My thoughts on O'Hara, Pollock and the lot.
(First, to introduce the poems that inspired the essay.)
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this fun site based on Jackson Pollock's work.
An essay on movement. Take the city in and breathe it out.
Even when one is static in the city, stands without moving in a particular spot, the city will still move around him. Commanding as a structure, literally concrete and in a wider sense ‘unmovable’, the city is nonetheless defined by an inherent duality of movement within stasis, transience within permanence: it is the embodiment of process. In Frank O’Hara’s ‘Lunch Poems’, the process of the city is taken in by a poet who is himself often in motion, meaning that visual impressions succeed each other even more rapidly, that they overlap even more densely, a quality shared by the reader in his poems that become processes themselves, instead of mere representations of the city: ‘It’s my lunch hour, so I go/for a walk among the hum-coloured/cabs.’ The first line of ‘A Step Away From Them’ immediately draws the reader in the poem, in the experience that O’Hara is about to embark on. The present tense transfers the reader to the moment the poem is about to be engendered, and the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’ can be read as a means to elide the reader with the poet, heightening the sense of immediate experience – we share O’Hara’s direct impressions. This in itself is a cinematographic technique as it aligns us with the poem’s persona in a similar way that films make us, through the pattern and mode of images shown, share the perspective of a particular character. The images we are about to be exposed to in O’Hara’s poem will succeed each other, overlap and overcross in our minds in the same way the city unravels around the poet while he takes a stroll during his lunch hour.
The fragmentary nature of the images in ‘A Step Away From Them’ can be read as a result of precisely this saturation of visual impressions and codes that define the city. The ‘dirty/glistening torsos’ and the ‘skirts…flipping/above heels’ are both products of the speed of city life as well as marks of the poet’s perception, which breaks the city’s seeming commanding structure into the sum of its less-than-clearly-defined-and-static parts. The poet does not want to describe what he sees to us, he wants us to see it, too. For this reason, the fragmentary bodies, both familiar in their metonymic association but also alien in their mutilating capacity seem to offer an antidote to metaphor, a poetic convention that O’Hara resists as it constitutes an unwanted mediation between his direct experience and the reader. This is the city we know; landmark place names such as ‘Times Square’ helps situate us in the geography of the city and the poem; but at the same time it is also particular to O’Hara, and it is this particularity, the idiosyncrasy of O’Hara’s way of seeing that renders the poems so vivid and alive, so new and so surprising.
The purposeful lack of mediation is something that O’Hara shares with the Action Painters or Abstract Expressionists, the New York school of painters who are as affected and inspired by the multi-referential quality of the city as O’Hara is. Jackson Pollock and his ‘drip’ paintings in particular share O’Hara’s desire for immediacy both in their rejection of figures and in their rejection of metaphor and representation. Pollock does not paint objects – he does not offer a second-degree rendition of a visual element existent in real life. As O’Hara writes in his book on Jackson Pollock for The Great American Artists Series, Pollock’s images ‘have no real visual equivalents. Upon this field the physical energies of the artist operate in actual detail, in full scale.’ So Pollock’s painting does not ‘make bigger’, ‘make smaller’, or ‘make different’ something that pre-exists it – the painting itself is the subject. The canvas becomes a field where he maps his action, his expression, his process of work without the use of symbol or distorting convention, in a similar way that O’Hara maps his walks through the city: ‘I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it.’ If in Pollock, ‘paint is paint, shells and wire are shells and wire, glass is glass and canvas is canvas’ then in O’Hara ‘a glass of papaya juice’, ‘And chocolate malted’ are precisely that – his poetry is the opposite of double entendre. While I agree that ‘paint is paint’ and ‘glass is glass’ for Pollock, I think that it is possible to take this statement further and say that the same paint and the same glass – while not signifying anything ‘deeper’, not ‘representing’ something else – can nonetheless function differently in each of Pollock’s works. Glass is glass when he uses bits of it to give texture to the paint, and glass is also glass when he uses a slab of it to paint on instead of a canvas – but the same object, the same visual sign, functions in completely different ways. While glass will roughen the texture of a painting when used in the paint and as part of the surface, glass as canvas gives the painting a fluid transparency conveying continuation and clarity – a smoothness of touch as well as sight; here, it is the opposite of obstacle. The same goes with the line, a prominent feature of Pollock’s work, that is at times softly lyrical and thin, and at others passionately aggressive and wider, bolder. The multiple ways Pollock uses these ‘same’ elements, their fluidity, reinforces the concept of ‘canvas as an arena in which to act’ and painting as an ‘event’ (Harold Rosenberg). The personal expression of the artist means that he is not pre-conditioned by set codes of what each sign ‘must mean’ – he is free to leave his marks on the canvas in any way that follows from his purpose, his expression, and his ‘spiritual life’ (O’Hara on Pollock) at the moment he acts on the canvas. This means that one kind of mark cannot be given a particular ‘meaning’ that can be applied across all of Pollock’s paintings. His spiritual life, his thought and process of each painting is different, and so what visually appears the same can be infused with a completely different function in the context of each painting and can be the product of a completely different purpose.
