University of Cape Town – ELL 4068S
Peter Anderson
18 November 2017
‘The Affable Affluence’:
The Selfless Luxury of Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium (1923) and Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964)
“We must enter boldly that interior world
To pick up relaxations of the known.”
– From Stevens’s ‘A Word with Jose Rodriguez-Feo’
“and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
…
it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it”
– From O’Hara’s ‘Having a Coke With You’
“It was not important that [his poems] survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.”
– From Stevens’s ‘The Planet on the Table’
“And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
Writing these poems!
Imagine!”
– From O’Hara’s ‘Autobiographia Literaria’
There is an alternative Modernist tradition of bliss. For the “waste and welter” of Eliot & Pound’s hegemonic dissonance I would offer the counterpoint of Stevens & O’Hara’s incarnations of ecstatic variety. Their entire bodies-of-work, a generation apart, both bespeak a lyrical vitality and a self-aware charm that regards the reader equally with intellectual respect and a wry sense for the necessity of pleasure. This is most closely focused in the self-sufficient texts of Harmonium and Lunch Poems respectively. The former is Stevens’s loudly lush middle-aged debut while the latter is O’Hara’s inadvertent summation of his own transience. Together they are almost criminally readable. Their fun, their confidence, their casualness, their generosity and their sensuous heft all signify something that I doubt has ever been well-enough emphasized: a modern poetry of self-reconciliation remains possible. Stevens harnessed his art to an exceptionally American conception of Nature, as a “sugared void”[1]of mutual possession within a whirling kaleidoscope of shapeshifting sensuality, while O’Hara particularized the glamorous “catastrophe of [his] personality”[2]into a living love-song for the metropolitan paradise of mood and chance. Historically, these visions seem to me to arrive on the crests of two successive waves of (apparently) pre-Freudian consumer booms – Harmonium cataloguing the coming delights of the Roaring Twenties and Lunch Poems reporting both the bourgeois and transgressive pleasures of ‘the naked city’ of the New York Fifties. But neither poet speaks to us as mere articles of their time. My interest in combining these considerations of their achievements is to speculate on the shock of experiencing their residual intimacy as voices. To my mind the lyric impulse, at least in America, towards the expansion of personal fantasy had nowhere to go after these two masters but into the poeticization of popular songwriting and the less social experimentation of confessional poetry. So a reckoning with their homemade systems of spontaneous exaltation is perhaps required to begin imagining a verse of any future urgency.
The prevailing mythos of literary Modernism is premised on a bathetic romance of dissolution and desolation. The usual suspects of Eliot, Hemingway, Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Pound, cummings, H.D., D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Pessoa, Brecht, Mann, Orwell, Isherwood and Auden, despite their wildly varying politics and characters, all inhabited or rambled between the European capitals between the world wars as perturbed witnesses to an age of extreme anxiety. Against Modernity in all its disruptive, fantastical guises, their voices collectively ran the gamut between lamenting a lost foundation of coherence and attempting to replace it with a new, looser form of active expression. Each of their personal stylistic blueprints – from Imagism to Epic Theatre to the Heteronym – announced a potential aesthetic remedy to, or salutary expression of, what Pound in ‘The Garden’ diagnosed as “a kind of emotional anemia”: a basic, unprecedented crisis of the self’s relation to society. These were new ‘centres’ to chuck in place of the one that could not hold – the general, unqualified faith in the virtue and preference of God-given Order, in all of its manifestations. As such they implicitly assumed that the individual could not constitute itself without reference to an abstract totality. The particular self was inseparable from the system it simultaneously renewed and participated in. The New was conditioned by its obligations to the purposes of the Old.
This is a familiar story of course, and one which holds good across most of the other classical arts of the time, from Kandinsky’s form-fetish to Schoenberg’s twelve-tones, but all around this milieu a different venture developed its own manner of reaction. A stoic Romanticism – the latent legacy, in a sense, of Shelley, Keats, Rimbaud and Mallarme – was revived in the ardent playfulness of the surrealist works of Apollinaire, Reverdy, Eluard, Mayakovsky and much of the literature of the Dadaists. Though all of these poets remained far from apolitical[3], their writings did not primarily present themselves as panaceas to chaos but rather as clear-headed celebrations of its liberatory potential. The system they advocated, so to speak, was just the sensuous fantasy of chance. The prospective revolution they supported was not a collective reassertion of self-control but a visionary transcendence of rationality. Their lines followed only the formal strictures of unfolding feeling.
