Leopard: A poem, is an event that begins and ends on the page; when a poem works it works alone and is not dependent on the performance of its neighbours. The goal with Leopard was to create individual poems whose scope is eclectic and ambitious rather than to fashion a coherent collection. This attitude is not a popular one in twenty-first century poetry, where themed collections and identity poetry are both desired and celebrated. But I believe imagination is the true currency of poetry and coherence is over-rated. The poems cross a variety of forms and styles, to invent and tell stories, to untame the imagination. My poems are disparate and there is little point forcing arbitrary connections and themes onto them. Leopard is influenced by music, film, art, words and by other poets. The poems are influenced by Frank O'Hara, not in style, but in the way O'Hara reminds me that poems can begin anywhere, the poet is nothing if not in control, and writing poems is an exciting thing to do. I imagine some of the poems would please the old ladies in Ealing comedies, these 'doiley' poems are flimsy and full of carefully positioned holes; they stand next to surreal poems which I see being read by a guy in a diner in a David Lynch movie, he'll be crying and laughing—at the same time probably—and not necessarily because the poems are sad or funny; others might be valued by characters who know things about poems and can appreciate what they do, know who or what they are referring to and hopefully find something beyond their lines. Like the spots on a leopard, each poem stands alone, but if a unity is to be found, I hope it is through sound and accessibility. I care how my poems sound because poetry for me is primarily an oral art form. I think some of the poems sound good, others I never read to an audience because not every poem can escape its white space, though it can still serve a valuable enough purpose on the page. I hope my poems are accessible and I hope the sound of a few of them, at least, will stay with the reader, but most of all I hope the poems will not bore; the worst adjective to attach to a poem is boring.'As obvious as an ear': Frank O'Hara's soundThis thesis explores the poems of Frank O'Hara in relation to sound. O'Hara's status as a poet, though legendary, is built on the casual nature of his poetic and not on claims about technical expertise. O'Hara's much-quoted statement in 'Personism: A Manifesto', in which he rejects 'elaborately sounded structures' has resulted in critics taking O'Hara at his word and largely avoiding the sonic properties of his poems. But a poem and its sound are inseparable and to overlook sound in the critical discourse on O'Hara is a considerable omission. The study of sound in poetry typically involves the examination of embedded sound effects which have been employed by the poet to manipulate the readers' experience when reading or listening to a poem. O'Hara does embed sound to some degree in a haphazard way, but what is more noteworthy about O'Hara's poetic is the way sound inhabits the surface of his poems. My intention is to turn up the volume on this neglected area of O'Hara's poetic and tune in to the sonic world he invites the reader to inhabit, the world of surface sound.

archives@tulane.edu / 0 / Marjorie Rawle

This paper is an analysis of two poems by the American New York School poet Frank O’Hara. The two poems analysed here are “The Day Lady Died” and “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul.” Both poems have O’Hara’s distinctive ‘I do this, I do that’ style which is characterised by a conversational tone and a narrative of everyday events in New York City. O’Hara’s poetry has long been criticized by the literary community for being targeted to a coterie circle, specifically to his friends and artists in the New York School in the 1950s and early 1960s. Because these criticisms partly derive from the considerable amount of proper names O’Hara includes in many of his poems, the following analysis will be based on the proper names included in the poems. By using two different theories/typologies to analyse the poems, this paper finds the proper name to be a core part of the narrative of the poems and an important source of information for the context in which the poems were written.

Calif., Univ. of Calif., Diss.--Berkeley. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [301]-315) and index.

This study examines the presence of poetic form in First and Second Generation New York School Poetry. Because New York School writing—where its existence is conceded—seems formless, it has yet to be viewed under a formal lens. Therefore, this study is the first of its kind. In what follows, works by Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley and Ron Padgett are contextualized and closely read for form, with an attention to the shaping propensity of inhabited spaces. While it is agreed that the external environment has the potential to influence shapes and forms of writing, domestic spaces also offer parameters which are traceable onto the page. New York School poets lived in and wrote from alternative domestic spaces—untidy, disordered, congested apartments in downtown New York City. The forms of their poems are accordingly untraditional. New York School stanzas often take on the contours of these spaces, becoming linguistic rooms riddled with the tensions of indoor urban life. After outlining New York School poetry and addressing contemporaneous urban theories, this study asks: what role does the space of writing have on the shape of writing? More specifically, are New York City apartments reflected in the forms of New York School poems? Through close-reading and formal analysis, it becomes possible to affirm that New York School Poetry is formal, and that its form is distinctive in that in its variances, it makes it possible for the tensions and dynamics of living within the constraints of inner urban spaces to be fully pronounced and inflected. This is a study of the formal representations of those inflections.

