The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes: Prick'd by Charm (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics) 3030948404, 9783030948405

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Prick’d by Charm
Corpus Charismata
Constitutional Poetics
Trefoilation: A Tradition of Three
Chapter 2: Frank O’Hara: Myth as Madrigal
Auto-Literaria, or on Being O’Haraesque
These Charming Things; or Polish Rider with Coke
The Democratic States of Self
Chapter 3: “You in Me, That Is What the Soul Is”: The Traffic of Frank O’Hara’s Daemon
Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara: The Faming and Flaming of Friendship
Touching Frank or the Perverted Charms of Animal Charisma
Animal Magnetism
Chapter 4: Tricked Myth Machines: Making Ted Berrigan Making The Sonnets
Territoire de Moi: Berrigan and America
Affective Currents
Approaching Conclusion, or Ted Is Dead
Chapter 5: Phantasmatic Transmissions: Ted Berrigan’s Vida and Razo
Give Me Vidas and Razos: The Life of Troubadour Technologies
“There Is Always a Phantasmagoria”
Charmed Articles
Works Like a Charm
Chapter 6: The Textural Shimmer of John Forbes’s Dead Reckoning
Technics of Self: Surface Technics
Anti-Romantic: John Forbes in Love
The Viral Survival of Romanticism
Chapter 7: The Pagan Sermons of John Forbes
Pandaemonium
The Critique of Animal Glamour
Do We Really Believe in the Daemon?
Chapter 8: Charismatic Animals
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND POETICS

The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes Prick’d by Charm

Duncan Hose

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Series Editor David Herd University of Kent Canterbury, UK

Founded by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and continued by David Herd, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes: social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Since its inception, the series has been distinguished by its tilt toward experimental work – intellectually, politically, aesthetically. It has consistently published work on Anglophone poetry in the broadest sense and has featured critical work studying literatures of the UK, of the US, of Canada, and Australia, as well as eclectic mixes of work from other social and poetic communities. As poetry and poetics form a crucial response to contemporary social and political conditions, under David Herd’s editorship the series will continue to broaden understanding of the field and its significance. Editorial Board Members: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University Vincent Broqua, Université Paris 8 Olivier Brossard, Université Paris-Est Steve Collis, Simon Fraser University Jacob Edmond, University of Otago Stephen Fredman, Notre Dame University Fiona Green, University of Cambridge Abigail Lang, Université Paris Diderot Will Montgomery, Royal Holloway University of London Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley Redell Olsen, Royal Holloway University of London Sandeep Parmar, University of Liverpool Adam Piette, University of Sheffield Nisha Ramaya, Queen Mary University of London Brian Reed, University of Washington Ann Vickery, Deakin University Carol Watts, University of Sussex More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14799

Duncan Hose

The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes Prick’d by Charm

Duncan Hose West Hobart, TAS, Australia

ISSN 2634-6052     ISSN 2634-6060 (electronic) Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics ISBN 978-3-030-94840-5    ISBN 978-3-030-94841-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94841-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Michael H/Getty images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Shazza and Bob

Acknowledgements

This book began as a doctoral dissertation in the Department of English and Communications at the University of Melbourne, under the guidance of John Frow and Stephanie Trigg. For the fiercest and friendliest skirmishing in ideas and all the species of support, I am deeply indebted to Ann Vickery. For Tsar Bomba moments of ignition in thinking, I would like to thank Corey Wakeling, Fiona Hile, Michael Farrell, Lytle Shaw, Anne Poulos, Nick Whittock, Philip Mead, Callum Scott, Sam Moginie, Bernadette Meyer, Tim Wright, Ella O’Keefe, Gig Ryan, Greg Taylor, Pam Brown, Kris Hemensley, John Tranter, Kate Hatch, Melody Paloma, and Christopher Brown. This book has benefited from the generous attention of many friends and colleagues: Sam Langer, Bronwyn Frances, Tana Eupene, Sierra McManus, Bonny Cassidy, Jessica L.  Wilkinson, Marty Hiatt, Justin Clemens, Antonia Pont, Leah Muddle, Lilly-belle Lemonade Eupene, David Musgrave, Alison Lydiard, Tristan Stowards, Guillaume D’Rousse, Jacinta Le Plastrier, Felicie Vachon, Banjo James, Monique Germon, Daim Stephens, Oscar Schwartz, Lucia Rossi, Donna Simpson, Emma Goodland, Kate Harrison, Nicole Zehntner, Meg Sands, Christine Small, Samantha Adams, and Laurie Duggan. For access to archival materials I want to thank the Museum of Modern Art Library, New  York, The Fales Library and Special Collections, New  York University, The Fryer Library, University of Queensland and Special Collections, UNSW Canberra. vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For text and photographic permissions I owe thanks to Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith, Veronica Sumegi, Connie Lewallen, Alice Notley, David Joel, Ken Bolton, Kyle Schlesinger, Simon Farley, Nicholas Martin, Kerry Kilner, and Kerry O’Donnell. Earlier versions of the chapters were given as talks: “John Forbes: A Casual Eschatologist,” Rethinking Late Style, The Australian National University, 2008 (this presentation was supported by a grant from the ANU). “Tricked Myth Machines: Self-Mythologising in the Poetry of Ted Berrigan and John Forbes.” Refashioning Myth: Poetic Transformations and Metamorphoses, The University of Melbourne, 2008. “Instruction for an Ideal Australian: Metaphysical Etiquette in the Poetry of John Forbes.” Common Readers and Cultural Critics, ASAL Annual Conference, ANU, 2009. “Give Me Vidas and Razos: the Life of Troubadour Technologies in the Poetry of Ted Berrigan.” Poetry and the Contemporary Conference. Deakin University, 2011. “Poetry Hauntologues: Erotics of Influence in Frank O'Hara the younger.” Symposium on the Poetry of Ken Bolton. Monash University, September 2012. “You in Me, That is What the Soul Is”: How Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers Made the Cult of “Us” “Networks.” ASAL Literary Networks. University of Wollongong, 2015. Thanks to David Herd as Series Editor of Palgrave Macmillan’s Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Thanks finally to Bruce F.D. Hose, Shazza and Bob MacFarlane, Gareth Hose, and the daemons of the poets in this book who have given such fine instruction. Versions of these chapters appeared in: “Special Issue: Common Readers and Cultural Critics.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Eds. Russell Smith and Monique Rooney (2010). Refashioning Myth: Poetic Transformations and Metamorphoses. Eds. Jessica L.  Wilkinson, Eric Parisot and David McInnis. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. John Forbes in the Archive. University of Queensland: AustLit Monograph Series, 2019.