And in America, long before Gertrude Stein’s coterie of ex-pats left to refashion themselves in the Great Tradition, this spontaneous craft had already been summoned up and sounded out by a number of performers. Firstly by the two great original voices of the late 19thCentury, Whitman and Dickinson, who complemented each other perfectly as the bellowing bard of empirical plenty and the quiet detective of psychological power. Then by the folkloric evolution of the musical forms of Blues and Jazz, which founded their popularity on the requirement of personal improvisation and affectation. And last, but most, Cinema arrived on the scene as the electric focus of mass fantasy, projecting a commoner’s art out of the fluctuating substance of collective desire. For the poets who remained in the New-ish World after 1910 (the year Virginia Woolf picked as marking ‘a turning-point in the human character’), such homegrown mediums served as the backdrop, soundtrack and inspiration for a paradigm of purist prosperity. The West had just been fenced. The South had mostly recovered from Reconstruction. The Gilded Age of the robber-barons had caused something of a trickle-down effect (for once) by inflating and connecting the skyscraping cities. Cuba and the Philippines had been nabbed from Spain to expand the country’s private empire. And Woodrow Wilson then kept U.S. servicemen away from the Western Front just long enough to ensure a share of the spoils of victory sans any of the various devastations then common. Reality was altogether there to be reaped.
So in Robert Frost’s deliberate tones we hear the leisurely pastoral appreciation of a John Clare resurrected in New England:
When I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path.
(From ‘A Late Walk’)
In William Carlos Williams we get the self-evidence of a physician dissecting materiality with the least apparent effort:
It was an icy day.
We buried the cat,
then took her box
and set fire to it
in the back yard.
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire
died by the cold.
(‘Complete Destruction’)
Langston Hughes proclaims the validity of his personal experience through a trademark tautological oratory:
Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.
(‘April Rain Song’)
Marianne Moore makes a private encyclopedia of animals, vegetables and minerals to translate the arcane tendrils of her feelings:
Openly, yes,
With the naturalness
Of the hippopotamus or the alligator
When it climbs out on the bank to experience the
Sun, I do these
Things which I do, which please
No one but myself.
(From ‘Black Earth’)
And with Edna St. Vincent Millay we eventually arrive at a plain lyric of self-acknowledgement:
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
(From ‘Dirge Without Music’)
There is a startling but effective naivete to the poetic techniques of all these quotations. They clearly show the preoccupation of the era’s auto-didact practitioners with the mere affirmation of things. The language is simple and self-explanatory because it means to restart description from the beginning again. It responds to Whitman’s overspill by fastening onto particulars and sucking their potential meanings dry.
But Stevens and O’Hara invented themselves out of more than just this atmosphere of elementary acknowledgement. Their prosodic freedom is also the commercial, sardonic tricksiness of one Dorothy Parker:
Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
(From ‘One Perfect Rose’)
One Ogden Nash:
Celery, raw
Develops the jaw,
But celery, stewed,
Is more quietly chewed.
(‘Celery’)
And one Cole Porter:
Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose.
Anything goes.
(From ‘Anything Goes’)
These personalities are far too relaxed and industrious to take whatever agonies they may experience very seriously. Their selfhoods are composed of observations and affections, their witticisms both pristine and throwaway, like any of the commodities advertised in the magazines they featured in. They occasionally recognize the general change in human values but their first instinct is to capitalize on it with a rhyme and a joke. Their sense of assurance stems from their forthright involvement in life, down to its flickering wants and petty details. And this urbane serenity requires no meta-narrative beyond the entertaining utility of appearances.
The various outworkings of this materialist temperament then ultimately amount, in Stevens and O’Hara’s work, to a “concocted doctrine [of] rout”[4]:
By being so much of the things we are,
Gross effigy and simulacrum, none
Gives motion to perfection more serene
Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought,
Most rare, or ever of more kindred air
In the laborious weaving that you wear.
