Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2014, 86pp. ISBN 9780872866171. $10.46 hardcover.

At no point can the artist, as a living human being, be totally divorced from his social existence. This recalls Picasso's famous remark that there is no abstract art. The major artist makes us feel his connection above and beyond any literal comment. He is there as apples are there, as dirty napkins are there, as the Brooklyn Bridge is there. Frank O'Hara (1)

In his introduction to the expanded, 50th anniversary edition of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, John Ashbery, looking back to the 1960s remembered "how conservative and formal most contemporary American poetry was at the time". With the publication of Lunch Poems in 1964 however, "No other poetry collection of the 60s did more to shatter the congealed surface of contemporary academic poetry". And at the time of his death O'Hara was fully established as a leading figure in the New York literary and art circles and was heading towards cultdom, which was reached in the years after his death. Now established as a major American poet, this 50th anniversary edition contains thirty seven poems, seventeen of which were chosen for Donald Allen's Selected Poems and are amongst O'Hara's most memorable poems. This edition also includes previously unpublished facsimiles of correspondence between O'Hara and Lawrence Ferlinghetti exchanging thoughts and ideas concerning the poems to include in Lunch Poems and notably, O'Hara's suggestion for the book blurb or "blurp".

The poems are arranged in chronological order, ranging from 1953 to 1964, and show the extent to which his early influences filter though the poems and formed the basis for his involvement with New York and Abstract Expressionism. In his early poems, heavily influenced by Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism, the voice from the unconscious is the very stuff of poetry, perversely imbued with the "grace of accuracy". The unconscious voice in his poem "Second Avenue", as he explained in "Notes on 'Second Avenue'", gives a meaning that is not paraphraseable into terms readily apprehended by the conscious mind. Rather, poems such as "Second Avenue" display an attitude above and beyond meaning which cannot, and more importantly, should not be paraphraseable. O'Hara concludes his "Notes" with a paragraph that can be applied to his work and his attitude to his work:

the verbal elements are not too interesting to discuss although they are intended consciously to keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious. Perhaps the obscurity comes in here, in the relationship between the surface and the meaning, but I like it that way since the one is the other (you have to use words) and I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it. (SS p40)

There is an implicit acceptance of the unconscious voice here: surreal distortions, juxtapositions and polarities are true to experience because O'Hara can express language direct from consciousness and not distort or change it so that it 'means' something. There are three points here which are important when related to his work: one is the notion of "surface" which shows his interest in art and his use of art theories in his poetry to enhance the effect of place; the second, which is a corollary of surface, is the desire to make the poem be the subject and so become part of his environment; and the third point is that poetry should not be too reflective and self-conscious. To be too reflective and self-conscious within poetry is to distort reality: "I have a feeling that the philosophical reduction of reality to a dealable-with-system so distorts life that one's reward for this endeavour (a minor one at that) is illness both from inside and outside". (SS p37) To put it another way, the criterion of truth in poetry is "where you don't find that someone is making themselves more elegant, more stupid, more appealing, more affectionate or more sincere than the words will allow them to be". (SS p14) If poetry is synonymous with life then words possess a power which can easily be misunderstood or mishandled, just as one's responses to life and interaction can be misunderstood or mishandled. Yet truth to O'Hara was set within the limits which he defined and his language and poetry defined for him. In this respect the autographical mode was anathema to him. Revelation through his own form of truth was not sought after, was not a goal that he consciously strived towards in the way that Robert Lowell did: "Lowell has...a confessional manner which [lets him] get away with things that are really just plain bad but you're supposed to be interested because he's supposed to be upset". (SS p13) Even though Lowell tells the truth when he writes "my mind's not right", O'Hara sees the experience delineated in Lowell's "Skunk Hour" as a "philosophical reduction of reality to a dealable-with-system" that makes the poem conventional, therefore artifice.