Contents

1 Introduction: Prick’d by Charm  1 2 Frank O’Hara: Myth as Madrigal 31 3 “You in Me, That Is What the Soul Is”: The Traffic of Frank O’Hara’s Daemon 85 4 Tricked Myth Machines: Making Ted Berrigan Making The Sonnets127 5 Phantasmatic Transmissions: Ted Berrigan’s Vida and Razo161 6 The Textural Shimmer of John Forbes’s Dead Reckoning209 7 The Pagan Sermons of John Forbes251 8 Charismatic Animals275 Works Cited287 Index299

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1

Charles Segal’s triangle of love, art and death The Gadsden Flag The single entry in Frank O’Hara’s final notebook. (Reproduced with the permission Maureen Granville-Smith/ The Estate of Frank O’Hara) Frank O’Hara’s final notebook. (Reproduced with the permission Maureen Granville-Smith/ The Estate of Frank O’Hara) Larry Rivers, Double Portrait of Frank O’Hara, Museum of Modern Art, 1955. © Larry Rivers/Artists Rights Society [ARS]. Copyright Agency, 2021 “Washington Crossing the Delaware” Oil on canvas, approximately 7 feet × 9 feet. The Museum of Modern Art, New York City “Stones” © Larry Rivers/Artists Rights Society [ARS]. Copyright Agency, 2021, and the Estate of Frank O’Hara “Stones” © Larry Rivers/Artists Rights Society [ARS]. Copyright Agency, 2021, and the Estate of Frank O’Hara “Stones” © Larry Rivers/Artists Rights Society [ARS]. Copyright Agency, 2021, and the Estate of Frank O’Hara Oolagah, Oklahoma Seal of Rogers county “Leprachaun” (© Estate of Bill Berkson and Estate of George Schneeman) “Ted Berrigan” (© Estate of Bill Berkson and Estate of George Schneeman) Boötes constellation

4 69 82 83 98 99 106 108 110 143 147 187 192 228 xi

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Draco constellation “Forbes’s notebook.” Fryer Library Holdings, University of Queensland UQFL 148/B/6 “Note from the Daemon.” Fryer Library Holdings, University of Queensland UQFL 148 A

231 256 268

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Prick’d by Charm

To charm is a kind of ritual act, but its affect is evanescent and its enchantment eludes articulation. This book investigates how poems might generate power through their charm, especially when one considers that the term “charm” originates from the Latin carmen for song. A charm, like a poem, may be a thing evoked as much as an act: Charm: the chanting or recitation of a verse supposed to possess magic power or occult influence; incantation, enchantment; hence, any action, process, verse, sentence, word, or material thing, credited with such properties; a magic spell; a talisman, etc. (OED Charm sb.1, 1.)

The word itself works like a charm: its effects are uncertain; it exudes a little mesmerism and intoxication and possibly excites a little scepticism. “Charm” exceeds any object of knowledge, and though we would strike out to find synonyms to articulate a consensus on its seductions, it succeeds as its own vocabulary. Drawings, prospects, pot-plants, faces, and well-placed obscenities can be “charming.” A way to manage the action of charm is to name it: it works upon itself. I want to consider whether charm might compose, in a sense, the person upon whom it operates. What happens when charm is made mobile, initiating communities of those who have experienced its effect?

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Hose, The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94841-2_1

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I argue that it is myth that structures and carries charm beyond an individual and into a public. Jean-Luc Nancy sees myth-making as the constitutive moment of community. Bypassing the problem of definition, he suggests that whatever we decide myth is, it is analogous to human experience: We know—at least up to a certain point—what the contents of myths are, but what we do not know is what the following might mean: that they are myths. Or rather, we know that although we did not invent the stories (here again, up to a certain point), we did on the other hand invent the function of the myths that these stories recount. Humanity represented on the stage of myth, humanity being born to itself producing myth—a truly mything humanity becoming truly human in this mythation: this forms a scene just as fantastical as any primal scene. (45)

Nancy equates the coming into being of self and community with moments of mythopoiesis. He further describes the scene of myth as the occasion of the distribution of charms: We know the scene: there is a gathering, and someone is telling a story … The story often seems confused; it is not always coherent; it speaks of strange powers and numerous metamorphoses … It names things unknown, beings never seen. But those who have gathered together understand everything, in listening they understand themselves and the world, and they understand why it was necessary for them to come together, and why it was necessary that this be recounted to them. (43)

Nancy’s scene of myth is a ritualistic performance. With Nancy I want to think specifically of myth as embodied types of knowing and experience (gathering, listening, speaking) that always requires a theatre of iteration. The poet is perhaps the most powerful figure in myth-making, able to use the power of his or her art to shape the way we think about the individual and constitute the state (polis). Poets have always charmed by charging names and events, making community by celebrating ancestors and exemplary deeds through verse. The poet “moves” their audience by telling a story in a ritual act that is simultaneously psychological, physiological, and social. Whether sung or recited, “charming airs” create affects that are difficult to analyse, since as a thinking animal, part of the way we absorb the signal flares of our culturally mediated world is through sensation as much as via abstract thought. Excitement at a poem, a speech, or a cinematic moment is both intellectual and visceral, triggering goosebumps

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and registering more deeply at the liver, the spleen, and the cockles. This brings us to thinking of the affects of the incantatory or that which enchants in the person and the poem. The proto-poet Orpheus embodies the power of language to persuade and charm. In Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet, Charles Segal writes: Language is among the most mysterious of man’s attributes. Its power not only to communicate truths about reality, but also to compel assent in the face of reality has often appeared miraculous, magical, and also dangerous. The marvel that mere words can compel us to the most momentous actions, and the admiration or fear that this fact inspires, are recurrent themes in classical literature. (1)

“[A] magical singer, half-man, half-god, able to move all nature by his song,” Orpheus emblematises, with dark and violent glamour, the interrelated nature of person and poem (Segal 1). He exerts charisma through his songs and is himself a charismatic text, eliding the difference between bios and graphos, forms of life and their trace. He is able to make one work upon the other with a magical consistency, swaying almost everyone and everything, until his song is annihilated in the collective din of the maenads through ritual punishment. Aside from being “the poet who can make the world respond to him” Segal suggests that Orpheus “has another gift, an ability to hear the music of the world, to know its sights and sounds that others cannot perceive” (xiii). This is the power of the semi-divine: Orpheus does not merely give the world coherence; he makes it mean something. His sensual and lyrical insight occurs because he is also human and, being mortal, available to death. Segal teases out the tragic paradox of Orpheus as being “balanced precariously between the creative and the self-delusive capacity of language” (34). He defies the terms of his contract with death by turning to gaze upon Eurydice on their ascent to the earth’s surface (the habitude of the living).1 Is this because he behaves like a god (believing in his impunity) or  Précis: “Eurydice, the bride of Orpheus, is fatally bitten by a snake; the singer, relying on the power of his art, descends to Hades to win her back, persuades the gods of the underworld to relinquish her, but loses her again when he disobeys their command not to look back. Renouncing women (and in one version turning to homosexual love), he is torn apart by a band of angry Maenads. The head and lyre, still singing, float down the Hebrus river to the island of Lesbos, where Apollo protects the head from a snake and endows it with prophetic power” (Segal 2). 1

