Having a Real Day of It: Grace, Time, and Pastoral in Frank O’Hara’s Work Poems

“A Little Reminder of Immortal Energy”: Effort, Work, and Effortlessness

The rough coordinates of labor and art in O’Hara’s writing can be seen in “Radio.” The poem, written in 1955, O’Hara’s first year working in the International Program at MoMA, presents energy and boredom at two poles of vitality but with a relation more complex than mere opposition. “Why do you play such dreary music / on Saturday afternoons, when tired / mortally tired I long for a little / reminder of immortal energy?” the poem begins,

All

week long while I trudge fatiguingly

from desk to desk in the museum

you spill your miracles of Grieg

and Honegger on shut-ins.

Am I not

shut in too, and after a week

of work don’t I deserve Prokofieff?

Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning

to aspire to. I think it has an orange

bed in it, more than the ear can hold.

(The Collected Poems 234)

It is the weekend, but the weekend is shadowed by the week’s exertions. Leisure, listening to the radio on a Saturday afternoon, disappoints because it has become the servant of labor, a mere rest period from work, a mode of torpor rather than stimulation. O’Hara presents a scale of vitality: at the one end, “immortal energy” and “miracles”; at the other, the “dreary” and “mortally tired.” O’Hara initially seeks a miraculous grace in the culture industry, but, captured by the interests of the working week, it merely replicates dreariness.2 He eventually finds energy in nonindustrial culture, the painting of an intimate friend: “Well,” O’Hara writes, finding energy suddenly, miraculously, in an art that is, in contrast to the radio, bold and excessive. Working through the tranquilizing disappointments of a weekend, “Radio” finds its immortal energy unexpectedly but nonetheless through a working out (“I think”). The poem’s vitality breaks through its fatigue, first by reconstructing it, then by momentarily overcoming it, but it also comes from its tiredness. In its first ten lines, energy manifests as frustration, restlessness; in its final three, as a coup de grâce whose enigmatic spareness accentuates an effortless finality. Escaping from deliberation and interrogation in a surrender to excess, the ending’s antidote is simply “more than the ear can hold.” The aspiration beyond labored thought is itself a release.

The poem has a strange relation to the avant-garde. In it, energy is held back by the limits of bourgeois convention, but unlike the historical avant-garde, which often claimed to simply sidestep or explode them, O’Hara comes up against these limits directly. In addition to convention, that is, he encounters the less easily transcended limit of labor. The encounter with limits is elaborated by Pierre Reverdy, in remarks O’Hara referred to in “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul”:

Because the constant drama of the poet is his aspiring more than anyone else to stick to the real—as in the Absolute—the excess of his sensibility itself forbids him to adapt himself to it, to accommodate himself to it—in the Relative—like everyone else—and forbids him to take from it, for the sake of enjoyment, even the least of whatever benefits it can offer. For sure it is not lust for life which he lacks. On the contrary, what constrains him is his having this lust in excess. So that, whatever might be the social circumstances of his life, he can never avoid knocking into limits and wounding himself on them. And these limits, which make even the widest world suffocating, he discovers again in his work, which the demands of his nature and his character forbid him ever to find satisfying.

(Reverdy, “Cette émotion appelée poésie,” qtd. and trans. in Sutherland 127)

For Reverdy, poetry commits to an absolute real, but the poet, having lust for life in excess, “can never avoid knocking into limits and wounding himself” on life’s “social circumstances.” Poetry’s real drama is, to use O’Hara’s phrase, the excess it must “aspire to” amid its suffocating lust for life: the sparks given off as immortal energy rubs up against the limits of the actually existing social world. Work is not the only social limit in O’Hara, of course, but it is a very good place to see some figures of the unlimited in O’Hara—to see him operating through limits toward moments that imaginatively slip their grasp.

I will come onto the specifics of O’Hara’s duties at MoMA, but we can see here an attitude toward intellectual work generally. It is not merely a boredom; it is also the everyday social ground of any energy. The most familiar readings of O’Hara, as a flaneur at home in uptown New York, refusing serious work for the pure pleasures of libertinage and aestheticism, do not do justice to this fact. More recent readings, on the other hand, go the other way with a hard-headed sense of O’Hara’s place in the political economy and can leave us with an O’Hara identical with work and difficult to recognize. Jasper Bernes, for example, claims that “O’Hara’s charisma is the charisma of the salesperson” (25). Jason Lagapa, similarly, claims O’Hara had a “zeal for orderliness and efficiency” (4) and “predilection—and enthusiasm—for clerical work” (2). There are resistances in these accounts, too, but they can be quite unoriginal resistances: in Lagapa’s essay, for example, O’Hara rages primarily against the “impersonal” nature of bureaucracy, which he would not be the first to do, and does not speak with any particularity of O’Hara’s job of mediating the world’s avant-garde through office work. There is, in sum, work to be done joining O’Hara’s effortlessness, its grace, so important to the love readers feel for his poetry, with labor, one of its essential contexts. It is what, I think, O’Hara meant when he spoke of himself as “a real human being with real ascendancies” (The Collected Poems 392).