To O'Hara, truth was directness and spontaneity in all that he wrote, which led him to write in an impressive array of linguistic styles and prosodic forms. However, spontaneity was a by-product of directness and an almost stream-of-consciousness approach to his work. He rarely revised his poems: "What makes me happy is when something just falls into place as if it were a conversation or something". (SS p12) And, in order to appear spontaneous and fix time in a certain place and the poet within that place, he never had recourse to the past and memory in the way that autobiographical poets did. Both spontaneity and the writing voice are represented in the poem at the instant of composition. To fix the past and memory within a poem, would be a too-conscious attempt at self-manoeuvring: the self must come out of the poem only if the moment and mood determine it:

What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggeration which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don't think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else, they are just there in whatever form I find them. My formal 'stance' is found at the crossroads where what I know and can't get meets what is left of what I know and can bear without hatred.(SSp112)

Significantly, it is the moment, that which is "happening" both in the poet's mind and in his environment that matters. And so experience is delineated from the perspective of the present, unalloyed and direct, not contained by what O'Hara "can't get" yet nor what he has already experienced and is now a memory. The self in his work is thus premised on his attitude to his work and where he was at the time of composition, rather than viewing the self as something which has to be revealed within the poem though a process of recovery, a process that Plath, for example, found almost intimidating. There are many examples in Lunch Poems and the Collected Poems of the spontaneous nature of O'Hara's poetry, evincing also a joy merely to be using words and constructing a poem: "Quick! a last poem before I go/off my rocker." ("On Rachmaninoff's Birthday")

Totally abashed and smiling
I walk in
sit down and
face the Frigidaire
it's April
no May
it's May ("St Paul and All That")

O'Hara's connection to his culture and environment is evident in his most personal and idiosyncratic style, what he called the "I do this, I do that" poems. Lunch Poems contains three of his most exemplary "I do this, I do that" poems – "A Step Away from Them", "The Day Lady Died" and "Personal Poem". The poem as a result of the writer's response to the moment in time and place, is given its fullest articulation showing the quintessential O'Hara:

It is 12.10 in New York and I am wondering
if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch...

And from "The Day Lady Died":

It is 12.20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4.19 in Easthampton
at 7.15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me.

There is a childlike, urgent breathlessness here, almost as if he can't fix the images fast enough on the page as they roll through his mind. But there is more going on here than seems apparent. Time and place coalesce. The past and future are used in such a way as to locate the poet in the present. O'Hara relates to the specific moment, the exact moment of composition, by treating time other than the present as non-relative, that is, not related to the present. He establishes the time and place but then refers to a day which is merely arbitrary when related to the present and his intention. The poem seems to expand and contract in relation to time – from the present, to an arbitrary past and the past-present-future contained in "1959", then back to the present as action and finally to the near future which is both known and unknown. It seems as if O'Hara cannot create the poem fast enough to accommodate whatever his consciousness is creating at the moment of composition. There is a sense here then, that his consciousness is creating a place for itself outside of the certainty of time. The process of the writer's response to the moment in time and space is both fixed on the page yet posits a moment that seems to be continually emerging on the page. This effect helps the poem towards being the subject and not just about it and is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams' effort to "make" a poem, what is made rather than what is said. "The Point", O'Hara explained, "is really more to establish one's own measure and breath in poetry...rather than fitting your ideas into an established order, syllabically and phonetically and so on" SSp17

Although O'Hara denied that he did this in poetry, it is clear from reading his work that there is a singularly individual consciousness at work, moving with the forward projecting syntax. This consciousness may have a relation to the breath, yet it is a breath that emanates from the mind not from the lungs. In effect, each perception becomes the individual breath of the poem, the measure by which O'Hara progresses towards the end of the poem. The evolution of consciousness depends on this "measure" which, as Bill Berkson pointed out is a "process of natural selection - discrimination conjoining civility of attention – so that any particle of experience quick enough to get fixed in his busy consciousness earned its point of relevance." (2). It is the occurrence of the moment, but particularly without reflection, that sustains O'Hara's voice. He saw this involvement with the voice in poetry as a process of "becoming", moving from perception to perception, from image to image, so that within the poem there is a projection of experience as related to form and presence.