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Fig. 1.1  Charles Segal’s triangle of love, art and death

Death

Art

Love

a mortal (paranoia)? As he turns to look back, he is both mortal and immortal: it is precisely his ambiguity in this that is powerfully seductive, especially since he is now made to suffer. The lyrical work of Orpheus disturbs the boundaries between life and death, gods and mortals. To plot the permutations of the Orpheus myth, Segal gives us a relative configuration of love, death, and art for contemplation (Fig. 1.1): He glosses this model of transfixion: The meaning of the myth shifts as different points form the base: love-­ death, love-art, art-death. On the one hand, Orpheus embodies the ability of art, poetry, language—“rhetoric and music”—to triumph over death; the creative power of art allies itself with the creative power of love. On the other hand, the myth can symbolize the failure of art before the ultimate necessity, death. In the former case the myth celebrates the poetic inspiration and the power of persuasive language. (2)

Segal’s formula, though static on the page, is balletic, with two of the terms always wanting to pair off in a pas de deux. Only once it begins to move do we engage with the kind of dialectical thinking that is here expressly a kind of erotics. We have the paradox of a mortal figure embodying immortality: art, fuelled by love, both can and cannot overcome death. Orpheus operates at extremes. Loss (of Eurydice) is inevitable—one will always be incomplete—and this structures his proximity to the abyss. Because we know his tragic fate, Orpheus will always be a charmed creature whose immanence in death shades every part of his mythos. Orpheus is at once seemingly invincible but totally vulnerable. His

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semi-­divinity only increases the attraction of his mortal station, the fraught passage where everything is at stake but insouciance a necessity. It is the ambivalence of Orpheus that makes him such a seductive figure. For he is a person but an exceptional one, able to make the world bend or trope towards him. His relation to Apollo, the god of light who gifts him the lyre, the techne of his craft, is not cancelled but increased by Orpheus’s relation to darker forces. Could we call this shirring of light and dark the affective rhythm of Orpheus’s mythos? Orpheus incarnates art’s abilities and its failures. He is a mythos in the sense that there is no knowing him outside the plot that makes up his narrated life. In Orpheus, we read the drama of the aesthetic: the ephemeral world “fixed” in the work of art becomes “tragic”; fate becomes linear and inexorable. There are no longer any alternatives, it will always be thus. This is the delicious tension that drives the tragedy of Oedipus Rex, delivering a superfluity of pathos and black humour as he rails against his fate and becomes a “masterpiece” of self-delusion. This is what also structures the myth of the artist whose death is “untimely.” We retrospectively read their lives as being tempered by an unusual and exquisite gravity, since death had always been there as immanence.2 The impulse or compulsion to life that comes to live in a symbol is both dead but still, ideally, “has a life of its own” and this is what makes a work of art art and not just decor. After Orpheus, poets in the ancient traditions of the West take to epic cycles in which the role of the poet is more communally based. From Homer to Beowulf, the poet becomes a living archive of oral traditions, constituting community in terms of origins, heroes, and histories. A counterpoint is Sappho, whose insistence on structuring a lyrical subject through love and desire (writing the mythos between lover and beloved) eschews the heroic mode of social poetics, favouring a fraught and fragmented discourse of the more personal and uncertain being. The community worth singing for Sappho is the closest one, which always includes the most unsatisfactory distances. As her lyrics structure the subject in love, always plural and always divided, Sappho represents the personalising of poetry. Love is the reason to sing, and, as part of this difficult lyrical efflorescence, we read an emerging ontology of selfhood through a knowledge of individuation and bodily desire that is structured intimately. In the Sapphic lyric, as Anne Carson suggests, “[t]he self forms at the edge 2  As we shall see in Chap. 2, Oedipus Rex shows up as Frank O’Hara in his final draft constitution of self.

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of desire” (39). A phrase like this provides an “apparatus of capture” (Deleuze) that is in excess of meaning. What combines poetic modes of the personal and communal most effectively is the troubadour tradition of Provence. This tradition assumes both the Orphic tradition of the singer who charms the multitude and the Sapphic tradition of a highly personal and intimate address. Sappho and Orpheus are charmed names in the “lover’s discourse,” for, as Segal asserts, “Orpheus is important not so much because he is a poet as because he is a lover” (xiv). Troubadour poetry is about the performance of love in the careful (highly ritualised) public space of life at court. It is a communal poetry that plays on the identities of those present, while being built around a song of most private intercourse. Chivalric or courtly love marks the invention of love as both an intricate ritual to be savoured by the group and the structuring of the subject in relation to the other. It is the co-incidence of Eros, theory, the performativity of the self, and the poetics of the social. The transcendent idealisation of the other in troubadour poetry is well matched with the eroticism of visceral performance, the very precise texture of the tongue, throat, and lungs combining to form the singular charm of the occasional song. Besides love, the second essential to the troubadour’s kit is braggadocio. This is the capacity to demonstrate one’s feats at arms and skill as a singer, the latter sometimes acquired through a mocking or parody of other troubadours. It is a studied but competitive attempt to become a charismatic text, and so we might read in troubadour lyric the original pushing and development of poetic career. It is significant that this generation of charisma requires the court scene or “being seen” publicly. While charming the beloved, the troubadour’s song can also apply dirt to smirch one’s rivals with bad charms and stylised curses.3 This is an integral part of the emergent troubadour modus of making intimate publics. To be picked for ridicule as an enemy or unresponsive lover can be a perverse compliment, and we see here the shifting between light and dark strains in making myths of the self: selves are socially confirmed through the distribution of good and bad charms. In the reflexive selection that characterises stylised selfhood, perhaps all that is possible for the troubadour is a masque. Indeed, we may begin to get the sense that there have only ever been “mock-troubadours,” or at 3  In pronouncing curses in the matter of love, the troubadours have an ancestor in Archilochus, a contemporary of Sappho’s and another of the first poets in the Western tradition to write personal lyrics.