For so retentive of themselves are men
That music is intensest which proclaims
The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom …
(From Stevens’s ‘To the One of Fictive Music’)
And
Yes it is strange that everyone fucks and every-
One mentions it and it’s boring too that faded floor
How many teeth have chewed a little piece of the lover’s
Flesh how many teeth are there in the world it’s like
Harpo Marx smiling at a million pianos call that Africa
Call it New Guinea call it Poughkeepsie I guess
It’s love I guess the season of renunciation is at “hand”
The final fatal hour of turpitude and logic demise
(From O’Hara’s ‘For the Chinese New Year & For Bill Berkson’)
The candid voice in both poems is retained from its surrounding influences, but what is here so ridiculously new and shared is a rolling technical exuberance that sweeps the reader into a state of sharp-edged confusion. Both poets are speaking of the ‘gross’ ubiquity of reality’s excess through forms that immediately strike us as being, in themselves, uniquely excessive. Their respective rhapsodies equally inspire an entranced awareness of the material construction of their lines. However, their methods for achieving this effect are entirely opposed, and they originate in Stevens and O’Hara’s contrasting philosophies of poetry’s connection to personal experience.
For Stevens, the poet “cannot spend [his] time in being modern when there are so many more important things to do.”[5]Like Kafka, his near-exact contemporary, this entailed spending most of his working-life instead as an insurance man. Through the composition of all his lasting poetry, he lead a peaceable, bourgeois existence in a big house in the small setting of Hartford, Connecticut. He stayed married to the same ‘High-Toned Old Christian Woman’, Elsie, for forty-six years until his death – raising one respectful daughter, Holly, never leaving the North American continent and never condescending to any literary socializing beyond once punching Hemingway in the jaw on a dare during a sojourn in Key West. As his style grew stark in the early Fifties, he accepted his expected late-career honours with the zen nonchalance of a porcelain bust of himself, his crisp silver hair still cropped and professional. All of which, after his death, obliged his wife to comment that “a critical biography is not needed for the understanding of Mr Stevens’ poetry. Mr Stevens’ poetry was a distraction that he found delight in, and which he kept entirely separate from his home life, and his business life – neither of them suitable or relevant to an understanding of his poetry.”[6]
This is innocently untrue. A better understanding of Stevens’s work is definitely afforded by the consideration of how this very vast separation between his life and his art engendered the visceral paradise of his verses.[7]Thanks to regular, roundabout business-trips, he was still able to see for himself much of “[t]he dreadful sundry of this world”[8]; taking long strolls in the wilds of the states that would feature in Harmonium, from the Tennessee of ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ to the Oklahoma of ‘Life is Motion’ to the Florida of so many of the rest. Most of all he encountered the reality of the Caribbean as a witnessed arcadia of flavoured feeling. Back in the North-East, these places became for him the working materials of a continuous contemplation of the potential extent of his reimagined senses. In the dependability of his domesticity, he followed up a freedom of private appreciation that bred extremity in a modicum of quotidian choice. His loyal poet-friend Jose Rodriguez-Feo thus attested him to be
the poet of the enjoyment, in the sense that those realities that he speaks about – for instance when he talks about fruits, or when he talks about pictures, or looking at something in nature – those are the things that make life enjoyable … He was always going to fruit stores to buy things.[9]
The self-contented being of these objects of potential pleasure transmutes into the self-sufficient circling of his poems’ meditations:
The words of things entangle and confuse.
The plum survives its poems. It may hang
In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground
Obliquities of those who pass beneath,
Harlequined and lazily dewed and mauled
In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form,
Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzle fruit.[10]
But in as much as this external sweetness exists indifferently it still remains beholden to the catalyst of time:
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;
And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,
In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation[11]
And
The honey of heaven may or may not come,
But that of earth both comes and goes at once[12]
And
There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.[13]
Likewise Stevens’s poetry, as a rococo evocation of this ever-present transience, first presents itself exactly as a ‘Harmonium’ – a continuum of mellifluous harmonies. Each individual work appears as a resumption and variation of a single grand ode to the necessary interdependence of the senses and the intellect:
The imagination, here, could not evade,
In poems of plums, the strict austerity
Of one vast, subjugating, final tone.[14]
And this tone, Stevens’ own, declares a constant metamorphosis of things and the modes of their appearances:
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
And
As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,
And out of their droning sibilants makes
Often this Spinozan flow of sense just seems to dissolve into pure, sweet noise as well:
The lacquered loges huddled there
Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay.