The unity of purpose and the visual, the ‘spiritual’ and ‘physical’ is evident in O’Hara as well, who uses images as thoughts, or, whose images are not only mappings of physical displacement but also of the movement of his thoughts. The paratactical arrangement of statements such as ‘I look/ at bargains in wristwatches. There/ are cats playing in sawdust’ highlight that we are looking at the city through his eyes and mind, as we jump from wristwatches to cats – just as the line urges us to ‘look’ from one line to another through enjambment – in an association we assume is incited by physical proximity but which can also be a mental one. For this a city filled with visual impressions but it is also a city filled with the poet’s subjective mental activities. In the poem ‘The Day lady Died’, the stream-of-consciousness mapping of O’Hara’s hurried (?) walk in the city – form reflects content without smothering it – punctuated by the aggressive capitals of store names and publications, culminates in an encounter with ‘a NEW YORK POST with her face on it’. Who ‘her’ is is never explicitly resolved in the poem, but the title gives us a clue that this is a poem about the day Billie Holiday died. ‘Her face on it’ hangs at the end of the line, the one single image, out of the many in the poem, that has a lasting, suspended effect on the poet, and the one single thought that makes the poet, and the poem stop, or at least slow down:
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
The last two lines of the stanza transform the entire poem. Its ambiguity and evasiveness, its refusal to ‘pin down’ identity is exemplified as the ‘I’ who is ‘leaning on the john door’ blends with the ‘she’ who whispers a song, and the name of ‘Mal Waldron’ is introduced which leads to a collective ‘everyone’ and then retracts back into the ‘I’ of the poet again. The blend of time and space in this stanza is remarkable. The poet’s persona could be read as blending with the ‘she’ of (the absent, and dead) Billie Holiday in the act of ‘leaning’, as I always imagine her having to lean towards Mal Waldron in order to ‘whisper the song’. The conjunction ‘while’ implies that the whispering happens in tandem with the poet’s ‘sweating’ and finding support ‘on the john door’, and this is true in that it happens in tandem in his head. Physical reality and mental association are blended here, and the sense of breathlessness described in the last line is both the sense of awe that overcomes ‘everyone and I’ at the jazz club when O’Hara presumably last saw Holiday performing, and his breathless state having found out about her death. These last four lines, by putting a halt to O’Hara’s (literal and figurative) ramblings, render the present of the previous lines a product of an ignorant past as they absorb, through the tension they create between past and present, memory and materiality, the reader’s full attention, making us, too, ‘stop breathing’, as we stop reading, or speaking the lines.
Back to ‘A Step Away From Them’, and the importance of its title in rendering the simultaneous closeness and distance of O’Hara from the city’s visual impressions. ‘Everything/ suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of/ a Thursday.’ O’Hara persists in the tension between particularity and generalization – the Action Painters’ ‘push’ and ‘pull’ technique materializes in his poems through this sort of vivifying contradiction – in order to render the surface of his poem alive like the surface of the city. We can fairly say that not everything actually ‘suddenly honks’ in an urban moment of communion and harmony, but between the specificity of the digital 12:40 and ‘Thursday’ and the abstractedness of ‘everything’ and ‘a’ (preceding Thursday), we realize that at that moment in time, all of the bits and pieces, the fragments that O’Hara has been perceiving come together in a sound effect that is almost comforting in the aural image of coherence it purports. Despite the poem’s resistance to figuration – its refusal to flesh out fully the images of the Negro and the chorus girl (O’Hara focuses instead on a toothpick and the blond’s click) – it succeeds in bringing these fragmented, re-engineered ‘signs’ of the city in a choral unison entirely representative of the city’s shifting landscape and its general atmosphere. This is what O’Hara terms ‘the aesthetic of culmination rather than examination’, where totality is as important as the individual parts, and where the individual parts modify and generate an over-arching vibe which often invites a reassessment of previous impressions. This can be compared to the effect of the vastness of some of Pollock’s paintings, which have the effect of confronting and engulfing the spectator, creating an emotional response generated by the individual detail of the painting in its final culmination. The emotional response generated by the whole will modify our opinion of the detail, and vice versa. Confronting a Pollock you are confronting a complex network of marks and events, the culmination of one single, and yet multivalent, purpose, a city very much present and possibly aggressive or intimidating, but lyrical and fresh, new, in its particularities.