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least this is how it appears in the atmosphere of perfectly dispersed irony that directs much of today’s post-structuralist thought. As a cultural phenomenon, the troubadour is aware of their own coming into being as a public study of “private ritual.” They know themselves as sheer performance, coinciding the one who makes mythos, the one who makes love, and the one who speaks of the self. In a sense, the audience for troubadours was always other troubadours. It was a culture of reputation, satire, and connoisseurship. As the sung self is knowingly refracted and versioned, we see the start of an iterative voice. Simon Gaunt writes: to argue that medieval poetry is purely formalistic is reductive, for poets often use topoi, or take a conventional stance, ironically. In doing so they are both reflecting a tradition and playing with it, affirming it and denying it, absorbing it and transforming it: the early troubadours were individualists who felt themselves to be part of a community of poets with which they shared a sense of sophistication and self-awareness. (184)

This impresses the idea that the troubadours begin by playing knowingly with a set of shared conceits or situational commonplaces, and as they are known artifices of expression, one enters into a ludic game of posturing. The tone of sincerity is not a guarantee of authenticity in love but a formal achievement that may operate as a complicit wink at the audience in order to bring them into the intrigue of “making love.” The troubadour seeks not necessarily to convince by the suit of their song but to “prick by charm.” Becoming-troubadour is therefore the erotic pursuit of a desired-for subjectivity. Significantly, where the Sapphic lyric was a mode of feminine address, the troubadour tradition reifies the feminine by transferring it to the object of the female beloved. The canso, or love song, makes an exquisite object of the beloved, and even though the physical descriptions fall to the topoi of human beauty (neck, lips, breast) as “commonplaces” of desire, this only concentrates the desire for the “who”: it loads the proper name with charm. The political or satirical troubadour poems, the sirventes, stir the intrigues of court through commentary on morals, manners, and feudal wars, in ways that celebrate the audience’s cognisance, effectively making them occasional poems. Another formal echo of the troubadour tradition that this book pursues is the mutant continuation of vida and razo as complementary texts. The vida (a short biographical sketch of the poet’s life) and the razo (a short

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account of the circumstances of a work’s composition or coming into being) were read before the performance of a deceased or otherwise absent troubadour’s work. These short prose pieces were then collated and published with the first written collections of the troubadour poems. They work as charms to charge the poetry with a sense of the amorous or political animal who composed them. Of course they cannot give us the person of the poet, but they freely invite us to participate in and imaginatively reproduce the mythology of the poet. The present work argues that the late twentieth century sees a simultaneous remastering and troubling of the troubadour tradition, with the self becoming relational and highly contingent. The figure of the troubadour, which comes to shape Western poetic traditions so much, shimmers in the work of the poets that follow: it stands as tradition but is hopelessly remote. Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, and John Forbes take troubadour techniques of making a self into overdrive, using lyric as a specular techne to negotiate the constitution of self through language and making the figure of the poet “personal” through a new poetics of shared transmissions of thought and feeling. In each we read a tradition of the poet as charmer or “charming bastard” as the brash vernacular would have it. Their work would be gathered into a posthumous Collected Poems and each received a collective Homage upon their untimely deaths. Cult figures in their own lifetime, the peculiar charm of their writing has seen their mythic currency grow exponentially. Crossing over three successive generations, we find a poetic trefoil of charm that is unique in twentieth-century English-language poetry. What I am interested in is their practice of self-mythologising, and the ways in which this myth is then worked by others, through both complementary textual production and the exchange of charmed articles and relics. What unites these three as a troika for study is not only a certain amative spirit that crosses their lives and works that are directly traceable (Forbes loves Berrigan and O’Hara, Berrigan loves O’Hara, O’Hara loves “his” Byron) but also the weird synchronicity of their poetic community’s response to their sudden absences; their respective homages all have the same compulsive desire to make the carnal or animal person of the poet present, to both charge the poetry and transmit the sense of their general being and comportment as somehow not apart from their “work.” Part of what is beguiling about O’Hara, Berrigan, and Forbes is their constitutional poetics. They approach personhood through the logic of myth in ways that explore possibilities of the self, of the intimate

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community, and the larger polis (nation or state). They emblematise a turn of the lyric self as the negotiable terrain for the ethos of a culture, positing a reflexive poiesis of the self that is simultaneously social, mobile, and imagined. Sarah Kay writes of the troubadour function as “the elaboration of a first person (subject) position in the rhetoric of courtly poetry” which she suggests must be revised according to insights into the self as a social and semiotic creature of code: The status of such a subject is at issue in postmodernist writing … The “decentering” of the subject as a result of the individual’s entry into the social codes of language, and its consequent construction by those codes, underlie the concern with language and rhetoric. (2)

Thinking through charm and myth gives us a means to understand the complex interconnections between text and affect, bios and graphos, or as Segal’s triangulation suggests: art, life, and death. We might even say that it is the ongoing movement between them through which charm works, obscurely, as a “magic” adhesive of the social. In the intimate public of the court, we have a model of social poetics that repeats itself in later formations of poetic coterie. Troubadours make the self as a work of art that is for the enjoyment of others, not only as a narcissistic project. Homages respond to the absence of the person of the poet and echo the reflexive vida of the troubadour tradition as witness to the intolerable removal of bios from graphos: as a genre, it is a literature which requires and promotes the presence of the poet as a “charismatic text.” Stephen G. Nichols writes: It is easy to imagine that the dynamic memory of the lost twelfth-century troubadour culture also fuelled the creation of the colorful myths of their lives. The vidas, or lives, of the poets created in the thirteenth and on into the fourteenth century function generally as biography generally does, that is to provide an image of culturally important people who have disappeared but whom we want to be able to picture. The literary image thus fills a void, a hole in the history marked by the corpus we possess that recalls the creator long gone but no less real in our imagination: the body of the work cannot quite stand for the body of the poet. (69)

Because of the “immediate” qualities of troubadour poetry, a poetry that provokes physically and metaphysically, we require at least the phantasm of the poet as the thing that sets the space for a living mythology that is both text and person. It is possible as well that we develop relations with

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the phantasms of writers and artists who are living and whom we do not know, and the radical extension of this thought is that all our acquaintances, including our “selves,” are phantasmatic: the self is performed or transmitted through a clutch of vida and razo, tricks of poiesis. These compressed prose devices are transmitters of presence, they fill the “gap between creation and transmission” (J.H. Marshall 5ff). In this respect, the poet might be viewed as a hauntologue. The term hauntologue follows Derrida’s “hauntology” as a way to think through the simultaneity or undecidability of presence and non-presence, and how the living consort with, and are composed of, the spectral remainders of those who have lived. In writing of the return of the dead to the living, Derrida plays between the spectres of Justice personified in the historical figure of Marx and the literary figure of Old Hamlet, reappearing to give personal injunctions for some kind of action to those who come after: The specter weighs, it thinks, it intensifies and condenses itself within the very inside of life, within the most living life, the most singular (or, if one prefers, individual) life. The latter therefore no longer has and must no longer have, insofar as it is living, a pure identity to itself or any assured inside: this is what all philosophies of life, or even philosophies of the living and the real individual, would have to weigh carefully. (136)

Rather than assuming the self is a discrete formation, Derrida gives us the notion of the self as a revolving catalogue of ghosts, an uncertain space for the traversal of spectral identifications, invocations, and conjurations. Language is the codex through which the living come to expression. If we use the metaphor of a life as a textual event, persons are hauntologues: animated archives of sedimented culture, in language. Ezra Pound is the name of an animal we know who opened themselves up to possession by the hauntologue to a diabolical degree. Giving poetry a future through a conscious inhabiting of its pasts, via the assumption of vestments, styles, and masks, is the gift granted by this subtle rattlesnake, so adept at changing its cryptic colouration. Pound’s appetite for territorialising different personae, who operate as metonymic devices to capture whole epochs, wherein human artistry is perceived to be at its greatest pitch or effulgence, seems nourished by his radical dissatisfaction with the contestants, cities, and civilisations of his own day. Pound reanimates the technics of troubadour erotics, not only through the play of personae and the recital of peritexts (vida and razo), but also through the linking of

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charmed territoire to his own walking talking person. T.S. Eliot observes that Pound “was supersaturated in Provençe; he had tramped over most of the country; and the life of the courts where the Troubadours thronged was part of his own life to him” (166). For Pound, Provence was the spiritual home of confabulators, where poiesie is atmospheric, where he could sense directly the conviviality of spooks whose songs in Occitan were still “thronging” in his head, and where one might be imbued with the power to re-enchant the world.

