O'Hara on the Silver Range

Abstract

Still with us, walking his poems' streets or dreaming through their jungles, O'Hara creates a sense of presence unique even in our time of poetry crowded with real people, poets, lovers, and friends. For once, the immortality conferred by art seems actual; what walks, behind the imprint of voice, is not simply a ghost. The problem is to define the quality of his presence, to discover the nature of the creative motion so intense that the poet in the poem moves always before us. As O'Hara himself once suggested by negation, another type of artistic motion comes inevitably to mind. In his 1961 nonstatement for the Paterson Society, in a quandary about being unable to say anything definite about his poetry, he protests, Well you can't have a statement saying . . . 'My poetry is just like Pollock, de Kooning and Guston rolled into one great verb.' 1 Ten years later, listing a similar assortment of Action Painters, John Ashbery would argue differently: Frank O'Hara's concept of the poem as the chronicle of the creative act that produces it was strengthened by his intimate experience of Pollock's, Kline's and de Kooning's great paintings of the late forties and early fifties, and of the imaginative realism of painters like Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers (CP, p. ix). But as O'Hara asks, What would poetry like that be? (CP, p. 510). To see what really moves an O'Hara poem involves considering O'Hara as an unusually conspicuous example of the interaction between American poetry and modern painting. Since the brief great days of Imagism our poets have drawn pictures as attentively as verbal lines, and have often looked to post-Impressionist paint-