Collaborative Poetics: Frank O’Hara and Robert Creeley draws on literary studies, art history, and bibliography to examine the transactions between the visual and verbal arts found in the American poets’ work. Bringing longstanding aesthetic debates about poetry and painting to bear on studies of collaboration, the dissertation counters the field’s prevailing intra-disciplinary focus. Visual-verbal collaborations, it suggests, undo conventional dichotomies between these descriptive systems, rendering insufficient a binary view of the “sister arts” as antagonists or analogues. By examining Creeley’s and O’Hara’s interdisciplinary forms and practices, this study advances a notion of “collaborative poetics” that centrally depends on both inter-artistic and inter-subjective exchange. As two of the most prolific collaborators of the mid-20th century – completing over 50 projects with visual artists between them – O’Hara and Creeley serve as exemplary case studies, situated at the forefront of an era in which reciprocity between the avant-garde arts was increasingly common. Through analyses of O’Hara’s early ekphrastic poems (Chapter 1) and Creeley’s literary self- portraiture (Chapter 3), Collaborative Poetics suggests that poets’ interactions with visual media destabilize lyric authority, creating space for reciprocal attachments between artists, artworks, and audiences. The poets’ artists’ books – Frank O’Hara and Michael Goldberg’s 1960 Odes (Chapter 2) and Robert Creeley and Robert Indiana’s 1968 Numbers (Chapter 4) – further advance a claim for alterity by refusing the conservative demand for “artistic purity” and prompting conversation between different (and traditionally opposed) artistic media. Restoring these little-studied works to their original interdisciplinary contexts, the project reinvigorates their status as material objects and subjects of analysis. Finally, the coda both considers the still-tenuous place of such interdisciplinary projects within many institutional spaces, including the academy and the museum, and reflects on the midcentury poets’ collaborative legacy as it turns to a brief reading of contemporary American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and painter Kiki Smith's 2006 artist’s book Concordance. / 2020-12-11T00:00:00Z

This dissertation adopts a fresh interdisciplinary perspective on reading the postwar urban poems of New York School poet Frank O’Hara. Through French Situationist philosophy, and particularly the writings of Guy Debord, the study explores the spatial and textual relations of O’Hara’s urban and cultural representations in postwar poetry. With the help of psychogeography and its “anti-techniques” of détournement and dérive, the research focuses on O’Hara’s uses of appropriation in constructing his urban assemblages. The dissertation considers postwar poems from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara and offers Situationist readings and understandings of O’Hara’s modernist (urban and cultural) space. The choice of specific poems highlights O’Hara’s unequivocal inspiration by French poetry and focuses on their urbane, experimental and erotic aspects. The first two chapters propose ways in decoding psychogeographical approaches in poetic (de)composition for reading O’Hara’s poems, while the third delves into O’Hara’s uses of camp in dialogue with Situationist politics that highlight not only the capitalist and the cultural, but also the erotic and the queer. / Cette thèse expose une nouvelle perspective interdisciplinaire quant à la lecture des poèmes d’après-guerre de le poète de New York School Frank O’Hara. Au travers de la philosophie de Situationiste Internationale, plus précisément des écrits de Guy Debord, cette étude explore les connections entre la poésie de Frank O’Hara et des propres représentation urbains et culturelles. Grace au notions de psychogeographie et ses « anti-technique » de détournement et dérive, cette recherche se concentre sur l’art d’appropriation qu’utilise O’Hara dans ses assemblages poétiques. L’emphase mise sur les poèmes d’après-guerre tirés de The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara illustre la vision de l’environnement moderniste de O’Hara. Les aspects urbains, expérimentaux, et érotiques inspirés de la poésie française sout mis en valeur par les poèmes choisir d’O’Hara. Les deux premier chapitres proposent une approche psychogeographique pour décomposer les images des poèmes de O’Hara tandis que le troisième chapitre examine l’utilization du « camp » en rapport avec la politique Situationiste qui souligne non seulement la capitalisme et la culture, mais aussi l’érotique et l’homosexualité.