What comes through when reading O'Hara's poems is his exuberance, his desire to be all-inclusive, a joy to be alive and living in New York with the best friends in the world.
His poems reverberate with his experiences in such a matter-of-fact and here-and-now way that they ultimately reveal his work to be an intimate talk with himself and friends on the nature of being and experience. To O'Hara, a successful poem is one that emerges onto the page as if he were having a conversation with it. The inspirations behind this discourse were the art world, the influence of French writers and above all, his unbounded zest for life in New York city. These contributed to the graphic verve and spontaneity that exemplifies his voice, and in their own way helped his poetry to evolve into full maturity. Asked about the link between painting and poetry in New York, O'Hara replied that it was "partly...the French influence...on American painting. You know, the Apollinaire, cubist and that sort of thing". (SS p3) This link was also forged through the fact that poets who arrived or emerged as poets in New York during the mid or late 1950s were attracted to painters who were "the only ones who were interested in any kind of experimental poets and the general literary scene was not". (SS p3) What was most important to O'Hara was the example of the Abstract Expressionists who gave him the feeling that "one should work harder and should really try to do something other than polish whatever talent one had been recognized for, that one should go further". (SS p3)

Although most of O'Hara's later poems beat with the rhythms, speed and language of New York city, seminal influences on his work were ironically French poets. Gazing eastwards to Europe, not from Pilgrim's landfall but from the 20th century cosmopolitan city, his study of French poets such as Apollinaire, Reverdy, Peret and the Symbolists, was crucial in the development of his idiosyncratic voice, the kind of images that flow into and through his poems and the link between his spontaneity, place and Abstract Expressionism. O'Hara's preference for the example of the French poets was inspired as much by what American poetry lacked as by what French poetry achieved. All American poets after Whitman, he remarked (apart from Williams and Crane), were overtly concerned with "comportment in diction", (SS p12) His preference for the poetics of Dadaism and Surrealism was inspired through their spontaneous and free associational aspects of production, and to a certain extent, their disregard for what was deemed to be traditionally correct. To O'Hara, correctness in terms of New Critical standards, or rhyme and metre, did not guarantee authenticity. Indeed, comportment in diction is a mode that the poet adopts; he makes a conscious choice and therefore weakens the process whereby a poem finds its articulation through spontaneity, the process of becoming. O'Hara's process is one where, through spontaneity, he becomes the instrument for the poem's release onto the page, although he does not yield ultimate control in the process of what is being written. In this respect he differs from the Surrealists, who experimented with automatic writing and trance states in order to free the unconscious from control by the conscious mind. In the majority of his poems he always had a 'subject' be it a particular image the poem is concerned with, a person, or a general theme arising from image, person or linguistic method.

It is this quality, developed from the French Dadaist and Surrealists which, ironically, makes O'Hara the most exemplary New Yorker of the so-called New York group of poets, which includes, amongst others, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. Just as important as the French influence however, is the city of New York, which became the catalyst O'Hara needed to realise his full poetic potential: from 1951 onwards it became as much a part of his poetics as Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. New York city then, was more than an image to him. It can also be seen in his work as part of his poetic, part of the assimilation which gave him his distinctive voice. Place affects formal considerations, not the least of which is spontaneity, and is evident throughout O'Hara's mature poetry. This is not to say that New York and America were evident as images in every poem he wrote. Rather they are evident in his response to language and how language responds to environment and culture to reflect a state of consciousness. In effect, the poet, his language and his environment are one.