Corpus Charismata Charisma (χάρισμα) “itself” is a process of transmission as a “favour freely given” or “gift of grace”; passed on by the gods it becomes the power of passing on charm (OED “Charisma”). It belongs to phenomenology, in the way that a landscape may be “enchanting,” a piece of music “hypnotic,” or, as Walter Benjamin suggests, a work of art can possess (and possess us within) its aura (221). Charm and charisma operate through a dynamic relationship: there are no charmed objects or persons in and of themselves; they require an audience. In poetry as in most human pursuits, there are procedures of initiation which prepare one to engage with a charmed atmosphere: Saint Paul would say this of the sacrament, Marx would say this of commodity culture, Nietzsche would say this of his philosophy. The gift of thinking through charisma as a phenomenon of the political animal comes to us from Max Weber, who approaches it as: a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader (48).

Weber’s charismatic being is the person heavily imbued with desirable qualities, who projects as a public spectacle a certain grace in being and doing and gives the sense that this grace is available just over here. The subject poets of this book continue to exert charisma through what has been captured of their animal being. In poetry, people need not be alive to transmit their gifts of grace.

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In Enchantment, C. Stephen Jaeger argues for the historical movement of charismatic art replacing charismatic persons in the decline of charismatic cultures (Benjamin would add the decline of charismatic art in the age of mechanical reproduction) (Rossi Monti 3). I would rather think that these things cannot be separated and that they operate across a “zone of undecidability” or indifference (Agamben Signature 37). Texts are personable and persons are semiotic events whose vocabulary needs to be cultivated, and for this we turn to poetics.4 Extending Jaeger’s scholarship on charisma, Martini Rossi Monti writes: the charismatic work of art embodies and projects (in an extremely intensified manner) the vitality and intensity of a real corporeal personality, thereby obliterating its fictional and objectual nature … the charismatic individual appears as a living work of art, while the charismatic work of art appears as an (illusory) living being. (2)

The action of charisma crosses the distinction between person and text or rather “obliterates” it. Eva Horn writes that “the charismatic bond is a bond of enchantment … Despite its powerful material effects, charisma is an imaginary construction” (11). The “imaginary” is that strange melding of the physical and metaphysical that characterises experience, reflection, and self-narration: what is really “there” is not “really” there. We should spite Horn’s “despite”: in the world of material affect, outside of animal jeopardy, specifically the human social, the imagination is sovereign. Charisma is the possession of the imaginary of the other, and “charm” is the process of combustion as it is happening. Horn describes charisma as “an unstable form of power” and suggests: Like a theatrical role, charisma has to be “performed”: it has to be displayed before an audience as a specific and remarkable way to speak, gesture and communicate … it intrinsically has an aesthetic side: charisma is born with the representation of an individual as extraordinary and “gifted”—representation as both self-representation or “performance” and as perception in the eyes of supporters. (11)

4  The confusion of “presence” and “representation,” “text” and “body,” and “person” and “art” will always be a productive quandary. Jaeger’s work demonstrates that deciding upon a superior term is only ever a temporary achievement of rhetoric and that the relational dialectic cannot be brought to heel.

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Horn writes of Weber’s definition of charisma as ambivalent, “vacillating between a property properly held and one perceived or projected within from outside” (11). This ambivalence means a loss of self (a mild or excessive ecstasy) that is also an affirmation of self. It is in narration or “making mythos” that we find “the micromechanisms of its maintenance.” Horn notes: only as a life related, as an extraordinary and memorable history, can charisma gain a concrete form. For charisma always has a story: it is made of the plots and intrigues woven about the charismatic subject, creating his image or “myth,” recounting the stations of his rise and memorializing the scenes of his success and downfall. (11-12)

She suggests that literature prefers the “drama” of charisma, “its mystic thickening and quickening, its climactic success, and last but not least, its tragic denouement” (12). Jaeger writes of the “ignition” of Odysseus as a charismatic figure when others come to hear his stories. He argues for an “invisible ‘increase of being’ tak[ing] place … it is as if [Odysseus’s] stories altered his appearance” (91-2). This is the cumulative effect of legend that sets the glow on the charmed individual, having tangible affect: “the increase of person through projected associations, I will call ‘aura’” (92). Again, the effect of charm transmitted through myth obliterates the distinction between art and life. As far as the social is concerned, people are indissociable from their mythos. Jaeger puts this into a neat compress: “the first and most important work of art in charismatic cultures is the human presence, of which epic poems and sculptures are echoes and imitations … conversely, the ideal living human presence in a charismatic culture is art avant la lettre (96).” The “ideal human presence” and the “charismatic culture” seem to be myths of self and myths of the group. O’Hara, Berrigan, and Forbes are all interested in the making of self and the making of a nation state and a resulting constitutional dialectics.

Constitutional Poetics The idea of nation as a collective fantasy that territorialises (and is territorialised by) individual citizens is compellingly theorised by Benedict Anderson. Anderson suggests that “the convergence of capitalism and

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print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation” (58). Earlier than this we find Giambattista Vico attending to nation as a matter of poetics: Philosophers and philologists should be concerned in the first place with poetic metaphysics; that is, the science that looks for the proof not in the external world, but in the very modifications of the mind that meditates on it. Since the world of nations is made by men, it is inside their minds that its principles should be sought. (quoted in Koolhaas, 9)

For Vico, the production of nations is the communal work of a plurality of imaginations whose dynamic morphology is to be located and “scientifically” described as emerging from this elusive “first place” of the “inside of the mind.” Reflecting Anderson’s concern with the fatal tendencies of “capitalism and print technologies,” Vico moves to confuse the physical and metaphysical, to step inside the “magical potency” of the mind and its “baffling combustions” while keeping a sceptical eye to the “glamour” of its products, holding forth their high contingency and (phantasmatic) material status. Both Vico and Anderson want to move beyond reading the symptoms of this basic “morphology” to practise an engaged and reflexive mythopoetics of nation, to start speaking at the limits of community and subjectivity, and to impress that “nations” are made of wilful acts of mythos. I argue that poems are the specular techne through which the mythos of one’s personal and nation states is constituted. In Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet, Svetlana Boym makes the case for Mayakovsky as a modern type of revolutionary poet/ citizen whose mythology becomes patterned on and through an emergent mythology of a revolutionary Russia that embraced artistic imperatives as an integral part of social change. This partially fulfilled Rimbaud’s futuristic ideal of poetry as a “multiplier of progress”: “External art will have its function, since poets are citizens. Poetry will no longer give rhythm to action; it will be ahead of it” (308). Mayakovsky, in both his writing and his life, wants to constitute the revolution, and Boym approaches the schismatics of this project through acute readings of the “relationship between a literary persona, a biographical person, and a cultural personage” in order to

