Frank O'Hara Book Cover

Frank O'Hara was a poet in mid 20th century who was friends with a large amount of the Abstract Expressionsist Artists in New York City, his critical writings and poetic works helped define the idea of the "New York School" which was oppositioned to the growing Beat movement in that the NYS looked to surrealism for possibility and humor within their poetry whereas the Beats looked for transcendance and derrangement of the senses in their work. As a result, Frank o'Hara represented for me someone who bridged both the high and the low, the chatty and the deep and he was a perfect illustration of what his fellow poet, Kenneth Koch, described as: "to be serious without being solemn." O'Hara's tombstone reads, "Grace to be born and live as variously as possible," which describes what it would be like for being an openly-gay man in the pre-Stonewall days New York. O'Hara writes with passion about who he is, but always is aware of feeling outside of the heteronormative tradition of 1950s America. In all my work, and especially this piece, I tend to look at what is the established tradition in a field and seek a way to work around that in much the same way, Frank o'Hara Which is at odds in the ways that printed poetry is treated—always suffered from an immense malady of "seriousness" in both content and layout and design. Poetry books aren't in demand, except in academic environments: study and education, and moving towards motion graphics and other youtube/audio expression. So a book such as Frank o'Hara's Collected Poems needs to excite students in a college Literature class scenario by using imagery and layout that may differ from their high school experience of poetry.

There are numerous references to typewriters in Frank O’Hara’s work. The typewriter was a means to express the kind of long lines full of adjectives and pop culture in a way that he never felt comfortable with pencil and paper. I had a collection of typewriters that I had collected due to a study I had read saying that the means of writing affected your thought process: eg. a pen and paper suggests a different way of thinking vs the faster speed of a keyboard.

And so I stacked my typewriters, to use the typographic differences between the different keyboards as a form of both formal and historical contrast. Then I rearranged the keys to spell out the pertinent information. In my current typography classes I encourage my students to see no difference in the virtual and the digital form of typography; kerning is the same no matter what tool you end up.

Though you have people such as Guillame Apollinaire and Stéphane Mallarmé exploring type layout in their work, and then later with the Dadaists, Futurists, Surrealists, and Constructivists... and a whole buch of other -ists, you rarely see poetry layout move beyond the Shakespearian Sonnet-style layout. Sentence structure, columns of text, and flush left. The history of Modernism in literature was more about how do we break up text through connotative and denotative means, but less often about the look. Frank O'Hara collaborated with painters in putting poems into their work and his work with the typewriter showed me as a young man what could be done with poetry in printed form, but there's still a way to go.

Example

His poems also have an explosion of subways, hot dogs, New York, Abstract Expressionism, the life and times of a Gay Poet in the Art World of the 50s and 60s at the height of the Abstract Expressionist Movement. Critics have often compared O’Hara’s wordplay to the paintstrokes of deKoonig, Pollock, and others.

“Music”—Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet / of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn. / As they’re putting up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue / I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets, / put to some use before all those coloured lights come on! / But no more fountains and no more rain, / and the stores stay open terribly late.

And I was torn between the idea of the Uptown Frank O’Hara who hobnobbed with the patrons of the arts and the O’Hara who smoked a thousand cigarettes in the the painter’s studios, walking up rickety stairs in cheap coldwater flats. This dual side to O’Hara is one of the things that attracted me to the project. How does one suggest restraint and exuberance in a visual form, especially if the typical poetry books are skewed towards more restraint?

And one can get wrapped up in the soft surrealism, the sorta magical realism of his work, but Frank O’Hara’s work is often referenced in connection to Susan Sonntag’s theory of Camp, where the art is about the surface and there is a danger in often going for the “razzle dazzle” or the hustle and bustle of a surface feeling to convey the energy of poetry.

When looking at Frank O’Hara’s poetry, one can get both thrilled and worn out with all the dazzling references used. My Work, through this project, learned to be more focused and less preoccupied with conveying Energy through clutter, through ‘randomness.” I’m still interested in process, but the poet’s ear is much like the maker’s eye in determining a strong solution to a given problem.

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