The artist's connection is a positive connection because he acts as mediator between the collective consciousness and the collective unconscious. If we feel his connection above literal comment then we must be implicitly conscious of his artistic intentions and how intention resolves itself through the artist's medium. Intention resolves itself in many ways, as we see with the differences between Lowell's ontology and O'Hara's. O'Hara's intention was intuitively resolved through transcribing reality as part of a process where connection ends up as unity. Hence, O'Hara's images are not symbols of states of being, they are not objective correlatives – they do not represent anything other than what they are. He uses language not just as a means of placing the self within a linguistic context but also of placing the environment within a linguistic context as part of his poetic. This placing of place gives added resonance to presentation of self, not simply because of any apparent unity therein, but because it takes the pressure off of the self within the poems. The self is not abstracted nor is it used as a lens for an autobiographical perspective. Thus the self is able to enter into a dialogue with things, people and subjects in the poems and not continually question the role of the self in society and the meaning and nature of reality. Self and language in O'Hara's poems, satisfied with environment and the self's place within it, do not engage in a "philosophical reduction of reality to a dealable-with-system". Reality cannot be philosophically reduced: it is simply there and to be enjoyed and used by the poet. Therefore we feel O'Hara's connection to his society in more than an intuitive way because he does not rely on the presentation of psychological motives for the amelioration of a troubled and isolated self.

During the late 1940s and 1950s, New York became the centre of avant garde art, particularly the development and growth of Abstract Expressionism. O'Hara was eventually to become an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art and was an enthusiastic supporter of Abstract Expressionism, an enthusiasm which influenced the way he used language. What is striking then, is the extent to which place and art affect O'Hara's prosody. Not only does place affect formal considerations and content, but also the influence of art and art theories are apparent. In this respect he is the representative of the link between poetry and painting in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, a link made even stronger through his and the Abstract Expressionist's use of Surrealism. O'Hara's interest in Abstract Expressionism was fostered as much by his friendships with various artists as by the theories and methods involved. No artist lives in a social vacuum, least of all O'Hara. Nevertheless, his close friendships and theories of art were part and parcel of his intuitive feel for the avant garde, a response which also accounts for his reluctance to use preconceived forms and his belief that Whitman and Williams were preeminent amongst his American poetic predecessors.

Ironically, those poems that rely too heavily on these various influences are not, perhaps, O'Hara's best. Poems such as "Easter" and particularly, "Second Avenue" (Selected Poems) seem to strive too hard to avoid meaning and to be non-paraphrasable. That said however, O'Hara was influenced by formal and theoretical aspects of Abstract Expressionism beyond simple appreciation of the paintings as works of art. The need to go further, as Joe LeSueur recognised, manifests itself not just through example but through inter-social and aesthetic relationships:

He seemed to be inspired and exhilarated by all his painter friends... He devoted so much time to looking at and thinking about their work you'd have thought he had a vested interest in their development as artists... He offered them encouragement, inspired them with his insights and his passion; they impinged upon and entered his poetry, which wouldn't have been the same and probably not as good without them. (3)

In a sense O'Hara did have a vested interest in the development of his friends' work because he was intellectually aware that such an interest would benefit him as a poet. Significantly, the need to go further developed from example into collaboration, producing a series of lithographs with Larry Rivers and a series of poem-drawings with Norman Bluhm. And, just as his artist friends impinged upon and entered his poems, so O'Hara was the subject of portraits by artists such as Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Fairfield Porter, John Button, Alice Neel, Elaine de Kooning, Alex Katz and Philip Guston.

The list, to which more could be added, is an indication of O'Hara's involvement with the artists and art world of New York, an involvement which cut across genres within modern art. Abstract Expressionism is important however, in that it was part of his milieu and can be regarded as influential as Surrealism. It must be borne in mind the degree to which O'Hara had, by 1953, assimilated such influences for his own ends. That he was successful can be seen not only in his distinctive poetic voice and his poetic trademarks, but also though the extent to which that voice in turn became enormously influential and emulated. As Jim Carrol acknowledged, "There was this whole school of other young poets who were writing like Frank O'Hara. It blew my mind when I started to go to readings...and every week there was some guy reading some new Frank O'Hara influenced poems". (4)

Naming is O'Hara's most overt and consistent poetic device. Significantly, names imply communication and speech: if one is "in touch" with friends in the way that O'Hara presents them in the poems, than the implication is that one also communicates and connects with society and culture in the same implicit way that O'Hara believed artists made connections with society above any literal comment. The implication is enforced through the use of public names as quoted above and others such as Elizabeth Taylor, Pablo Casals, Albert Schweitzer and James Dean – just a small selection from a long list of public figures.

