Frank O’Hara Drives Charles Olson’s Car

This article shows how Frank O’Hara’s quintessential “I do this I do that” style, and especially his time signals (“It is 12:20 in New York a Friday”), were inherited from Charles Olson. O’Hara’s inheritance is also a critique of Olson’s contradictory poetics of manly immediacy through machinery on the one hand, and claims to autonomy from commercial culture on the other. By immersing himself in consumer culture, O’Hara, contrary to predominant interpretations, is not being flippant. Rather, his cataloging of the life of commodities betrays a deep anxiety about the stability of selfhood in Fordism, evinced in the deaths populating his poems. Both Olson and O’Hara reveal how the Fordist fantasy of personal freedom through machinery (especially the automobile) is haunted by its dialectical opposite: men becoming mere moving parts on the assembly line of the administered world.