"Between the Poet and the Person": Dilemmas of Friendship in Contemporary Poetry

Abstract

In the speech Larry Rivers gave at O'Hara's 1966 funeral, he said: Frank O'Hara was my best There are at least sixty people in New York who thought O'Hara was _their best friend. He later rooted this impossibility in O'Hara himself, calling the poet dream of contradictions.1 Andrew Epstein cites Rivers's eulogy at the outset of his fascinating reading of the artistically generative conflicts between self and friendship in O'Hara's life and work, an analysis that forms the core of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry. From O'Hara's death on, friends, lovers, critics, and scholars have all helped to con tribute to the myth that the poet actually achieved the proliferated intimacies Rivers describes?that, in O'Hara's words, he managed to be everything to everybody everywhere (qtd. in Beautiful Enemies 117), without personal consequence and in the breezy mood that buoys his most famous poems. Epstein's skepticism, bred of a much more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between O'Hara's poems and friendship as subject matter, biogra phical factor, philosophical riddle, or textual consideration (87), offers a sobering, and deeply humanizing, alternative to what