Space in Frank O'Hara's Urban Poetics

Abstract

The “urban poetics,” which contains so many interweaving and interchanging implicit characteristics, is distinctly a kind of three-dimensional and crystal-structured system of poetics. What is “New York City” exactly like in O’Hara’s poems? This is the very question that O’Hara reflected on when writing his urban poetry. Both his “improvisational utterance” and “improvisational writing” are fictions and fantasies of a city (New York), and his collages of urban landscape, created in different styles, construct his unique space for urban poetics. In the intricate urban pedigree, there are O’Hara’s personal “no-attitude” emotions and outlook of “Personism” on the edge of life. The invisible New York City is not just related to visible forms of city buildings, streets, billboards, traffic, but more to the invisible cognition of life and universal emotions like dreams, memories, reflections, desires, interactions that are all shrouded in “urban space.” In contrast, urban modernization destroys mankind’s sweet memories about cities, and the separation and crowdedness in urban living space have given birth to an invisible controlling force that mercilessly destroys and creatively ruins our endurance for “the indifference toward life.”