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9 Ihave come to see my depression of that era, in large measure, the result of my psychiatrist and fellow groupniks targeting my homosexuality as the cause of all my misery, seeing it as “simply” the result of an unworked-through “oedipal situation,” which the group dynamics would resolve. Ludicrous as it now seems, I bought it, lock, stock, and barrel, and was even willing to go straight, if that would solve my problems—except that I was gay. Therefore, it is ironic that three years of several group meetings a week, a treatment that was supposed to help me, had left my ego and life in tatters. But I finally caught on to the brutal punishment I was taking, and in 1955 I walked out. By luck this coincided with my second two-month fellowship to Yaddo. For I was not only broke, but desperately in need of being taken care of, in order to think about how to go on with my post-therapy life. I was in a very confused state and again doing little writing in my Yaddo studio, when I discovered the poetry of Frank O’Hara. 72 73 Listening to Maria Callas in Bellini’s Norma on the radio recently brought back to me my brief affair in the fifties with the late poet Frank O’Hara. Frank adored Norma, particularly those dizzying vocal duets between the ladies. But he dismissed all the fuss over Callas, whose performance in the title role was getting raves, considering her an unnecessary and expensive import, when “we” had “our own” Zinka Milanov, as he put it. This was part of the Frank O’Hara mentality I found unusual at first. He was always using that phrase “our own”—“our own painters,” “our own actors,” “our own galleries,” even “our own duo piano team,” which turned out to be Gold and Fizdale, whom I frequently heard on a classical music station . What I came to understand, when I got to know him, was that his crowd, with its “own” poets, painters, museum curators, and so on, comprised a new arts movement, of which he was clearly the center. On that visit to Yaddo in the spring of 1955, when I wasn’t walking moodily in the surrounding woodlands, where, a century before, Edgar Allen Poe, in a black suit, was said to have wandered shouting “Nevermore!”—presumably the inspiration for “The Raven”—I spent much of my time in the library, which spilled out from one of the oak-paneled rooms onto shelves lining the halls of the dark, cluttered but imposing mansion. It was in this unreal atmosphere, disoriented by the grim oedipal struggles I had been engaged in in my therapy, that I came across Frank O’Hara’s poems in Poetry magazine. I had been hopefully, if unsuccessfully, submitting my poems to Poetry myself. The poetry world back then, in contrast to today’s, was terribly limited and the periodicals that did take poetry were restrictive , even prudish, about what could be published. I was too informal , too far out, too Jewish, or too openly queer, though they all published me eventually. But now in stuffy little Poetry magazine I was electrified by Frank O’Hara’s swishy, surrealist, almost zany poems, so fresh and funny. I had to admire anybody who could write like that and get away with it. Frank O’Hara had gone to Harvard, I read in the Contributors Notes, where so many other poets seemed to have gone, including Dunstan Thompson—it was the world of the silver spoon, to which I could never belong. When I read Frank’s poems enthusiastically to the other guests, who had gathered at the cocktail hour in Yaddo’s baronial hall for predinner drinks and chat, the listeners were offended at their irresponsibility, their flaunting of homosexuality, their sparkling decadence, and let me know it with yelps of outrage. No one felt neutral about them. My bell jar lifted a little, as Sylvia Plath put it about the effects of her first shock treatment. When I returned to New York at the beginning of that summer, I slipped into the back row of a poetry reading by Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery at the Egan Gallery. The walls of the room were lined with distorted self-portraits by the artist Earl Kerkam, grotesquely descriptive of the way I was feeling about myself. O’Hara and Ashbery , looking like the young Harvard...

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