Space: Frank O’Hara’s Forward-Dawning Futurism

Losasso, Mae

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3_2

Mae Losasso³

Part of the book series: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics ((MPCC))

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Abstract

Shifting focus away from traditional architectural readings of Frank O’Hara’s poetry, which have tended to situate his work in relation to New York’s international modernist office blocks, this chapter looks at the relationship between O’Hara’s poems and the organic architecture of 1950s and 1960s America. Mapping the extremes of O’Hara’s poetic forms onto the ‘needle’ and ‘globe’—the architectural typologies that Rem Koolhaas identifies at the heart of what he calls Manhattanism—I suggest that these typological extremes are also symbolic of the last, competing expressions of late modernism: i.e. international modernism’s tall, slender towers and organicism’s capacious, ovoid structures. In doing so, I read O’Hara’s work through the prevailing architectural language of sterility and fertility that charged contemporaneous polemics between these modernist rivals and suggest that, conscious of this ongoing architectural discourse, O’Hara constructs a fertile mode of poetic expression, which opens up liveable spaces ‘between two persons’ and encodes the potentiality for queer utopian encounters.

And someone you love enters the room

and says wouldn’t

you like the eggs a little

different today?

—Frank O’Hara, from ‘For Grace After A Party’

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Notes

1.
David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), p. 20; Matthew Weiner in Scott Timberg ‘The poetry of “Mad Men”: When Matthew Weiner first read Frank O’Hara, “it was just like total time travel”’ in Salon July 6, 2016, https://www.salon.com/2016/07/06/the_poetry_of_mad_men_when_matthew_weiner_first_read_frank_ohara_it_was_just_like_total_time_travel/. Accessed 13 March 2023.
2.
Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964), pp. 15–16; 25–26.
3.
Ibid., pp. 32; 37; 38; 57.
4.
Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), pp. 206–207.
5.
Ibid.
6.
Ibid., 257.
7.
Matthew Holman, Frank O’Hara Abroad: Curatorship, Cosmopolitanism, and the Cold War. PhD Dissertation, University College London, 2020.
8.
Internal memos for all of these exhibitions are located in: Department of Circulating Exhibition Records, II.1.a. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, NY, USA.
9.
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York & London: New York University Press, 2009), p. 23.
10.
Keegan Cook Finberg, ‘Frank O’Hara rebuilds the Seagram Building: a radical poetry of event’ in Textual Practice (30: 1: 2016): p. 132.
11.
Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins & David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), p. 167.
12.
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), p. 89.
13.
Ibid., p. 88.
14.
Ibid., pp. 88; 85.
15.
Ibid., p. 10.
16.
Ibid., p. 27.
17.
Ibid.
18.
Ibid., p. 255.
19.
Finberg, ‘Frank O’Hara rebuilds the Seagram Building’, p. 132.
20.
Ibid., p. 133.
21.
Koolhaas, Delirious New York, p. 97. Wallace Kirkman Harrison, director of the UN building project, noted in a 1947 article for the New York Times: ‘As for building with glass, that is one of our good, new materials, and in a sense, uniquely symbolic of our civilisation since it is clear, practical, and beautiful’. These overdetermined semantics (good, clear, civilisation, practical, beautiful) indicate the extent to which the building was designed to reflect a deeply conservative and moralising Cold War society. ‘MR. HARRISON’S OPPORTUNITY’, January 10, 1947, Section C, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1947/01/10/archives/mr-harrisons-opportunity.html. Accessed 20 April 2023.
22.
Alan Powers, Bauhaus Goes West: Modern Art and Design in Britain and America (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019), p. 254; Robert Bennett, Deconstructing Post-WWII New York City: The Literature, Art, Jazz, and Architecture of an Emerging Global Capital (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 10.
23.
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 216.
24.
Indeed, denouncers of the intentional modernist style in 1950s America were wont to criticise it on the grounds that, as Elizabeth Gordon wrote in an article for House Beautiful magazine, it promoted ‘unlivability, stripped-down emptiness, lack of storage space, and therefore lack of possessions’. Quoted in: Powers, Bauhaus Goes West, p. 214.