Sam Ladkin has defined O’Hara’s style as a form of sprezzatura, a term borrowed from the Italian Renaissance to describe “art that conceals the labour of art; quickness; ease; nonchalance; grace.”3 This dialectic, for me, gets much closer to O’Hara’s attitude to work. Sprezzatura is an “attitude of diligent negligence” in which the artist seeks, in the words of one of its original theorists, “with a great amount of work and study (zeal), to do the work that it may appear, although laboured over a great deal, as if it had been done almost hurriedly and almost without any work” (Francisco de Hollanda, qtd. in Clements 302). We have some idea of what this means for O’Hara because he provided a definition of sorts in a discussion of Jackson Pollock:

In the state of spiritual clarity there are no secrets. The effort to achieve such a state is monumental and agonizing, and once achieved it is a harrowing state to maintain. In this state all becomes clear, and Pollock declared the meanings he had found with astonishing fluency, generosity, and expansiveness. … the artist has reached a limitless space of air and light in which the spirit can act freely and with unpremeditated knowledge.

(Art Chronicles 25–26)

Acting freely comes through monumental effort, and yet the result is not a result at all, but a continuing process of fluent activity. This partly speaks to the movement of American workers from making things to performing services: at the time O’Hara was writing Jackson Pollock (1959), white-collar workers outnumbered their blue-collar counterparts for the first time in US history (United States 51). Equally important here, though, is that a state of free expression is attained through agonizing effort. The meanings we attach to this dynamic are much less clear. It could articulate a workerism placing labor at the center of even the most nonchalant activity. Equally, though, it could be a fig leaf for reducing all labor to the status of art, and capitalist life to the free play of style, as in Baldassare Castiglione’s own ideal of noblesse, where the word “sprezzatura” first appears: an aristocratic bearing that resolves the problem of exploitation by melting labor into air.

The problem at present, then, is one of abstraction. To start to move beyond it, let us take an example of effortlessness rooted in work. It is at the fore of one of O’Hara’s most famous poems, “A Step Away from Them”:

It’s my lunch hour, so I go

for a walk among the hum-colored

cabs. First, down the sidewalk

where laborers feed their dirty

glistening torsos sandwiches

and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets

on. They protect them from falling

bricks, I guess. Then onto the

avenue where skirts are flipping

above heels and blow up over

grates. The sun is hot, but the

cabs stir up the air. I look

at bargains in wristwatches. …

(The Collected Poems 257)

Breezy and assured, O’Hara seems to glide through the city. The poem’s considerable dynamism is engineered, however: its nimble line breaks are only apparently effortless, its laconic observations are only seemingly made in passing, its improvisational carelessness carefully structured. O’Hara moves, that is, through some intricate leg-work. The poem has labor as its subject, observing workers and framed by the lunchbreak, and yet it is entirely graceful, free in its movements, its unruffled dynamism expressed in a parataxis deftly varied in register. The poem continues:

There are several Puerto

Ricans on the avenue today, which

makes it beautiful and warm. First

Bunny died, then John Latouche,

then Jackson Pollock. But is the

earth as full as life was full, of them?

And one has eaten and one walks,

past the magazines with nudes

and the posters for BULLFIGHT and

the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,

which they’ll soon tear down. I

used to think they had the Armory

Show there.

A glass of papaya juice

and back to work. My heart is in my

pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

(The Collected Poems 258)

In these lines, the poem exhibits a process of hiding work, thematizing the effort that goes into effortlessness, moving through New York at a speed and fluidity able to connect the city’s formal, informal, and creative labors on the fly. The poem also thematizes work limits: workplaces where others have to stay, the lunch hour that will ultimately constrain O’Hara’s walk to circularity. “A Step Away from Them” is a story of simultaneity and relatedness, as builders and bargain wristwatches, condemned warehouses and lunch hours, Jackson Pollock and papaya juice, all circulate through each other. The constantly changing complexity of these circulations registers as speed, but speed that is, on the one hand, fluid, and on the other dependent on what Morton Feldman called O’Hara’s “capacity for work, his stamina … the energy running through his life” (13).

O’Hara’s effortlessness, his “ascendancies,” reflect back onto work. Recklessness is cultivated as part of an attempt to be alive to the present—to be adaptable, lithe, graceful in the midst of fast-paced urban life, its work pressures and its laboring multitudes. O’Hara’s moves with the working world of the city; this is the ground from which alternative worlds may be imagined. In this, O’Hara’s poetry is distinct from its most obvious model: Rimbaud. Rimbaud engages labor but is ultimately repelled by it: his identification with workers is found in the strike, where nonalienated labor can be glimpsed. Rimbaud exuberantly soars above the petty clock-time of the working world, an adolescent imagination never growing up into the ordered, steady duration of the professions. It is this that Kristin Ross has identified as Rimbaud’s laziness, “a kind of absolute motion, absolute speed that escapes from the pull of gravity” (54). O’Hara’s poetry, by contrast, rarely soars above, however much it aspires to Rimbaud’s hyperactivity. The poet moves at street level with the everyday world of the working day in “A Step Away from Them.” The urban sublime encounters the urban workaday from moment to moment. The poems are not just set in the working world, they participate in it. Though keen to imagine freer relations beyond it, O’Hara dramatizes such energies as they are pushed and pulled by—as they rub up against—work.

