The Poetics of the Mundane in Frank O’Hara’s Selected Poems

Abstract

The act of walking or strolling and exploring urban places of the metropolis is a dominant aspect in the poetry of Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), a prominent American poet and the leading figure of the New York School during the 1950s and 1960s. O’Hara is largely known for his poetic portrayal of the city stroller who enjoys city detouring as a pragmatic and poetic representation of the urban culture, city crowds, and everyday experiences of postmodern America. The paper’s purpose is to explore the poetic vision of O'Hara's art of strolling the metropolis not as a mere arbitrary self-isolation or escape from the anxieties of the post-industrialized world. Instead, it argues for the value of flânerie or the leisurely city sauntering as a cultural and artistic act of creating the poetics of the mundane. It is a poetics that detects the value of the quotidian and spatial meaning in the most seemingly ordinary places of the consumerist and capitalistic American culture. As the figure of the flâneur or stroller is discerned in O’Hara’s poetry, the study underlines the significance of his poetic advocacy of perceiving, exploring, and interacting with the dynamic as well as the gruesome and consumerist sides of the urban environment of the metropolis.