The Outer Circle

Now,” wrote Frank O’Hara in 1954, “I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern.”¹ Now — over forty years after O’Hara’s early death — we might fairly judge the wait over. A widely reviewed new edition of Selected Poems; a number of significant, recent critical engagements with his work; even the surprisingly brisk sales of his 1957 volume Meditations in an Emergency, following its role in an episode of the television series Mad Men — all variously attest to a renewed critical and popular interest in O’Hara’s exuberant personality and his part in postwar American poetry.² It is a part that, if it once seemed a memorable character role, has gradually morphed into a decidedly queer star turn. But what does it mean that a poet whose reception has been indelibly marked by his perceived status as a coterie figure, dashing off poems to lovers and friends stuffed full of personal references to New York’s midcentury queer and artistic cultures, now finds a new audience via a mainstream television show? What would O’Hara make of the odd effects of his work’s emergence first within, and then increasingly far from, a particular community of sympathetic friends and readers?

Lytle Shaw’s important new study, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, speaks to questions much like these, arguing that O’Hara’s poetry both thrives on the everyday, affective, and artistic sustenance of his ever-shifting circle of intimates and also keenly anticipates its inevitable surfacing in contexts beyond its immediate frame of reference. As the binocular focus of his title suggests, Shaw’s engagement is as much with theorizing the term coterie as with delving into the specific affiliations that produced, or were produced by, O’Hara’s body of work. That work is an apt case study for what Shaw identifies, in his introduction, as the difficulties of reading coterie. Intervening in a critical debate that would either view coterie’s breach of aesthetic and social decorum as pejorative (an inappropriately or ineffectually small audience) or recuperate it as positive (a social context to be recovered beneath the ahistorical veneer of literary institutionalizing), Shaw asserts that “we need a way to articulate coterie’s afterlife in literature that does not simply imply loss — as if the opposition were between proper historicism and the symptomatically literary” (23). Coterie, he counters, is best understood as not only an archival fact but also a fluid rhetoric: one whose set of formal strategies depends on its communal occasion, but whose address is nevertheless not limited to or fixed by that vital empirical context.

Over six chapters, Shaw’s elegant readings of coterie’s formal strategies in O’Hara’s poetry limn the “seam between the textual and the empirical” (4). In so doing, they provide a rich conceptual framework for anyone occupied with the question of queer formalisms. Chapter 1, which centers on a bravura reading of “Cornkind,” examines O’Hara’s use of the proper name to fashion “nominal families” that reinvent social and literary kinship as forms of queer reproduction (17). Chapter 2 reads the second-person address in O’Hara’s long, late poem “Biotherm” in light of the revisionary stances his work takes toward modernist coteries as it attempts to think collectivity outside the model of the heterosexual family. Having pursued coterie’s relationship to imagined futures and to history, Shaw next places O’Hara’s coterie poetics alongside other midcentury discourses of community, provocatively reading “In Memory of My Feelings” as a poem about how subjects comprehend and participate in collectivities. The fourth chapter broadens the space of coterie to an international scale, looking at O’Hara’s intimate use of the “combative names” of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak as an extension of his coterie poetics and a concomitant meditation on the terms of political and sexual freedom available to subjects in Cold War America (120). Each chapter subtly yet significantly reframes...