O’Hara’s work poems are embedded in labor. In this, they speak to their historical moment in two ways. First, the mid-century professionalization of the arts made a unilateral opt-out from labor an aristocratic gesture of aloofness rather than real opposition to capitalist life. Second, the perceived diminishing revolutionary potential of strike action, the point of nonwork at which Rimbaud found his identification with the proletariat, in 1950s America, meant a diminishing identification of fragmentation with utopia—an identification central to the historical avant-garde. As a consequence of both historical realities, vitality for O’Hara meant presence, living in and with labor’s moments rather than outside it or in its future. The response to labor’s boredoms and frustrations is to work up a state of intense immediacy. As he wrote admiringly of Pasternak: “the poet and life herself walk hand in hand. Life is not a landscape before which the poet postures, but the very condition of his inspiration in deeply personal way” (Standing Still 102). Or, as Kenneth Koch reminisced of his friend: “It was always an emergency because one’s life had to be experienced and reflected on at the same time” (206). In this, as in “Radio” and “A Step Away From Them,” O’Hara’s effortlessness reflects on effort: his nonchalant movement is a vehicle for connecting various instances of labor. In the case of his own job, such connections are preoccupied with the organization of time; in the case of the work of others, of space. I will come to these now and move beyond what are admittedly still abstractions about labor here. First, then, let us consider the kind of presence O’Hara’s work poems perform.

“The Anxiety of the Future Is Only Equalled by the Tiresomeness of the Present”: O’Hara and Time

O’Hara is admired for his immediacy. Direct, attentive, responsive to their here and now, his poems are uniquely alive to the energies of the present that surround him. Presence is usually, in these accounts, numinous and vital. Ever since the emergence of the New American Poetry, such presentism was seen as an antidote to the turgid “historical sense” of traditionalists like T. S. Eliot and his followers who were dominating American letters at the time.4 The danger is that O’Hara’s rootedness in the now becomes a mere celebration of it, which is what is presented even in readings of a political, future-oriented O’Hara. José Esteban Muñoz’s discussion of O’Hara’s queer utopianism, for example, describes an “irrepressibly upbeat” (5) relation to the present. I will consider whether this is true of O’Hara below, but it should be said first that nowness is not automatically a salutary chronotope. Fredric Jameson claims that mid-century celebrations of presence prefigure the “epochal” (696) shift he sees as definitive of postmodernism: the shift from time to space, where “the perpetual present” prevents historical knowledge and utopian thinking alike (710). For some theorists, this shift reflects changing work practices: David Harvey, for example, describes this “time-space compression” as continuous with the postwar shift from Fordism to forms of “flexible accumulation,” under which time was radically accelerated as well as radically accounted (426). If modernism was interested in exploring, in Stephen Kern’s phrase, “the heterogeneity of private time and its conflict with public time” (16), postwar artists were increasingly faced with the obliteration of private time itself. As free time became increasingly colonized by work time, temporality became homogenous and difficult to imagine at all. Jameson goes as far as to state that, as a result, mid-century art gave up on time as a subject entirely (695).

O’Hara’s present stages what the presentism of many of his contemporaries was really a device for avoiding: questions of social time. Many of O’Hara’s poems, so rooted in his job, inhabit the time discipline of labor—as manifested in the working day, the working week, and other rhythms of work and leisure time. These time signatures constitute a present divided against itself, jostled by competing temporalities that are a long way from the simple presence of numinous authenticity. Attention to the complications of time, rather than a mere abandon to presence in the abstract, defines O’Hara’s poetry. He registers the epochal shift Jameson and Harvey speak of because he was living it through his particular job. A defining fact of O’Hara’s job at MoMA, for example, was the compromising effect it had on his friendships and enthusiasms: the nascent phenomenon of cultural wage-labor made this inevitable, and it blurred the boundaries of where office work ended and socializing began.

On the one hand, O’Hara’s experience can be generalized. He is one of the first writers to confront the increasingly irresistible tendency, after the war, for the world of work to encroach on nonwork, for all areas of life and all times of day to become co-opted as labor time, throwing lived time itself into crisis. This crisis begins at mid-century: this is when the downward trend in weekly working hours is stemmed, when white-collar employment became preeminent, when advances in communications technology and the emergence of networking made work outside the workplace more common, when no legal limit on overtime and no option of declining it was enshrined in law, and when companies increasingly started to take an interest in, and responsibility for, their white-collar workers’ leisure.5 Most of these phenomena are found in but never critiqued the most famous work novel of the postwar period, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), whose protagonist never clocks off. As time becomes more rationalized and accounted from the 1950s onward, it also becomes more confused and indeterminate. At a general level, that is, O’Hara’s situating of labor beyond the workplace and the shift, manifests these trends.