The moonlight
But the endless alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia in this and all the other above-quoted lines combines with the run-on proclamations of the rhythm to make a mimesis of the richness of sensation as such. Stevens thus reduces his purpose to the single-minded articulation of his own ‘supreme fiction’. His poetry is just the repeated proof and constant rephrasing of its own theory, which only particularizes itself through slight alterations to its music. But he grounds and validates this abstraction by convincingly casting it as an instance of the expressive whirlwind it attempts to describe:
There are men whose words
Are as natural sounds
Of their places
As the cackle of toucans
His own person is put forth as the nearest example of nature’s self-consciousness, and the materiality of his voice is subsumed into its subject:
And
‘The soul, he said, is composed
And
If from the earth we came, it was an earth
That bore us as a part of all the things
It breeds and that was lewder than it is.[21]
And
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.[22]
Thus the poet merely writes in accordance with their own material existence, and the subject-object divide between nature and its observer collapses into a single moebius-band-like plane of the self-aware imagination. But Stevens here avoids any false essentialism by reducing the substance of his perspective to the degree-zero of Emerson’s ‘transparent eyeball’:
the same wind
[…] is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.[23]
This empty subjectivity, unlike the ‘Hollow Men’ of Eliot’s drear vision, is liberated by its own poverty. Because we can only possess our own appreciation of the world by acknowledging it as one of the world’s own possessions, we are each free to change nature into what we make of it:
That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
And what we should make of it is, of course, a garden of earthly delights:
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.[25]
As a commodity of hedonistic invention, ‘ice-cream’ here represents the ideal of a kind of poetry made from taste itself. It stands as a kind of asymptote (‘finale’) for the artifice of appearances. And the poet cleaves to this conception of their craft because it provides a sense of self-delighting purpose that allows their work to seemingly remain valuable and sovereign beyond any outside influence: “[This ideal] cannot be dismissed merely because we think that we have long since outlived the ideal. The truth is that we are constantly outliving it and yet the ideal itself remains alive with an enormous life.”[26]Thus, Stevens responds to the flux of his era by building his own private Xanadu of language out of the affected void of his self.
Frank O’Hara was just as much an extension of his environment as Stevens, but he undoubtedly would have hated the notion of an essentially anti-social poetry:
“However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity – in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now listen carefully. You in others – this is your soul. This is what you are.[27]”
He was born in 1926, four years after Harmonium was published, and grew up in comfortable boredom in small towns in Massachusetts. He escaped first to the Navy, then to Harvard to study music, and then to New York where – thanks to a steady job at MOMA and dozens of intense creative friendships and love affairs[28]- he nigh-on vibrated at the center of the entire art world for nearly two decades. Where Stevens absorbed himself into the sounds and visions of the big country, O’Hara got lost in the city’s second nature of movies, paintings and concerts:
“One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes: I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.[29]”
Thus, unlike Stevens’ purified rhetoric, O’Hara’s pronouncements are shamelessly corrupted by particulars. When Stevens provides place-names and definite details (‘Florida’, ‘Chief Iffucan’, ‘Badroulbadour’ etc.) he means to employ them as a kind of ornamental diction for fleshing out his self-contained fantasies. But the real-existing New York of the Fifties was already O’Hara’s private paradise, and so his own daily life appeared to him as a song of celebratory reportage from inside its borders:
How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left.[30]
And each appreciable moment of self-awareness obliges an apparently direct transcription of his consciousness:
[…] it is 12:40 of
A Thursday.
Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.[31]
And even thoughts of unsought opportunities still stand as compliments to the general variety of adventures on offer:
How exciting it is
not to be at Port Lligat
Or learning Portuguese in Bilbao so you can go to
As such, his poetry was less of an art or a vocation than a constant companion to his personality. John Ashbery recalled that he would “[dash the] poems off at odd moments – in his office […] in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people – he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them.”[33]They also functioned as a kind of currency of affection that he shared constantly amongst his friends[34]- his Collected Poems had to be compiled by a lengthy process of petitioning most of his loved ones to comb through his old letters. And because the bohemian districts of the city then served as the centres of all the various post-war avant-gardes (and O’Hara’s exuberance extended to his affections for nearly every other medium), he befriended artists of all stripes – from Allen Ginsberg to Morton Feldman to Willem de Kooning – featured them in his poems and casually inflected his own style with literary imitations of the innovations they were pursuing in their own forms. Just as Stevens’ method aspired to a visual and musical extravagance to match its textual command, O’Hara affected his poems with conspicuous echoes of every incarnation of Abstract Expressionism, from the tonal chaos of bebop jazz to the spontaneous slashes of feeling in Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings[35]:
So many things in the air! Soot,
elephant balls, a Chinese cloud
Which is entirely collapsed, a cat
Swung by its tail
and the senses
of the dead which are banging about
As such this is a poetry spilling itself out into the world, aching to contradict its own self-sufficiency. It asserts its materiality not through harmonizing with nature but by constantly pointing beyond itself to a stream of incomparable realities it feels honoured to record:
I am alive with you
full of anxious pleasures and pleasurable anxiety
hardness and softness
listening while you talk and talking while you read
I read what you read
you do not read what I read
which is right, I am the one with the curiosity
you read for some mysterious reason
I read simply because I am a writer[37]
This perpetually hopeful encounter with otherness, in every imaginable form and context, O’Hara affirms as the intimate source of his poetic vitality. In his tongue-in-cheek literary credo ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ he describes his ideal verse as “being so totally opposed to [any] kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. […] Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art.”[38]He describes its Eureka moment as occurring on an afternoon when, having just fallen in love again, “I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person.While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born.” With this realization, “[t]he poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.”[39]
Thankfully it isn’t, but only because this sheer reduction to the poem’s reality doesn’t negate the reader’s potential for empathy. It just situates the poem itself as a self-consciously unique, ‘historical’ event to match the indispensable objectivity of whatever inspired it. There is no ‘philosophy’ to this aesthetic because it doesn’t seek to explain or systematize the contingency of such excessive feelings – it just depicts and affirms them. In stylistic terms, this insight amounts to an ingenious predilection for the unexpected. Whereas in Stevens, the poem presents itself as the spiraling logic of a transubstantiating consciousness, in O’Hara the only unity is provided by the presumed continuity of the poet’s perspective before the chaos of his own inspiration. As such, we are made to marvel at the crafted beauty of his mind’s formlessness:
the radio is on the cigarette is puffed upon
by the pleasures of rolling in a bog
some call the Milky Way
in far-fetched Occidental lands above the trees
where dwell the amusing skulls[40]
And
lies building their tendrils into dim figures
who disappear down corridors in west-side apartments
into childhood’s proof of being wanted, not
abandoned, kidnapped
betrayal staving off loneliness, I see the fog lunge in
And
the children were trailing their fingers in the water
and the swans, regal and smarty, were nipping their
“little” fingers
I heard one swan remark “That was a good nip
though they are not as interesting as sausages”
and another
reply “Nor as tasty as those peasants we got away from
The verses here are ostensibly as continuous as their run-on enjambments, but the swerving line placements, lower-case muttering register and sudden disjunctions of imagery all conspire to perplex us utterly. They play as concerted thoughts but quickly escape any reduction to insight. Instead, O’Hara composes them just to expose the idiosyncracies of his intuition, building up an internal logic of association that bears the imprint of his particular playfulness, as well as the everyday surrealism of any continuous appreciation of the modern cacophony of New York City.