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“elaborate cultural mythologies of the life of the modern poet and the connections between the making of poetry and the making of self” (2).5 In considering the self as an expansive territory that is both social and geographical in its complex imagined states, one is led to Walt Whitman’s artful blurring of his body and the body of America, its peoples, and its poetry. Whitman’s ambition as a poet is to be a cosmic voyeur of prodigious appetite, to make himself synonymous with America, to manage an ecstatic synthesis of the individual and the mass. In an interview, Jorge Luis Borges says: I suppose every poet has his own private mythology … When I think of America, I always tend to think in terms of Walt Whitman. The word Manhattan was invented for him, no? Walt Whitman himself was a myth, a myth of a man who wrote, a very unfortunate man, very lonely, and yet he made of himself a rather splendid vagabond … Whitman is perhaps the only writer on earth who has managed to create a mythological person of himself and one of the three persons of the Trinity is the reader, because when you read Walt Whitman, you are Walt Whitman.6

In Whitman we have a figure for “being as poiesis.” His address in “Song of Myself” is admonitory, familial, sexual, touching extremes of intimacy, plotting the body of the self amid countless bodies and the imagined unity of America, where the individual is both reified and squandered (endlessly disseminated). As Borges suggests, the invention of self coincides with the invention of an atmospheric or significantly loaded space for that self, and these abstract notions are synthesised in a word: “Manhattan.” Of course “Manhattan” precedes “Walt Whitman” but Whitman absorbs it in the creation of a mythology, via the apotropaic power of the word or the name. Whitman is insistent on the fleshiness of his mythopoetics and demands proximity to his readers. In tracing the intercourse between “New York” and “Walt Whitman,” Lytle Shaw notes that Whitman presents “the 5  In describing the cultural metamorphosis of myths of poet, Boym’s focus on Rimbaud and Mayakovsky is apposite for the current study, as both figures loom large in the personal mythology of Frank O’Hara, as technical virtuosos and charismatic beings of literature. Figuring for him an admirable confusion of life and art, he takes them as spurs for revolutionary practices of poiesis and for contemporarily recasting the figure of the poet. These are the daemons of poets that he lives with. 6  Jorge Luis Borges in an interview with Daniel Bourne and Stephen Cape, April 25, 1980. Artful Dodge. http://artfuldodge.sites.wooster.edu/content/jorge-luis-borges

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English language in terms very similar to those he used for New York City: as ‘a sort of universal absorber, combiner, and conqueror’” (“Urbanism” 78). Whitman’s “physicalising language” crosses both actual bodies observed in the street and their figures of speech (78). Myth gains ontological flex; we are part of its movement in such figures of speech. To read Leaves of Grass is to reconstitute Walt Whitman immediately among the living or, as Borges suggests, to become Whitman. He slides across the poem as charm to meet you, as evidenced in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: What is it, then, between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between    us? Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails    not. I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills, was mine, I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in     the waters around it; ……………………………… I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution, I too had receiv’d identity by my body, That I was, I knew was of my body—and what I should be I     knew I should be of my body. It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw patches down upon me also; The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious; My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality     meagre? would not people laugh at me? Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil; I am he who knew what it was to be evil; I too knotted the old knot of contrariety, Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d, Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak, Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant, The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me, The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish,    not wanting, Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of        these wanting. ……………………………………….. But I was Manhattanese, friendly and proud!       (130-131)

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What is transmitted is an amative force that insists on crossing while affirming personal difference. Whitman’s work presents a conversion of the possessive impulses of the West, which has its history in romantic and territorial conquest, in democratic acts of love. This is a constitution that admits or exhibits its own folly of enterprise: it preserves doubt as part of a motivational dialectic. It pleads animality not as inhumanity but as the totems of a manifold and shared humanity. “Distance” and “place” “avail not,” and when asked “What is it, then, between us?” we might answer that “it” is the sticky poem that would have everything adhere to it. Whereas Whitman embraces an expansive vision of self and nation-­ making, Wallace Stevens suggests that the mid-twentieth century requires a scale that instead engages with the “intricacies of new and local mythologies”: All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence. This is accompanied by an absence of any authority except force, operative or imminent. (17)

James R. Thompson traces this “spirit of negation” back to the work of Byron, who “shared with other Romantics the realisation of disorientation and the resultant crisis over myth” and whose “attitudes to the problem resembles more those of [modernist] artists more than those of his own generation.” He suggests that “[s]ome modern myth may retain the expansive optimism of, say, Prometheus Unbound, but more typically human possibilities are vastly reduced” (409). Thompson reads Byron’s Don Juan as being “anti-heroic” dealing with an “absence of vision” (409) and suggests that this is the appeal of Byron for poets of the mid-twentieth century. Both the self and nation have become tenuous as cohesive and synthesised states. George Gordon Lord Byron stands as prototypic of the self-­ mythologising poet for the contemporary era. Northrop Frye suggests that “[i]t is hardly possible to discuss Byron’s poetry without telling the story of his life in some detail” (168). Though the troubadours’ mode is to proclaim their singularity as the subject in love, and through their vida and razo traffic the aura of individual names, they are still a collective. Byron is obsessed by “cutting a figure” in the scene of his own time and within the destiny of the West as it is made manifest in the historical idea of Europe. Being composed of his heroes (Shakespeare, Napoleon,

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Alexander the Great, Aeschylus) Byron is fascinated by self as myth and its possibilities to move across nation states, to assume and perform an assemblage of cultural mythologies. Byron’s erotic charge works simultaneously between the figure of the poet and the body of the poem, and we can sense the auratic completion of this circuit in Frye’s diagnosis that “The main appeal of Byron’s poetry is in the fact that it is Byron’s” (178). The name itself is possessed of a “magical potency” which seduces Byron himself: “Fortune! Take back these cultured lands/ Take back this name of splendid sound!” (79). The name Byron as supersaturated signifier becomes apotropaic, a charm against the boring or the tawdry, even as it becomes a totally evacuated signifier, a topological figure to be customised by a supplicant public. Frances Wilson writes that: Byron has been hard to place in the canon of English literature because he became so quickly the stuff of myth. He also presents difficulties because for many readers Byron appeals to the unconscious and to the pleasures of fantasy life before he is read for literary merit. Byron was a figure for identification and desire in the public imagination in a way that Southey or Wordsworth simply were not, and in this sense he became what is now called a celebrity or “star”, and Byromania can be seen as an early example of that fanaticism. The American poet, Longfellow, noted how Byron invited his impressionable readers to fantasise that they were him. (9-10)

