrait of a world that is utterly gone now. There are some amazing moments in this book, such as the tale of how an incident with Chester Kallman convinced FOH to give up anonymous sex or how, far more reticently, LeSueur visiting O’Hara on his deathbed proved unable to say anything or even reach out to touch his dying friend. 

 

I’d paid no attention to the work of Frank O’Hara until I saw the mesmerizing television show* on him in Richard Moore’s Poetry USA series on PBS, a blur of constant motion – O’Hara on the phone & typewriter simultaneously while managing to keep up a conversation with the camera, drink & smoke, he was the ultimate multitasker decades before that term came into use – until, in the show’s closing credits as I recall (I haven’t actually seen the whole thing in 37 years), the voiceover mentions that O’Hara has recently died. I remember at the time sitting in front of the little black-&-white TV completely stunned, as if I’d seen a wonderful door open, only to have it slammed shut in the last 10 seconds of the show.

 

O’Hara’s death, not unlike that of Jack Spicer a year earlier, marked a critical moment in the history of the New American poetry. Both poets had been the central social organizers of distinctly geographic literary communities, and their passing transformed each town. Almost overnight, or so it seemed at a distance, the New York scene shifted its focus away from this group of largely gay men born in the 1920s – Ashbery was in Europe, Schuyler too much the recluse – and onto younger (& straighter) acolytes. The role Ted Berrigan would soon take in the environs around Gem Spa hardly seems conceivable in a world in which Frank O’Hara attends a party whose primary memorable feature is a lascivious tale told by W.H. Auden’s partner.

 

Auden’s role with regards to the New York School both was & was not like that taken by Kenneth Rexroth toward the poetries that crowded into San Francisco during the 1950s. The two poets were parallel in that Auden, like Rexroth, functioned at least partially as a sponsor, going out of his way to put Ashbery’s second book into the Yale Younger Poets series for first books. And, also like Rexroth, apparently felt some ambivalence about what these youngsters were up to. But, whereas Rexroth aligned with the bulk of the New Americans in his distrust for an American poetics that was cravenly derivative of the conservative mainstream poetry of the British isles – a distrust you can find amid the Beats, the Projectivists & the so-called San Francisco renaissance** – Auden virtually was British poetry, easily the most established & celebrated British poet since Yeats, even if he was now living variously in Brooklyn & on St. Marks Place.

 

I’ve sometimes wondered if the ease with which the first generation New York School connected with New York trade publishers wasn’t simply an accident of proximity, but also occurred at least in part because the NY School, at least until Mr. Berrigan showed up – and this really is Ted’s great contribution to this tendency – did not challenge the paradigm that American poetics was a tributary of British letters, a paradigm that has been central to all variants of the school of quietude.

 

 

 

 

* Listen to O’Hara’s reading of “Having a Coke with You” from that TV show here.

 

** Virtually everyone who at that point took William Carlos Williams seriously. While one can similar attitudes in American poetry over a century earlier, Williams rather steady campaign of negativity towards Eliot resonated with the rise of New Criticism, which had gain control over many of the English departments after WW2 even if the New Critics themselves had long been spent as poets. In this regard, the stance taken by the Objectivists, the first wave of Williams followers, deserves more scrutiny. It is also worth noting, of course, that this debate between anglophiles and those arguing for a “new” or “indigenous” poets was ongoing as early as the 1840s. The fact that American universities looked to England for legitimacy in their model of post-secondary education led most early U.S. colleges to align with the anglophiles, a phenomenon that is still visible in many universities.