As such, he implicitly expresses his self as a protean source of poetic response and urban speculation. He writes in the full sincerity of his passing moods because he recognizes the greater transience of all particulars:
[…] the light seems to be eternal
And joy seems to be inexorable
I am foolish enough always to find it in wind[43]
And
[…] I historically
belong to the enormous bliss of American death.[44]
But in the meantime, in the full acknowledgement of the inconsistency of his character, he still gives us lucid moments like this:
oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
In overview then, Stevens and O’Hara can be seen to have developed two entirely discreet but fascinatingly complementary private visions of the materialist sublime. They independently shared the endeavour of inventing a modern American poetry premised on expressing and celebrating the transience of sensation (the aesthetic of the commodity), and they both succeeded at finding forms that could lastingly accompany the changes in their preferred modes of personal experience. But Stevens created a private, self-sustaining mythology of the aesthetic that aspired to a transcendent articulation of the single shared substance of consciousness, art and reality, while O’Hara achieved the harder task of breaking down the distance between the daily facts, fluctuations and mysteries of his subjectivity and the overwhelming sentimentality he could bring to bear on all of them. These self-created systems for corralling chaos were made for their own sakes, and the proof of their success lies in their present appreciation. But the supreme intellect and perfect seriousness both poets brought to their self-delighting work now perhaps appears historically poignant and strange. However, as I say, I don’t think any future poetry of gratitude can be imagined without returning to their examples, as I have attempted to here.
Word Count: 4652
Reference List:
Ashbery, John. 1995. ‘Introduction’ to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. (Ed. by Donald Allen) Berkeley: University of California Press.
Burt, Stephen. 2000. ‘Hi, Louise!’ in the London Review of Books. Available: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n14/stephen-burt/hi-louise
Hofmann, Michael. 2016. ‘Snap among the Witherlings’ in the London Review of Books. Available: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n18/michael-hofmann/snap-among-the-witherlings
O’Hara, Frank. 1995. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. (Ed. by Donald Allen) Berkeley: University of California Press.
O’Hara, Frank. 1964. Lunch Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
Stevens, Wallace. 2006. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.
Wood, Michael. 1998. ‘Out of the Lock-Up’ for the London Review of Books. Available: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n07/michael-wood/out-of-the-lock-up
[1]From ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’
[3]Eluard and Mayakovsky of course were true-believer Communists, but their styles were self-sufficient as permanent revolutions of their own sensibilities.
[4]From ‘TheComedian as the Letter C’
[7]I dispiritedly agree with Michael Hofmann that “[t]o think about Stevens’s life, or Stevens from the perspective of his life, is to be told that your bird of paradise, your parrot or your quetzal, is actually a pigeon or a Farmer Matthews turkey. Nothing in writing has the full-on charm of early Stevens, the abundance of colours and scents and sounds, the musical instruments and fruit, and – oh, just the abundance of abundance.” (2016)
[8]From ‘O Florida, Venereal Soil’
[10]From ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’.
[11]From ‘The Place of the Solitaires’.
[12]From ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’.
[13]From ‘Fabliau of Florida’.
[14]From ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ one last time.
[15]From ‘Domination of Black’.
[16]From ‘Two Figures in Dense Violet Night’.
[17]From ‘The Ordinary Women’.
[18]From ‘Anecdote of Men by the Thousand’.
[20]From ‘Anecdote of Men by the Thousand’.
[21]From ‘Anatomy of Monotony’
[22]From‘Tea at the Palace of Hoon’
[25]From ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’.
[26](Stevens quoted in Wood, 1998)
[27]From ‘About Zhivago and his Poems’ (Quoted in Burt, 2000)
[28]So many that he needed a private appointment system to make time for everyone.
[29]From ‘Meditations in an Emergency’.
[31]From ‘A Step Away From Them’.
[33](1995:vii) Hence ‘Lunch Poems’ as the title for his first popular selection, from the fact that Lawrence Ferlinghetti of the City Lights Bookstore & Press found it amusing that he’d composed many of his poems during his breaks at MOMA.
[34]“He was, as Lytle Shaw has suggested, a ‘coterie poet’ in some of the ways that Donne was one. Like Donne, he became an energetic poet of intimacy. And like Donne’s, his work is addressed both to a public, populous world (which includes his future readers) and to the poet’s close friends (encouraging them to believe that they’re the ones who matter).” (Burt, 1998)
[35]Ashbery again:“[Abstract Expressionism] absorbed Frank to such a degree … that it could be said to have taken over his life.” (1995: viii)
[37]From ‘St. Paul and All That’.
[40]From ‘2 Poems From the Ohara Monogatari’.
[42]From ‘Poem En Forme De Saw’.
Categories: Essays/Prose