Parodic Nostalgia for Aesthetic Machismo: Frank O'Hara and Jackson Pollock

In his apologetic letter of rejection to Frank O’Hara for the 1955 Yale Younger Poets prize (awarded to John Ashbery), W. H. Auden wrote: “I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”¹ In a letter to Kenneth Koch, O’Hara responded to Auden’s comment, saying: “I don’t care what Wystan says, I’d rather be dead than not have France around me like a rhinestone dog-collar.”² In this way he confirms Auden’s characterization, but only after broadening the definition of “surrealistic style” to encompass modern French poetry as a whole, thus betraying the ambivalence which the New York poets felt about bearing such a label.

Koch makes this attitude clear in an interview with Richard Kostelanetz in 1991:

No, it was not founded on surrealism or Dada. Frank read the French poets and knew them, but his poetry was not surrealistic. It seems to me the surrealist attitude—trusting the unconscious more than the conscious, doing automatic writing, saying whatever comes into your head, using accident in your poems, bringing in material from dreams—all those things that were programmatic for the surrealists . . . these characteristics have by now become a natural and almost instinctive part of the work of many poets writing in English. You can find them in poets who are not of the “New York School.” But whereas a good deal of surrealist poetry tends to stay in this world of dreams and the unconscious and magic, Frank’s poetry very clearly comes back to what would be considered ordinary reality. It always ends up back on the streets, back with the taxicabs, and most of all back with the emotional attachments in this life.³

Ashbery is more affirmative, explicitly enumerating these French avant-garde influences that he sees as framing and modulating O’Hara’s work: “It is part of a modern tradition which is anti-literary and anti-artistic, and which goes back to Apollinaire and the Dadaists, to the collages of Picasso and Braque with their perishable newspaper clippings, to Satie’s musique d’ameublement which was not meant to be listened to.”⁴ Other, more academic writers have situated O’Hara’s work not so much in a marginalized “other tradition” (as Ashbery calls it),⁵ as in an American offshoot of a Symbolist tradition subtly inscribed at the core of twentieth-century avant-garde experiments, especially those of the so-called Cubist poets. Thomas Meyer summarizes this tendency, discovering in O’Hara’s poems a “notion of surface ... inherited from Mallarmé via Apollinaire, coming as it did through Dada and Surrealism on the way.”⁶

The contrasts and conflations of these assessments arise from Surrealism’s being the principal repository of poetic experiments since the Symbolists, yet a distinct entity within the Modernist Avant-Garde with its own agenda and methodology. A general principle, however, separates the Dada/Surrealist attitude from the Symbolist/Cubist one and pertains to the relative importance of the creative process for the first group as opposed to that of the finished work for the latter. Consequently, two modes of avant-garde discourse emerge that are closely connected yet vibrantly antagonistic. But O’Hara’s generation felt little obligation to maintain them in any doctrinaire way in the postwar American context. Thus, the Americans enjoyed a strategic flexibility that masked an underlying ambiguity about their role as the cultural heirs of the European Avant-Garde.

But O’Hara had another reason to avoid taking sides: his interest in the Avant-Garde paralleled that of the Abstract Expressionists, who were combining aestheticist and anti-aestheticist concerns in a new way. At the time, Abstract Expressionism was popularly viewed as an acculturative outgrowth of Surrealist aspirations as they were adapted to American conditions after World War II.⁷ The linchpin of this association was psychic automatism boldly transferred to the...