O’Hara, however, did not have just any job. He joined MoMA’s International Program as a special assistant in January 1955, eventually becoming a curator in 1965. Though he had worked at the front desk between 1951 and 1954, it was only from 1955 that O’Hara had a career, where his job began to absorb and be absorbed into his life. From then, O’Hara is responsible for the conception, logistics, and publicity for exhibitions of the international avant-garde, selecting paintings, writing catalogues, networking with artists and other galleries and collectors. We know what O’Hara’s work was in some detail because O’Hara wrote a job description for his boss, Waldo Rasmussen. Here is his checklist for his main duty, directing exhibitions:

conception of nature of exhibition; discussion of feasibility and desirability within the general program; formulation of exhibition proposal (after investigation of possibility of available works) for presentation to program committee, in collaboration with the Director of the Department; selection of works, most often in consultation with the artists, and/or dealers involved, and also the principal lenders; formulation of loan request letters, and phone calls where lender is recalcitrant in replying; first-hand knowledge of condition of loans, along with the exhibition assistant, for reassurance (or contradiction) of lenders; preliminary plans for, or actual installation of, exhibition (especially for international exhibitions); writing of introductions; consultation on catalogs; approval of press release and choice of photographs for publicity; frequently, attendance at one or more openings, which includes checking of condition of works and advice on installation; occasional meetings with the press in respect to the given exhibition; supervision of incidental correspondence with lenders in respect to their loans; first-hand knowledge, with exhibition assistant, of condition of loans before return; drafting of thank you letter; consultation on any insurance claims or complications attendant on return of loans; selection or approval of press reviews to be sent to artists and lenders; minor, but time-consuming follow-ups, such as purchase requests from exhibition, return of borrowed color plates and/or negatives (frequently retained by other institutions), and miscellaneous inquiries.

(April 8, 1965; qtd. in Shaw 230)

This administrative litany breathlessly performs the incessant demands of O’Hara’s job. Excitement and resentment run through the list, which registers the job’s compression of time and its pileup of pressures. Quantitatively, the description highlights workload: there is simply a rush of obligations. Qualitatively, the emphasis is on establishing or working within personal relationships. That is, the job makes time demands that are also demands on the affections (and is one reason why O’Hara is always in such a rush to meet people in his poems). As he continues to Rasmussen:

Attending openings, dinners, cocktail parties and studios because of interest, but more frequently because someone has lent, will lend, has done us favors, is involved in one or another program, and WANTS YOU TO BE THERE, for whatever reason, seldom made plain except in the direst of circumstances, like a favor back, getting into a show they’ve heard about, or more frequently getting a friend or protegé into said show.

(qtd. in Shaw 231)

Work here unavoidably overlaps with O’Hara’s relations with artists. His job is part of a wider trend beginning in the 1950s toward forms of sociable labor that instrumentalize personal relationships, thereby turning all free time into potential work time. This problem is constantly attested to in accounts of O’Hara’s job by his contemporaries: as Brad Gooch summarizes the interviews he undertook for his biography of O’Hara, “many saw a conflict of interest in O’Hara’s many positions” (342). Jane Freilicher, for example, worried that “‘[h]e had this thing of being the official representative of the Museum of Modern Art. … He started going very high up in that sort of bureaucracy. That made me feel somehow that there was a wall between us” (296). Relations with Grace Hartigan were similarly strained: “I think it started to fall apart when Frank became a curator of the Museum of Modern Art. It became impure because people wanted the world thing, not just his enthusiasm and eye. There was that sense around of using him.”

This brings us to a more obvious fact of O’Hara’s job: it is literally part of the postwar institutionalization of the avant-garde. Avant-garde art, often art he admired for its energy and vitality, had become tied up with wage-labor for O’Hara. O’Hara’s satirical collaboration with Larry Rivers, “How to Proceed in the Arts” (1961) mischievously inverted avant-garde tenets, but directives such as “Embrace the Bourgeoisie” were clearly enough jokes with an aesthetic unconscious, in which anxieties about a professionalized avant-garde were addressed with insouciant defensiveness rather than affirmative alternatives. At MoMA in the 1950s, O’Hara is on the front line of the increasingly automatic consecration of avant-gardes into mainstreams and markets. As one curator noted in 1966, “[a]dvocacy and support of experimental art has now gained such a hold on the American imagination that the normal lag time between artistic invention and its public acceptance is disappearing” (qtd. in Alberro 7). The avant temporality of avant-gardism is in crisis in this period, assuming a perversely immediate acceptance that threatens to dissolve its usual oppositional utopianism, a situation registered but ultimately accommodated in John Ashbery’s essay, “The Invisible Avant-Garde.” O’Hara’s reflection on this went beyond the mere critique of institutions to think about his place, as a worker, in the new aesthetic economy. On the one hand, then, O’Hara’s work forces him to live outside the moment, to think of personal relationships, encounters, and enthusiasms beyond their immediate pleasures and uncomfortably in terms of promises, forward-thinking caution, projects, returning favors, and so on. On the other, O’Hara witnesses the changing temporality of the avant-garde itself in process. This process was potentially liberating as well as threatening: experimental art might escape the prophetic monumentality of modernism into more localized and time-sensitive forms alive to everyday surroundings (for example, lunch breaks). The point is that O’Hara does not simply assume such presence through a mindful consciousness; he struggles to be present in a social world of competing demands. In other words, his job as an art professional at once frustrated an embrace of being present and made it urgent.

