FRANK O'HARA AND THE ART OF ABSTRACT POETRY

To the literary and artistic avant-garde, Frank O'Hara, New York poet and champion of experimental art, became almost a legend even during his life (1926-1966). But to the literary establishment, he's been somewhat of an embarrassment, his poetry too popular to ignore, too irrational and seemingly inconsequential to lend itself to traditional methods of exegesis. Most O'Hara critics, nonplussed by a poet who, as one critic put it, adamantly refuses to mean, end up dismissing him as a charming but minor poet, a chronicler of trivia, a camp, a pop, or even an anti-poet. Marjorie Perloff's description of him as a neo-Surrealist, though far more discerning, doesn't tell the whole story either, for, as this study shows, O'Hara specializes in incongruities and among the nonreferential features of language, sometimes referred to as linguistic surfaces. My thesis, then, presented in Chapter 1, is that O'Hara is both an abstract and a comic poet, abstract because of his emphasis on linguistic surfaces and their interaction, comic because of the incongruous nature of that interaction.;O'Hara's biggest incongruity and most dazzling surface is manner. The vernacular he perfected in his later poems is just one of the many manners he assumes, not to carry a message, but to play them off against conventional poetic manners in the same way that he plays off diction and syntax against register norms, or subject matter against its norms. O'Hara moved poetry in the direction of abstraction. That makes him an historically important poet. But his wit and his facility with a range of manners make him a poet who transcends history.;The remaining chapters deal with different components of his poetry: Chapter 2 with diction and syntax, Chapter 3 with subject matter and its structure, Chapter 4 with manner. To O'Hara, all these components are comic devices--tools useful for fashioning incongruities, but of a special sort. Consider, for instance, the register upsets--incongruous combinations of common and more specialized words--in phrases like "the infundibuliform / corolla on our right's" or "duck into the boskage." This type of humor, typical of O'Hara, is abstract is the sense that the words are incongruous, not their referents. What's true of his diction is also true of his syntax and subject matters. Plain hobnobs with fancy, low with lofty, for comic rather than expository purposes.