'Transparent Selves': The Poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara

Abstract

Art has to be constantly re-begun, or, as the Red Queen noted, one has to run very hard in order to remain in the same place. (John Ashbery, 'Paris Letter')1 In I949, during his junior year at Harvard, Frank O'Hara submitted some poems to the Harvard Advocate. John Ashbery, then a senior, was on the editorial board and liked O'Hara's work. So began a friendship between two poets that lasted until O'Hara's untimely death in 1966. For fifteen years, the poetic careers of Ashbery and O'Hara ran a parallel course, and yet no one, reading their poetry today, would be likely to mistake an O'Hara poem for one by Ashbery. To compare and contrast the achievement of these two poets is to get some sense of the excitement and diversity characteristic of 'New York Poetry' in the fifties and sixties, but such comparison also makes clear that the label 'New York School', still regularly applied to O'Hara, Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and a score of younger poets like Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman, has become a rather meaningless term.2 Let me begin with the more obvious parallels. Both O'Hara and Ashbery earned Master's degrees in English literature, Ashbery at Columbia, O'Hara, a year later, at the University of Michigan. But neither poet ever contemplated an academic career; both turned to the world of the visual arts, drawing their central inspiration from the Abstract Expressionist painters then coming into prominence in New York: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, and their followers. In I95I, O'Hara got a temporary job at the Museum of Modern Art: it was the year of the great Matisse exhibition, and extra help was needed at the front desk. Before long he was organizing travelling exhibitions and, by the time of his death, he had been named Curator. In the sixties he was responsible for some of the most important shows at the