"Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

The Personism of Frank O'Hara and the abstract expressionism it bathed in

Before we get to Frank O’Hara, I wanted to share a quick update about the boycott of The Poetry Foundation by 2,000+ poets. The authors of the letter (Omar Sakr, Tariq Luthun, George Abraham, Noor Hindi, and Summer Farah) released this update lifting the boycott. While the Foundation is not committing to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), they have been in what sounds like good-faith conversation with the letter’s authors and are committing to some new measures and better communication about policies they hold that are in line with anti-apartheid struggle. More pressure can be applied to PF and all cultural institutions to stand against occupation and genocide, but it seems that a boycott is not a necessary lever at this moment. Read the Poetry Foundation’s full statement here.

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From time to time, we get to do a deeper dive on a single author in our Zoom poetry writing workshop, and last week we dove right into Frank O’Hara’s very chest. I thought of him because of this comic that a friend shared on Facebook from Ad Reinhardt’s Art, Arts and Architecture (1947):

TFW being sassy at a painting leads to your death.

I like this for a lot of reasons. It’s fed up with your bullshit and is demanding we sit with our discomfort a little bit when faced with something we don’t immediately understand. YOU, SIR, ARE A SPACE, TOO maybe the wildest all caps statement ever made.

Besides being everyone’s favorite, O’Hara was also a curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York at a time when Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists were dribble-splattering their way into the hearts and minds of the 50s art scene. Like the murderous painting above, the abstract expressionists challenged us to bring our own messy incongruences to our artsy gaze and Frank O’Hara loved them.

But many of his more famous works aren’t very abstract at all. The pieces of his we looked at all talk ABOUT art and abstraction, like Reinhardt’s cartoon, but they aren’t exactly interested in messing with your ideas of representation. Here’s his “Why I Am Not a Painter”

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

For your reference, here’s Goldberg’s SARDINES:

So we have a nonabstract poem about abstraction. Do we need these explainers and entry points into non-literal art? Maybe you don’t, but as I have slowly learned doing poetry workshops, there is something powerful and reciprocally communal about arriving at meaning and understanding through conversation. The figuring things out brings people together - both in real time, and in our imaginations. Obviously, I too wish I could have been Frank O’Hara’s best friend.

Speaking of, we read O’Hara’s ironic essay “Personism: A Manifesto” which gets to both parody manifestos and still make real observations about (his) art and the role they play in relating to others. I think about this piece a lot and the way it wants to put poetry, “between two persons instead of two pages.”

[Personism] was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones¹ on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). 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. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style², and the poem is correspondingly gratified.

This way of conceiving art can be applied to any genre or media you choose to create in (unless your artist is AI). For me, this means that the poem can be an important connection between two (or more) people, but it needs the reader to exist, and the relationship to other humans is more important than the poem. We’re a social species and the worlds we have built fall apart in isolation, we fall apart in isolation.

We then looked at O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You.” Let’s just read it, shall we?

The subject of this poem is ballet dancer and certified lucky ducky Vincent Warren, who passed away in 2017. He was the subject of many of O’Hara’s love poems.

But also, the subject of this poem is art and, once again, its value relative to the humans in our lives. Clearly O’Hara loves art, knows a lot about it, loves writing poetry. In the Personism essay he says:

I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.

No matter how much he thinks about and loves his art, he appears to love Warren more. At least that’s what he’s (convincingly) arguing. And by keeping those priorities, the art benefits and hopefully his relationship did too. That poem is worth at least one prolonged smooch.

There are several O’Hara rabbit holes I want to go down, but I’ll leave it here and save those for another day. I think the main thing I want to say is that let’s keep looking at art together. Okay?

Here are the writing prompts we covered, if you’re interested:

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More of a Comment Than a Question #54 - 3.21.24 The Personism of Frank O’Hara

Look at this comic by Ad Reinhardt in Art, Arts and Architecture (1947)

Read “Why I Am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara
Look at “Sardines” by Michael Goldberg just because

• List five things that you are not but can appreciate

• Write a poem about one of them called “Why I Am Not a ____”

Read “Personism: A Manifesto” 
and “Having a Coke With You” by Frank O’Hara

• List ten people you love

• Write a poem to one of them that is almost as good as talking to them, just go on your nerve

1. Amiri Baraka.

2. According to Wiktionary, Lucky Pierre is “The person in a threesome who both penetrates and is penetrated.”