Naming adds intimacy; the people he placed in his poems, particularly his friends, are talismans that represent an ordering principle in his life. He does not question the validity of self because he is totally confident with his own sense of self. Yet there is almost a sense that he needs the vast array of names in his poems as another aspect of an ordering principle in his work as well as his life. Presenting this vast collection of names without making any effort to define their place in the poems has implications. The first is that this method reflects O'Hara's indifference regarding self-identity and the correct forms of social interaction: his friends are there just as New York is there and just as Frank O'Hara is Frank O'Hara. Using names like this is another way of making contact with environment and being influenced by it. Names crop up in relation to what he has done and where he has been. In this respect his social life comes to the fore, which is another aspect of his milieu. Names enhance the spontaneous quality of the poems, they add to the conversational voice and allow greater scope for O'Hara's 'talking' voice. There is also a feeling through the talk and spontaneity, that names enhance the sense of the immediate present

As suggested it is the "I do this, I do that" poems that play on intimacy, place and the notion of the poem continually emerging onto the page. "Personal Poem" is one of these. The combination of the lack of punctuation, line breaks and syntax, represents both the "circuitry and speed" of New York and the continuous motion of walking. Movement of syntax is reinforced by the movement of both O'Hara and LeRoi within a short space of time represented by the lunch hour. "Walk" is mentioned four times, movement is constantly referred to with words and phrases such as "passing", "get to", "mover and shaker", "comes in" "we go", "shake", "go", as well as words and phrases which suggest movement such as "give, "bought", "broke off". "keep me in", "construction", "batting", "tells", "asks", "sat", "crowded", and "buy". Added to this spatial movement there is also a temporal uncertainty, in that time is not sequential within the poem but is constantly shifting. The poem starts with "Now" yet clearly the poem was not written at the precise moment that the events occurred. "Now" could refer to the immediate past intimating that the event happened a short while before the moment of composition. It could refer to the present, the poet's immediate environment which conditions movements and thoughts. But there is a sense also that "Now" could refer to the future because the firs stanza leads to the assertion that "now I'm happy for a time". Significantly, time does become fixed when LeRoi enters the poem and speaks to the poet. This is the moment when conversation starts and which thus fulfils the expectations of the poet at the time and the intentions of the poet who writes the poem. The poem at this point achieves its function yet the conversation itself is a mixture of gossip, conjecture and optimistic musing – nothing out of the ordinary, nothing profound. The substance of the conversation ties in with the syntax and the constantly shifting time scheme. To a certain degree the substance of the conversation is not relevant to the overall meaning in the poem because at this point we have become aware of O'Hara's use of language as it affects overall structure, an effect described by Berkson where "the poet does not deduce, but he is thinking. You are getting the language first-hand, where it begins to get put together in the mind". (5) O'Hara's language is foregrounded to such an extent that meaning is almost subsumed by it. There is at least a very positive feeling that the way things have been said is as important as what has been said. In this particular case the syntactic patterning, the arbitrary line breaks, dearth of commas, semi-colons and periods reflect speech patterns, where the rules governing language use are relaxed and solecisms creep in unnoticed. It suits O'Hara not to be too concerned with rules however, because apart from anything else, the poem centres on a lunch hour conversation with a friend and personal observation as he walks to rendezvous with LeRoi.