O’Hara’s work poems inhabit a grammar between present tense and predictive future, embodying tension between the two. To put it bluntly: O’Hara wrote many poems that worry about going back to work, and how labor time haunts leisure time. His first poem after starting at the International Program came after a three-month silence. “It’s prematurely hot today,” the short lyric, “On Saint Adalgisa’s Day” begins, taking O’Hara’s morning walk to work as its subject:

And no rain in sight for the hay,

for the yellow asphalt on the wall

and underfoot as, in the hall

of avarice, I pace the city.

Spring is never purity

here, all grey, but weakness,

make-up, passing now for chicness

now for humor. In the heavens

radio announcers choose their sevens

and are glad to see me go

to work although I’m tired, so,

they can have the apartment and

turn off the morning music, no hand.

As the sun sits on my bed

with news, with news they fill its head.

(The Collected Poems 221)

The poem frets that the natural vivacity of spring has been replaced by a gray, weak chic merely “passing” for true energy. The atmosphere is fatigue, metaphorically of spring but literally of the worker, “tired, so.” Work turns the music off and transforms the bed into a receptacle of news (rather than sex or rest, a theme repeated in “Joe’s Jacket”). Surprisingly here, though, work asserts lifelessness by making everything happen too soon rather than making nothing happen at all. It is “prematurely hot”; avarice causes O’Hara to “pace the city,” forced to “go / to work” before he is ready, harried from his apartment. Caught between present and future, the poem tries to grab hold of the momentary prework period in a world that is “glad to see me go.”

Such morning scenes are common in O’Hara, but they are part of a larger group of poems that speak of periods between work. O’Hara’s lunch breaks are, of course, the most common of these. “The Day Lady Died,” his elegy for Billie Holiday, is the most famous:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

…

(The Collected Poems 325)

The contrast of meaningful with impersonal relations structures the poem. There are also two temporalities in conflict here, however, that are equally important: the paradoxically present, momentary intimacy with the dead Holiday versus the temporally fragmented rush of the lunch break. Worrying about who will feed you later, what train you will catch, rushing around to draw money and buy gifts—this all feels like a break from work, despite the lack of explicit markers, because it feels so much like its continuation. The timestamp, for example, seems a mental reminder to get back to the office punctually and is itself a form of administration; the trip to strangers in Easthampton seems likely to be networking overtime; at the bank, O’Hara seeks his wages on his break; even consumption, carried out in the rush of an hour out of the office, is laborious. And yet the two temporalities are not merely in conflict. “The Day Lady Died” triumphs because it achieves its intimate presence out of the temporal disjunction of its first twenty-four lines. The poem continues:

I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theater and

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

(The Collected Poems 325)

The poem’s final breathlessness is at once an articulation of this rush and an escape, an expression of absolute communion with Holiday where worries about the future suddenly and momentarily cohere into profound personal connection. The two temporalities conjoin in one half-line: “I am sweating a lot by now.”

“The Day Lady Died” is finally utopian, finding absolute communion in a single moment, but its immediacy is fought for rather than assumed as the site of guaranteed epiphany. Things can equally go the other way, toward anxiety. In “With Barbara at Larré’s,” for example, the lunch hour prompts fears about a close relationship changed by work. Walking into the eponymous Larré’s for lunch on a Wednesday with his friend and poet Barbara Guest, O’Hara worries about his alienation from the pleasures of friendship that should occupy him Ton a welcome break. At the French restaurant just around the corner from MoMA on West 56th Street, he notes that the regular patrons, who have “lunched on other / Wednesdays,” “are not turned by a change / of suit not touched by noon” (227). A previously shared circulation has been changed by O’Hara’s involvement in the different networks and rhythms of high-powered cultural work. He and Guest then find themselves “listening / for each other’s silence.” Despite “pour[ing] Martinis in our ears,” there is an admission that “[t]o such a tryst we cannot come / so frequently,” in what reads as a reference to the increasing demands on O’Hara’s time and attention from others (227–28). Lunch here, meeting with a friend, has become a fragile thing, still valued and enchanting but threatened by the demands of work to which O’Hara was still acclimatizing (the poem is written nine months after he began at the International Program). We see O’Hara here “guarding the effervescent,” showing how generosity and connection are not always simply available for consumption.

Other poems play other energies off against the workplace. In “Rhapsody,” as Benjamin Lee shows, queer temporalities rub up against other organizations of time, and sex is plugged into the network of institutions and workplaces via MoMA. In “Thanksgiving,” a Thursday holiday fails to make good on its promise of rest and festivity, haunted as it is by “old father time” (314): consequently, “[t]he anxiety of the future is only equalled by the tiresomeness of / the present,” as O’Hara dreads being again reduced to “walking meat, gristle and bone” (314–15). In rare poems set in the office itself, such as “Poem” (“The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer’s ankles”), anxieties are reversed so that leisure, and particularly the leisure of others, is contrasted with the possibly hungover O’Hara’s exhaustion at the office lights and bureaucratic commotion: “The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer’s ankles / the white paint the green leaves in an old champagne bottle” (331). The moment of grace here is the phone call to Kenneth Koch “in Southampton … leaning on the kitchen shelf,” by which O’Hara escapes the office Formica; and yet this moment of connection is moving precisely because the call is made from work, briefly taking O’Hara elsewhere, reminding him of the life beyond the office, even if it has to be sought from within it.