Wilson analyses the name Byron functioning as a Barthesian myth: [I]n the construction of a myth, the signifier dissociates itself from what it conventionally signifies and refers instead to something entirely separate, to a different and constantly changing set of secondary cultural associations … In the case of Byron, the “magical potency” of his name suggests a certain style and an attitude rather than the historical figure … Byronism has represented at the same time both solitary elegance and gross libertinism, physical indulgence and emaciation; the sharp dandy as well as the dishevelled wanderer are said to look “Byronic.” (9)

The usage value of Byron as myth is superlative because of this nebulousness and its ability to contain contradiction; it holds the promise of a style of being that, whatever it is, is sexy. It has a promised semantic mobility in always meaning more than one can suspect, a golden signature of excess, and the more one moves within the myth of Byron and checks its paradoxes, the more dense the charm of the sphinx becomes.

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Don Juan and Childe Harold inaugurate personal address on an epic scale, but though the works are signed “Byron,” this “person” is a shapeshifter: adventurer, libertine, vandal, man in drag, orientalist, sadist. None of these tropes are integers, they all partake of one another. Born a changeling with a caul on his head and having a Mephistophelean limp from a cloven foot, “Lord Byron” is a literary character and was so to his creator who acknowledges the theatricality of being himself: People take for gospel all I say, and go away continually with false impressions … One will represent me as a sort of sublime misanthrope, with moments of kind feeling. This, par example, is my favourite role … Now, if I know myself, I should say I have no character at all … But joking aside, what I think of myself is, that I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long.—I am such a strange mélange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me. (Lord Byron in conversation with Lady Blessington quoted in Wilson, xii)

Peter Graham writes that “as Byron has experienced it those beings designated actors are only the most blatant examples of their kind … every social being is an actor —and simultaneously everyone is a spectator” (26). One imagines Byron rolling his “r”s with glee in pronouncing his “favourite rôle”: it is a conscious (dandified) performance of self. As is said of Frank O’Hara, Byron’s “force is in his mobility” (O’Hara CP 345): “Byron” lives and dies with his ephemeral expressions, and yet these “coinages” are charged with a certain quality that they remain in currency, being passed from mouth to mouth as living mythos. This “conversation with Lady Blessington” is a remembered scene of operative charm that is also one of adulteration: the myth of the self-mythologiser as one who is hopelessly licentious with identifications. One gets the sense that Byron was driven to live, speak, and act in the service of his mythology: the epic swims, amorous “conquests,” menagerie of animals are all complex fetishes that arise from a practice of reading as much as they are a kind of writing. Whereas Shelley is an ephemeral and angelic ideal of the poet, Byron’s charms are decidedly more prickish: a troublemaker promoting himself as the diabolic, a transgressor. His mythopoetics is plugged into a newly imagined post-nation of Europe, as borrowing identities and playing on subjectivity in all its dimensions, including the poetical, theatrical, sartorial, practical, and athletic. Extending what Agamben sees as first appearing in the troubadours and terms the “indifference of life and its

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poeticisation” (End of the Poem 79), Byron presents an inexhaustibly complex case of the myth of the mythmaker. He becomes a “touchstone” for Frank O’Hara. O’Hara does not “look back” to Byron but becomes erotically involved in the Byronic (daemonic) play of identity through the sign, both lived and engraved.

Trefoilation: A Tradition of Three Against the backdrop of Byron, Mayakovsky, and Whitman, Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) develops a revolutionised practice of mythopoetics both in his writing, in being contemporary, and in being a poet. O’Hara was entranced by and subsequently came to inform a rich mythology of New York as the cosmopolitan centre of the New World. Shaun O’Connell argues that “O’Hara was for many … a symbol of the city and a kind of paradigm of the phenomenon that (E. B.) White has described, the person who becomes himself, or is his most interesting self, by moving to New York” (271). His life-as-mythology provides a solution to Nietzsche’s playful question of Ecce Homo: “how to become what one is,” with O’Hara viewing New York as a place where he might invent himself as a character of literature. As a transmissive agent, O’Hara “embodies” mid-century New York as an eroticised “grand central station.” I mean erotic here in terms of critical love but also as a force of desiring life (Eros), remembering that the figure of Eros is interruptive in a fashion that is both seductive and aggressive: it always takes form in the encounter. Lytle Shaw has persuasively demonstrated the ways in which O’Hara undertook a coterie operation whose reach was horizontal (connecting with artists of many disciplines) and vertical (acting through his poetic persona the ethos of artistic heroes of the past). O’Hara is a living hauntologue in generating a community of the great dead and charging his contemporaries to be great. He converts his present moment to “mythic time” through the action of charm; indeed, I argue that his poems become madrigal compositions of various selves. Following his death, the many anecdotes of his life transmit a presence which plays across the surface of the poems, a presence which, after Heraclitus, could be appreciated as O’Hara’s daemon. O’Hara’s innovation in plotting the self as a social nexus is partly enacted through his use of proper names. Shaw’s work on coterie gives us a complex and dynamic appreciation of O’Hara’s shifting and recoding of social and filial relations with the living and the dead, arguing that “what

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is unfamiliar is how names from different disciplines and historical periods come into contact with each other—the social syntax of names. O’Hara’s writing rethinks structures of kinship at the level of the name” (“On Coterie” n.pag.).7 For Shaw, O’Hara effects a rewriting of coterie poetics through both his person and text: [T]he idea of O’Hara as a coterie poet emerges both from O’Hara’s spectacular biography—his intimate links to a circle of famous artists and writers—and from the intimate referential practices in his work, in particular the conspicuous use of the proper names of his friends. (2)

Shaw would have us rethink “coterie … less as a pejorative charge or as an occasion for biographical detail than as a literary device” (6). In the poet’s practices of nomination and affiliation, I want to extend Shaw’s recoding of coterie as a complex “literary device” and argue that O’Hara makes a charmed consortium of identities that dissolves any effective membrane between literature and life, or renders any such distinction permanently problematic, and extends with cunning his “intimate referential practices” to his reader. This approach may compel us to appreciate “literary devices” as inseparable from the techniques of life and its poeticisation: how one turns the experience of one’s experiences into myth, creating “less centralized and hierarchical models of social and intellectual interaction” (Shaw 65). The mythopoetic mode is a charming of objects and proper names so that they become a part of the poet’s corpus. O’Hara’s charm works, like Whitman’s, through “coming across” the poem to the person, “blurring … boundaries between the writing subject and its reception framework,” and making them feel intimately addressed as one of the few (coterie), while preserving estrangement and a certain aloofness that is perpetually sexy (Shaw 65). O’Hara’s coterie is a “literary device” designed to spill over into life. After focussing on O’Hara’s charms, this book considers how they are taken up and extended by others (both his contemporaries and those who come after), giving a sense of urgency in “making your own days, so to 7  Shaw is the first to critique O’Hara’s sociality (with the living and the dead) as part of a total poetic practice, through his museum curatorship and art writing, to his collaborations and correspondences, in a way that makes the life not extraneous to the work.