O'Hara's partial abandonment of linguistic rules is closely related to his methodology as a means of presenting language as if the reader is involved in the process of language experienced at first hand, as it is put together in the mind. It is significant that he found it difficult to create poems other than on a typewriter:

He usually got what he was after in one draft, and he could type very fast, hunt and peck fashion. And from the very beginning it seemed to me that he never tried to get a poem going, never forced himself to write; he either had an idea or he didn't. (6)

Usually he was "lost" without his typewriter and on one occasion when he was observed handwriting a poem, he considered it "pretty bad" and threw it away. (7) Without the typewriter he would also have found it difficult to assimilate the Surrealist and Cubist modes as successfully as he did. Essentially, the typewriter allowed him to verbalise pre-verbal experience, language in the process of being "put together" before it is spoken. The effect is observed at its most extreme in O'Hara's surreal poems, but is also used throughout his work. In "Personal Poem" he does not try to re-present conversation but rather he acts as amanuensis to the mind conversing with itself:

I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so.

Pre-verbal consciousness is shown through the non-revelation of time and in the ambiguity. O'Hara does not drift into non-sense, alogical or illogical language; his happiness could apply to his being the subject of someone else's thoughts, shaking hands with LeRoi, buying a strap for his wristwatch or merely going back to work. The structure and thought in the poem, as well as representing pre-verbal experience, are also a direct response to environment. If time is not relative in the poem then space is. O'Hara moves from "this" to "that" defining a spatial sequence of events, thus enforcing structure and thought creating a place and space on the page relevant to his movement through his environment. In O'Hara's terms then, there is nothing "false" about his connectives because his language is not only part of his environment, but attempts to recreate what Williams described as those "jumps, swiftnesses, colors, movements" which are part of the "continuous confusion" of reality. (8) In this instance then, the poem has been conditioned by exterior reality as much as intention and psyche. "Personal Poem" is not just about a conversation, it is pre-verbal experience, the mind conversing with itself, and O'Hara listening in.

If we were to sum up O'Hara's poetry in one word, freedom comes to mind. Freedom of consciousness to such an extent that life, art and poetry were the same thing, indivisible, mutually inclusive and above all, at the very centre of his being. The extremely personal and idiosyncratic nature of his poems testify to this. But he was also part of a group of poets who developed their own personal and recognisable voices within their poems. With their individual responses to language, consciousness and reality, the New York poets became part of the alternative culture of the 1950s and, by the early 1960s, O'Hara was a cult figure. By 1968 however, O'Hara was dead and America was stirring. His poetry in this era, as John Ashbery pointed out , was no longer considered part of the cultural "underground":

it does not advocate sex and dope as a panacea for the ills of a modern society; it does not speak out against the war in Viet-Nam or in favour of civil rights; it does not paint gothic vignettes of the post-atomic age: in a word, it does not attack the establishment. It merely ignores its right to exist, and this is a source of annoyance for the partisans of every stripe.(9)

It was too "arty", too self-centred and chatty. It did not "connect" with society nor with any predominant "mood" in society at that time. Despite all this, O'Hara's poetry has survived and is finding a wider audience each year. It has survived because his imagination speaks for itself. It has survived because the imagination is precisely that which is the panacea for the ills of a modern society. It has survived because the imagination is, as Wallace Stevens maintained, a liberating force:

the chief problems of any artist, as of any man, are the problems of the normal and that he needs, in order to solve them, everything that the imagination has to give. (10)

John Murphy

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Notes:

SS = quoted from O'Hara's Standing Still and Walking in New York, Grey Fox Press, Bolinas, 1975

1) From notes relating to O'Hara's TV interview with David Smith for the "Art New York" series. University of Connecticut, Special Collections Library.

2) Bill Berkson, "Frank O'Hara and His Poems" in Homage to Frank O'Hara, eds. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur. Creative Arts Book Company, Berkeley 1980 p62

3) ibid, p50

4) ibid p198

5) ibid, p162

6) ibid p48

7) ibid p48

8) William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays, New Directions, New York, 1969. p257

9) Bookweek, 28th September, 1966. p6

10) Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, Faber & Faber, London, 1984. p19