O’Hara’s poetry speaks a presence that is not simply there but is divided against itself. It articulates a social time dancing to the rhythm of the working day, week, and year and circumscribed by the future obligations of O’Hara’s particular form of labor. O’Hara’s pleasures are set against the workday, but they are also set within it. That is, individual moments are available for joy, beauty, and love, but they are structured by a wider time discipline. O’Hara’s lunch hours attempt to transgress these limits; they are, in Andrew Ross’s words, “the very opposite of the power lunches being eaten … by the men who make real history” (389). His poems do not, however, by mere force of imagination, establish “his lunch hour as queer time, set against the straight expectations of the workday” (Knittle), in the words of another critic. O’Hara rarely if ever pretends that one can always simply establish one’s own temporal rhythm by writing a poem about it. In other words, O’Hara comes up against limits. Neither stopping at failure or surrendering life to work, O’Hara speaks an affirmative joy whose sparks fly because, to return to Reverdy, “he can never avoid knocking into limits and wounding himself on them.”

“Burgeoning Verdure, the Hard Way”: O’Hara’s Version of Pastoral

I want finally to talk about O’Hara’s representations of work proper, as it were—of being at work rather than just within its time discipline. Though some of O’Hara’s poems take place in the office, O’Hara is more often preoccupied with how labor spills over from the workplace proper, and so his poems explore the labor and activity that must go into hiding, forgetting, and escaping labor’s tyranny. These are poems usually set between work because O’Hara’s charm is in his having work in his life but for it not to become that life. A rare example of an office poem is “Anxiety,” which gives some indication about why O’Hara dreads the return to work and tenaciously grabs what moments of real leisure he can:

I’m having a real day of it.

There was

something I had to do. But what?

There are no alternatives, just

the one something.

…

If I could

get really dark, richly dark, like

being drunk, that’s the best that’s

open as a field. Not the best,

but the best except for the impossible

pure light, to be as if above a vast

prairie, rushing and pausing over

the tiny golden heads in deep grass.

(The Collected Poems 268–69)

This poem pits the claustrophobic inertia of the office against an equally unsatisfactory clichéd fantasy of open space, itself “impossible.” The office even prevents imagining an outside. In its plodding enjambment, repetition, hackneyed images and final hesitations, the poem describes stuckness. The final lines confirm this: “But still now, familiar laughter low / from a dark face, affection human and often even-- // motivational?” O’Hara is more comfortable on the way (back) to work because being at work enforces an immobility that threatens poetry itself. O’Hara does not have a language of liberation that might take place in the office in the same way the 1930s had a liberatory vocabulary for the factory. The first poetics of the postwar office, indeed, as typified by novels like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, was doggedly conservative. An alternative aesthetic of the office would be a much longer-term project for experimental US poetry.

How, then, does O’Hara talk about work directly? He does, of course, talk constantly of the activities of other workers. Where O’Hara’s labor above is seen as a time signature, other workers in his poems primarily inhabit space, a space that is landscape and, particularly, pastoral. The question here, I think, is whether this pastoral is a means of mapping a complex and dynamic urban economy, or whether it is a means of evading it by idealizing it. Does O’Hara provide us with access to the city’s competing temporalities and geographies, or does he smooth them out? We can hark back to Leo Marx’s classic distinction of “complex” or “sentimental” pastoral (25): that is, does O’Hara elide social and technological complexity, or does he accommodate it?

Pastoral has the urban at its heart: its historical origins are in cities, the court center from where the agrarian margin is fantasized and remembered. Equally, it is a style preoccupied with workers. For O’Hara, likewise, New York’s multiplicity of workers is a key marker of its vitality. Discussions of O’Hara and pastoral fall into two categories, but both deny that O’Hara’s poems are pastoral because they tend to see the concept as something unconnected with work. Timothy Gray’s “urban pastoral,” for example, is about landscapes with figures in the metaphoric sense, attending as it does to the abstractions of “semiotic shepherds” and “significations” (529). Susan Rosenbaum’s reading of O’Hara’s flaneurism, on the other hand, has a keen awareness of O’Hara the worker and discusses his landscapes as preoccupied with the distinct but connected issue of consumption. This is an important part of the question above, but Rosenbaum and other critics, including Michael Clune, Keegan Cook Finberg, and Oren Izenberg, have generally seen O’Hara as subverting consumerist rationality and therefore as essentially antipastoral. This reading, to me, is not reflective of O’Hara’s ambivalences about consumption and production or of how they might be landscaped.