25.
Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York, Phaeton: 1995), p. 9.
26.
Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), p. 68.
27.
Finberg, ‘Frank O’Hara rebuilds the Seagram Building’, p. 123.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc., 1961), p. 570–571.
30.
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture (Ljubljana: Mladinska Knijiga, 1969), p. 322.
31.
Ibid., pp. 323–324. The parallels with Olson’s writing (see Chap. 1) are striking, not only in Wright’s capitalisation of the word ‘SPACE’ but also in his insistence on the ‘the breath of a work of art’.
32.
‘The whole building, cast in concrete, is more like an egg shell—in form a great simplicity rather than like a crisscross structure.’ Quoted in: Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks, eds. David Larkin & Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), p. 2.
33.
Frank O’Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas: Grey Fox Press, 1975), p. 126. Note, in particular, the domestic simile that O’Hara employs in his praise of the building.
34.
Frank O’Hara, quoted in: Joel Duncan, ‘Frank O‘Hara Drives Charles Olson’s Car’ in Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory Volume 72, Number 4 (Winter 2016): p. 89.
35.
Gooch, City Poet, p. 302.
36.
Olivier Brossard, ‘“The / profile of a city / exploding”: Frank O’Hara’s Aesthetics of Shock’ in Caliban: French Journal of English Studies (25: 2009: L’art de la ville): p. 24.
37.
In his review of the ‘Abstract Expressionists and Imagists’ show, O’Hara noted that ‘The Guggenheim Museum is fun, and as such it justifies itself [my emphasis]’. O’Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York, p. 128.
38.
Koolhaas, Delirious New York, p. 275.
39.
Mumford, The City in History, p. 575.
40.
Ibid., p. 12.
41.
Ibid., p. 11.
42.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 6.
43.
One of the most consummate post-war examples of this is Stevenage New Town in the UK, which was laid out by Charles Madge in 1949. Writing in 1950, Madge openly commented that ‘the whole design of the garden common is based on the needs of the family at its reproductive phase’. Charles Madge, ‘Planning for people’ in The Town Planning Review 21 (July 1959): p. 140.
44.
Paul Overy, ‘Bauhaus’ in Art + Artists Vol. 3, no. 6 (September 1968): p. 10. Quoted in: Powers, Bauhaus Goes West, p. 230.
45.
This is mentioned in O’Hara’s 1964 poem ‘Here in New York We Are Having a Lot of Trouble with the World’s Fair’: ‘We are happy / here / facing the multi-screens of the IBM Pavilion’ (CPOH 481).
46.
Gooch, City Poet, p. 215.
47.
Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’ (London: Penguin, 2018), p. 9.
48.
Nelson, Other True Abstractions, p. 58; 56.
49.
Ibid., p. 58.
50.
Ibid., p. 53.
51.
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 8.
52.
Ibid., pp. 9; 12; 11. In true camp style, O’Hara is in fact playing on the fusion of high and low culture, through the shared name of the Arts and Crafts architect and the Hollywood-based talent agency, William Morris.
53.
Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MT: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 16.
54.
Ibid., pp. 18–21.
55.
Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), p. 29.
56.
Ibid., p. 36.
57.
Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 194.
58.
Ibid., p. 384.
59.
Yasmine Shamma, Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 2.
60.
Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 8.
61.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespearean Criticism, Vol 1, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London: Dent, 1967), p. 224; Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’ in The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R Ferguson & Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 224.
62.
Whitman, The Complete Poems, pp. 762; 746–747.
63.
O’Hara, Standing Still, pp. 34–35.
64.
Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, p. 224.
65.
Josh Robinson, ‘“A Gasp of Laughter at Desire”: Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of Breath’ in Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet, eds. Robert Hampson & Will Montgomery (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), p. 145; Nelson, True Abstractions, p. 82.
66.
Whitman, The Complete Poems, p. 747.
67.
Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’ in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 245; 244.
68.
For more on the relationship between O’Hara, Olson and poetic breath, see: Mae Losasso, ‘Conspiration: On Poetry and Breathing’ in The Contemporary Journal 4 (December 07, 2022).
69.
Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara, Poet Among Painters (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 16.
70.
Shaw, Poetics of Coterie, p. 78.
71.
Harold Aspiz, ‘Walt Whitman: The Spermatic Imagination’ in American Literature Vol. 56, No. 3 (Oct., 1984): p. 380.
72.
Ibid., p. 381.
73.
Daneen Wardrop, ‘Whitman as Furtive Mother: The Supplementary Jouissance of the “Ambushed Womb” in “Song of Myself”’ in Texas Studies in Literature and Language Vol. 40, No. 2, Essays (SUMMER 1998): pp. 142–145.
74.
Ibid., p. 142.
75.
Ibid., p. 156.
76.
Ibid., p. 145.
77.
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, pp. 185–189.
78.
Indeed, like the poetry of the New York School, the ovoid organicism of the late 1950s and 1960s represented what Frederic Jameson calls the ‘coupure’ between waning modernist aesthetics and an emergent postmodernism: eggs would continue to appear as tropes in postmodern art and architecture, from Joaquim de Ros i Ramis and Alexandre Bonaterrain’s Dalí Theatre and Museum (1974), its parapet topped with giant eggs (as well as a geodesic dome), to Terry Farrell’s Breakfast Television Centre (1981) in Camden, London, crowned with oversized eggs in striped egg cups, to Claes Oldenburg’s False Food Selection (1966), Andy Warhol’s screen print Eggs (1982), Jeff Koons’ mirrored sculpture series, Cracked Egg (1994–2006), and many others.
79.
Keston Sutherland, ‘Close Reading’ in Frank O’Hara Now, p. 121.
80.
Another indication of camp, perhaps, for as Sontag notes: ‘Camp is a tender feeling’. Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p33.
81.
M. K. Blasing, American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 163.
82.
Frank O’Hara & Bill Berkson, Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings (Woodacre: The Owl Press, 2004), p. 19.
83.
Perloff, Poet Among Painters, p. 33.
84.
O’Hara & Berkson, Hymns of St. Bridget, p. 20.
85.
Berkson admits in the notes to Hymns of St. Bridget that ‘most of these [poems] are mostly by [O’Hara] and the parts by me are mostly me trying to keep up’. Berkson, Hymns of St Bridget, p. 83. Therefore, although this section opens in what is likely Berkson’s voice, I will nonetheless treat the poem as equally O’Hara’s: the extent to which lines and words belong to which poet can never be fully untangled, and thus the poem has to be read as fully collaborative.
86.
As O’Hara writes in ‘Hymn to St. Bridget’s Steeple’ (1960) ‘it is to you, bending limp and ridiculous’. Or, in the opening lines of ‘Steps’ (1961), ‘How funny you are today New York / like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime / and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left’ (CPOH 370). This line is sharply juxtaposed by images of international modernism that counterbalance the poem towards its close: ‘and all those liars have left the U N / the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest / not that we need liquor (we just like it)’ (CPOH 371). In another poem from Hymns of St. Bridget, titled ‘St. Bridget’s Effeminacy’, the church is not only rendered camp and effeminate, but assumes O’Hara’s physical attributes: ‘The basic problem of Latin America / is that you’re here, St Bridget / how they miss your crooked / nose’. O’Hara & Berkson, Hymns of St. Bridget, p. 21. St Brigid is also an Irish ‘Muse of Poetry’, which may further explain why O’Hara so often treats the church as muse. For more on this, see: David Nowell Smith, W. S. Graham: The Poem as Art Object (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 237.
87.
For more on the death drive in relation to queer theory, see: Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham NC.: Duke University Press, 2004).
88.
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, pp. 5–6.
89.
Ibid.
90.
Ibid., p. 9.
91.
Ibid., p. 16.
92.
Ibid., p. 1.

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Mae Losasso

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Losasso, M. (2023). Space: Frank O’Hara’s Forward-Dawning Futurism. In: Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3_2
Published: 21 December 2023
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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