Contributor: Peter Brennan

Bio Notes: Head of English at The Latymer School, Edmonton and Dartford Grammar School for many years. Now works as a freelance tutor and publisher, teaching courses on literature and spirituality. Runs Perdika Press in association with Mario Petrucci and Nick Potamitis.

Author: Frank O’Hara

Work: ‘Ode to Willem de Kooning’

This is the quintessential New York poem by the quintessential New York poet. To my mind, it dramatises the relationship between the individual consciousness and the massive metropolis with a flair worthy of Apollinaire at his best. Indeed, the title itself gives notice that O’Hara has assumed the mantle of ‘Impresario of the Avant-Garde’—to appropriate Roger Shattuck’s description of Apollinaire. Although only a tiny percentage of O’Hara’s poetry was published during a lifetime that hardly extended beyond the duration of Apollinaire’s, this magisterial piece saw the light of day in 1960 as the second number in O’Hara’s second volume—Odes—with gloriously smudgy cover and title page by another of O’Hara’s painter friends, Michael Goldberg. That Donald Allen managed to omit ‘Ode to Willem de Kooning’ from the Selected Poems is a reminder that even the best of us misjudges occasionally.

Two expansive—almost painterly—sections frame a lyrical, meditative central ‘movement’. The poem gravely announces the morning, literal and metaphorical, but is also warily expressive of the hangover from the hours of darkness, ditto. The first four lines, sliding between margins, offer a grandiose sense of the Earth’s turning and the city’s collective response. (O’Hara’s New York did sleep—but not unduly.) We then hear a familiar O’Haraean alternative voice that is apologetic, but not unduly so, that will recur as the city—posing as life—challenge the speaker to heroism or dissolution.

The ‘blocking’ of this first section suggests an intersected narrow passage between skyscrapers, but it is not until line 15 that names are named—O’Hara loved naming. Throughout, a perilous dialectic is sustained, with ‘lapse of nerve’, ‘temporary hell’, ‘weak / and picturesque’, ‘tumble and rant’, ‘cowardice’, ‘patent absurdities’, ‘fathomless miseries’, ‘upset’, ‘mesmerized world’ and ‘inanimate voices’ ganging up on any attempt to establish ‘greatness’, ‘generosity and / lavishness of spirit’, ‘standing clearly’, ‘courage’, and ‘as the brave must always ascend’ as the operative mode. The competition between pusillanimity and bravery focuses in the emblematic paradoxes of line 16: ‘I have not the courage to convict myself of cowardice or care’.
(Like Apollinaire’s initiatory Alcools, the poem defies punctuation.) We are confident, however, that our poet—as he ventriloquises the speaker, who at this point is about 23% Prufrockian—does possess the requisite courage, and the section closes with a close-up of the participants in an improbable bullfight-cum-mountaineering spectacle, impelled by the transfigured imperative noun ‘musts’ (rather as Hopkins gave us—on the principle of ‘also-ran’—a ‘began’).

Section two takes us out of the streets and into an antique, psuedo-Homeric landscape, where literary heroism remembers its first morning. O’Hara even has the (maddeningly successful) temerity to give us—almost—the ‘rosy fingers’, though they shape shift to become both flowery and bloody. The section’s diction is, inevitably, knowing—but never cynical, even as he writes of ‘a horizon / line that’s beautifully keen, / precarious and doesn’t sag / beneath our variable weight’. The typically theatrical/cinematic imagination here could prevent us noticing the scary contradiction established by the apparently casual slipping in of ‘precarious’ there—but then we’re on to Homer, who leads us back to the imagery and tone of the poem’s initial paradoxes as ‘a white night that opens / after the embattled hours of day’. The glance at – presumably – Mayakovsky’s Leningrad is another example of the poet’s preoccupation with the connexions and movement between apparently irreconcilable worlds that have no choice but to succeed one another as the planet keeps rolling.

And so we return from the waking dream of bloody seas. The stars that featured at the beginning of section two have been ‘blot[ted] out’ as representatives, it would seem, of the nightmarish ‘terrible systems / of belief’ that cursed the century – though the grammatical link is not strong. Surely, though, O’Hara’s gift for seeming frivolous while invoking tragedy was rarely enacted more convincingly (pace John James, ‘The Seriousness of Frank O’Hara’).

The voice of personality, ‘reaching for its / morning cigarette in Promethean inflection’, reasserts itself, not incapable of ‘philosophical’ poise, and witheringly honest in its weary, intense acknowledgement of the procedures and consequences of our self-defeating mechanisms. (Had O’Hara, chained to his rock, been feeling liverish, it would have been perfectly understandable.)

However, the coda takes virtuosic delight in its imitations of the mannerisms of the media that O’Hara loved but did not practise, and ‘as the day zooms into space’—it has to ‘zoom’—the irony again underpins, rather than undermining, the transcendent and transcending assertiveness and ambition of the final peroration.

‘Ode to Willem de Kooning’
by Frank O’Hara

Beyond the sunrise
where the black begins
an enormous city
is sending up its shutters

(Quoted from Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. pp. 283-286. Permission to publish not yet granted.)