“I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life” (The Collected Poems 197). O’Hara’s most memorable statement, insofar as it values the unnatural, the mobile and the social, would be antipastoral if we wanted to accept the stereotype of pastoralism. O’Hara has this stereotype in mind when he dismisses a “nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures.” We need not ourselves accept it, however. Even Empson’s now canonical definition has almost no interest in nature, instead taking pastoral to be concerned generally with the relations of production, which is to say with labor. O’Hara’s “panic of jobs,” then, though set “far from burgeoning / verdure,” nonetheless conceives of economic relations through landscape:

If alone I am

able to love it,

the serious voices,

the panic of jobs,

it is sweet to me.

Far from burgeoning

verdure, the hard way

in this street.

(“1951” 74)

The hard way of the street is set apart from an idyllic nature, and yet it assumes the latter’s mantle as landscape—as, that is, a ground on which economic processes (“the panic of jobs”) are seen and imagined spatially. It is also aestheticized: the street here is sweet, loved, and accepted, though framed by unsentimental contingency, here in the word “if,” that would give all of O’Hara’s landscapes their characteristic fluidity.

O’Hara also conforms more precisely to Empson’s version of pastoral, however. Empson has two main criteria for the label: “putting the complex into the simple” (53) and “attempt[ing] to reconcile some conflict between the parts of society” (19). O’Hara’s vehicle for the simple is the moment, his ability to go on his nerve capturing something of the dynamism of complex processes, his capacity for an effortlessness able to reflect back onto the relations of labor and leisure. Empson’s wording is important, however: pastoral does not simply make the complex simple or banish complexity. Pastoral’s value lies in how it stays in touch with the complex. In O’Hara’s poems, a complicated network of relations is evoked within the drama of a single walk through a landscape, often within a single thought. That said, he accommodates far more dynamic scenes than are usually associated with pastoral, refusing still landscapes as well as gestures of rustic retreat. O’Hara moves through moving scenes. The key to his complex simplicity is that he is another worker among workers, and that his poems are haunted by the shadow of his own return to work. This is summed up in O’Hara’s own words: “I found that I myself was my life: it had not occurred to me before; now I knew that the counters with which I dealt with my life were as valid in unsympathetic surroundings as they had been in sympathetic ones; for art is never a retreat … there is no ivory tower; there are arrangements of the complex” (122). O’Hara’s poetry renders and simplifies its surroundings in scenes, but these are scenes the poet presents himself as in, alive to and participating in its moments rather than retreating to distance and nostalgia. O’Hara’s attempts to encompass the city as a place of simultaneities, results at once in landscapes and a mobile sense of place. The latter tendency has dominated discussion of O’Hara, and has gone under the name of attention, but O’Hara also has panoramic ambitions. Beyond his sensitivity to particular events, that is, his poetry has an impulse to coordinate and combine them—to landscape them. We have already seen this in two of O’Hara’s most famous poems. In “A Step Away from Them,” various forms of work and consumption—construction workers, Coca-Cola, wristwatches, Times Square, a “Negro … languorously agitating,” the Manhattan Storage Warehouse that no one ever comments upon, the Armory Show, a glass of papaya juice—are connected by the structuring fact of work, the lunch break, that O’Hara is living (The Collected Poems 257–58). “The Day Lady Died” figures the city as imperial metropolis, placing O’Hara’s connection with Holiday in a world of globalized capital and colonial power (see Clover). O’Hara is one of the few writers of the immediate postwar period to resist the process of world markets Marx predicted in the Grundrisse: “the connection of the individual with all” leading paradoxically to the “the independence of this connection from the individual” (161; emphasis original). Attentive to complexity, O’Hara’s poems give us momentary access to the shifting combinations of, to use Empson’s phrase, “serious forces … at work” (156).

Considering the second half of Empson’s definition, though, we can ask this: Does O’Hara makes this complexity harmonious? Is there an “attempt to reconcile some conflict between the parts of society” (Empson 19)? Do O’Hara’s poems, in other words, “imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor” (11)? Some of O’Hara’s earliest fans thought so, from celebrations of his “colorful urban pageant” (Leibowitz 24) to the conviction that “he, poetry, and the city, are all one harmonious … whole” (Bowers 328). At stake here is the relation of production and consumption, the extent to which workers are just another item like a glass of papaya juice. The “dirty / glistening torsos” of workers, for example, seem available for consumption, and yet it is the laboring body rather than its products where value is found. So where does this conflict go? Unlike pastoral shepherds, O’Hara’s workers are rarely idyllic in themselves. There is nothing in O’Hara like the simple harmony of shepherd and shepherdess finishing each other’s lines. The question, rather, is whether even in their multiplicity and complexity, O’Hara’s workers become a version of Whitman’s “well-join’d scheme,” the miraculous many-becoming-one celebrated in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (91) This is to ask whether the bustle of O’Hara’s poems express a carefree acquisitive grazing as much as work, and whether they tend to celebrate multiplicity itself in general. It is less about whether O’Hara’s figures are rustic and more about whether O’Hara himself plays a role that is courtly, mediating between uptown wealth and downtown struggle, between the cultural institution and the street.

Such questions relate to O’Hara’s own job, since they concern whether his observations are acts of curation, which is to say detached decisions that aestheticize the city’s labors. Ashbery’s shrewd description of O’Hara points to the disorderly order at the center of this negotiation: “The life of the city and of the millions of relationships that go to make it up hum through his poetry; a scent of garbage, patchouli and carbon monoxide drifts across it, making it the lovely, corrupt, wholesome place New York is” (x). O’Hara, I think, does occasionally make such accommodations in his “street of dreams painterly” (The Collected Poems 376). Certainly “A Step Away from Them” flirts with pageantry; indeed, some of its scenes come straight out of Hollywood. “Everything / suddenly honks” in this world of graft: though honking is hardly mellifluous, it nonetheless speaks of a harmonious connectedness (257). There is a shabby kind of synthesis in O’Hara’s poems that can, sometimes, be nonchalant about the violence of social processes, relaxed about the places he and others are forbidden from entering, blasé about the falling bricks of industrial hazard, and inattentive to the immobility work enforces. “Personal Poem” is a clear example. “I walk through the luminous humidity / passing the House of Seagram with its wet / and its loungers and the construction to / the left that closed the sidewalk” the poem begins. “If,” it continues,

I ever get to be a construction worker

I’d like to have a silver hat please

and get to Moriarty’s where I wait for

LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and

shaker the last five years my batting average

is .016 that’s that, and LeRoi comes in

and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12

times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop

a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible

disease but we don’t give her one we

don’t like terrible diseases, then

we go eat some fish and some ale it’s

cool but crowded

(The Collected Poems 335–36)

The poem is supposed to be flippant, of course, because it wants to be fast. The relations of labor, money, and power here, however, are in danger of being glossed over rather than registered. The poem’s knockabout pace and a wandering eye, that is, has pastoral’s sentimental tendency to view social relations as mere spectacle.

And yet, elsewhere, O’Hara’s city poems labor within a compromise first identified by Empson in pastoral: “The feeling that life is essentially inadequate to the human spirit, and yet that a good life must avoid saying so, is naturally at home with most versions of pastoral” (114–15). In its wilful artifice, its sense of the good life as a fiction, its imaginative attempts to articulate a social totality, O’Hara’s poetry is knowing about its leaps of faith and commits to them with this knowledge: “in pastoral you take a limited life and pretend it is the full and normal one, and a suggestion that one must do this with all life because the normal is itself limited” (115), wrote Empson. Such imaginative fullness, always with the risk that it is imaginary, runs through many of O’Hara’s best poems, even those that speak of places outside New York:

Five years ago, enamoured of fire-escapes, I went to Chicago,

an eventful trip: the fountains! the Art Institute, the Y

for both sexes, absent Christianity.

At 7, before Jane

was up, the copper lake stirred against the sides

of a Norwegian freighter; on the deck a few dirty men,

tired of night, watched themselves in the water

as years before the German prisoners on the Prinz Eugen

dappled the Pacific with their sores, painted purple

by a Navel doctor.

Beards growing, and the constant anxiety

over looks. I’ll shave before she wakes up. Sam Goldwyn

spent $2,000,000 on Anna Sten, but Grushenka left America.

One of me is standing in the waves, an ocean bather,

or I am naked with a plate of devils at my hip.

Grace

to be born and live as variously as possible.

(The Collected Poems 255–56)

One can hardly do justice to “In Memory of My Feelings” by describing it as a “work poem” only. Its serpentine movements do drift through work at moments, however, and place work in a historical fabric that would be Poundian in scope were it not so forcefully anti-encyclopaedic. Flippancy here, in the guise of O’Hara’s nonchalant, half-ironic artifice and sudden digressions, though, is a vehicle for a serious reckoning of historical forces. Chicago’s sailors open centrifugally out to geopolitics and Hollywood money and centripetally back into O’Hara’s room with Jane. Impressionistic and improvised, the coordination of these elements is, in part, a modernistic historical sense, but it is not entirely so. Ashbery called it O’Hara’s “marvellous half-fictive universe” (qtd. in Knittle). O’Hara’s most important and beautiful fiction is that the universe and its relations can be imagined, from the inside, as one’s life is lived. That is, that it can be felt and articulated as a universe, and that the severed connection of the world from the individual can be momentarily remade.

Some of O’Hara’s key poetic achievements can be seen through the prism of work. His distinctive nonchalance, speed, and city poetics are all inflected by different conceptions of labor. In the first, O’Hara works agonistically through and against effort, a process he first found in Jackson Pollock, to create an energy that is responsive to its limits but with the potential to exceed them. In the second, he articulates the new, ambiguous time-discipline of cultural work as a presence divided against itself, a poetics of the momentary committed to nowness but haunted by the temporal structures that stymy it. In the last, the increasingly complex and dynamic labor relations of the postwar world are expressed through a curated simultaneity of pastoral New York scenes that are at once simplifying and alive. Together, these manifestations of work show us how O’Hara encountered the professionalization of the arts and attempted to ascend beyond its limits: that is, by rubbing up against them.