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speak” (CP 301). Perhaps the most insistent of those coming after was Ted Berrigan; indeed, Berrigan leads the subsequent legendising of O’Hara and influences on his own work. In mixing positive and “ugly” feelings,8 O’Hara’s poetry is suggestive of the complexities of being, expressing an emotional life always somewhere between “mess and measure” (CP 444). While poems become charms to negotiate experience, O’Hara shows that charms can be dark and operate inconstantly: I drink to smother my sensitivity for a while so I won’t stare away I drink to kill the fear of boredom, the mounting panic of it I drink to reduce my seriousness so a certain spurious charm can appear and win its flickering little victory over noise I drink to die a little and increase the contrast of this questionable moment.                    (CP 330)

As an affective constitution, these lines from “Joe’s Jacket” become talismanic for a certain kind of person, yet what is charming is their admission of negative affects and the need to borrow warmth, whether it be from a housemate’s jacket or from liquor. O’Hara also takes the poem’s texture as an affective cure but is simultaneously repelled by it. The poem ends: it is all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here on many occasions as a symbol does when the heart is full and risks no speech a precaution I loathe as the pheasant loathes the season and is preserved it will not be need, it will be just what it is and just what happens.                            (CP 330)

The poem as garment both protects and suffocates: its charms are ambivalent. It threatens to replace experience with a “symbol,” something safely mediated. O’Hara feels hunted like a pheasant in season, who, when “preserved,” is both kept alive (spared) and embalmed. Poetry here is a fickle consolation, the poem’s final line staging the tensile drama of the tightrope: a balance of affirmation and resignation. O’Hara’s aesthetic revolution is in making art out of “untranscended/ life itself” (Brown). Jaeger suggests that the enchantment of charismatic 8  See Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings for a thoroughgoing treatment of the darker spectrum of affective states.

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art works by appealing to “the urgent need to believe in the reality of a higher world, one that is immanent and inhabitable. And behind that urge, the belief that adaptation to a higher world, transformation and redemption, are somehow available” (376-77). Yet O’Hara pursues the mythic fabulation of life as it is lived, affirming sometimes the most terrible, tawdry, or melancholic of things. He continually reifies or fetishises people, places, and everyday objects only to undercut this process by troubling fixed identifications. There is where the figure of the serpentine, which features so often in the poetry, becomes appropriate and beguiling. Like the serpent, the articulated corpus of the poet and the poetry is always turning or appears turned, poised now in a different shape, exerting a fascination that is difficult to pin down. O’Hara charges the proper name with charm, so “James Dean” becomes an indeterminate but affective sign for possible mythologies of a modern self, a sort of moodiness or gorgeous articulacy. “Jackson Pollock” is a reckless abandonment to the act of creation that is at the same time a drama of technical virtuosity. His “eccentric … personal canon” of charmed figures shuffles the personal and the public in a speedy calculus of intimate distances that muddles the fictional and the real in a way that comes to appreciate persons as energetic signatures that constantly lend each other legibility and obscurity (Shaw 19). Shaw writes that in O’Hara’s poems “names explain each other in infinite regress: he presents Jackson Pollock in terms of Richard Burton and Fragonard, or James Dean in terms of Tiepolo and Turner” (19). O’Hara plots his range of acquaintance on an erotic continuum in a way that makes them part of his extensive person with an aristocratic indifference to whether or not he knows them “personally.” He prefers to rely on caprice and the hormonal melee of embodied experience, pronouncing degrees of intimacy through the proper names of friends and artistic heroes. Charm presents a problem for scholarship on O’Hara and it is often passed over as self-explanatory. Reviewing Hazel Smith’s Hyperscapes, Mark Ford writes that none of her “skilful deployment” of “gender politics, deconstruction, topography, orality (the poem as talkscape) and queer theory … really helps to define the particular charm of poems such as ‘A Step Away from Them’, ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’, or ‘The Day Lady Died’.” He adds that “O’Hara’s seemingly scatty accounts of his everyday musings and activities … are compelling for reasons that are peculiarly hard to formulate” (344). Ford alights on the notion of charm as that which exceeds “definition” or “formulation” and comes closest to

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describing the charge of O’Hara’s poetry. David Herd offers the term “enthusiasm” to describe the recipient of such charge: “it should act on … readers and listeners in such a way that they might act on others in the world” (2). He argues that enthusiasm, or “breathing in the god,” happens when one is in proximity to the charismatic person-as-text and becomes oneself a vehicle of transmission (Herd 3). Herd’s enthusiast is a radicalised reader and conduit. I would suggest that O’Hara generates a kind of critical love by giving a generosity of attention to other artists and their concerns. O’Hara’s gift (closely aligned to grace) is being able to read the nuances of other people’s self-mythologies and, in confirming them, enable and write them. His “shaping faculties” transform the person he is talking to or about; this mythopoiesis fuses the person and their cumulative stories, uniting bios and graphos by instating an aura of charm. This social extension of O’Hara’s poiesis also had a destructive impulse; in certain states, he could use the same powers of mythography to turn or annihilate the mythology of the other, to prick them very painfully. Contrary to Bloomian paranoia, O’Hara does not suffer an “anxiety” of influence but rather courts and determines it through an “erotics of influence” (Guy-Bray).9 O’Hara’s poetry shifts from Romanticism’s transcendent symbolism to the occulting of everyday objects and people of his acquaintance. I consider this through the idea of “charm effects” and the ways in which the poems plot the self among (and as) the things of the world and as dynamic systems of social engagement. Things and people become charmed and charming by being included in a Frank O’Hara poem, partly because of his seeming insouciance and partly because it plays to his erotic sense of enveloping the world as part of the self as a charmed situation. The New  York School poets are minted and exchanged through the issue of the proper names: John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler are mapped in a mythological holding pattern (a band of friends), making them ripe to be considered a “school” or cohort for later academic study. More so than the others, it is Frank O’Hara who excites further charismatic texts; his poems and figuration were studied and developed by the Second Generation, particularly by 9  Stephen Guy-Bray cites Barthes’ notion of erotic reading (frisson/jouissance) in The Pleasure of the Text alongside the polymorphous textuality of O’Hara’s “Personism” and its queer configuration of poet/poem/reader as “Lucky Pierre Style.”

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Ted Berrigan (1934–1983), who “gets” the transmission of the poet, the poetry, and “courtliness” as the scene of dynamic coterie. Berrigan becomes both poetry’s self-appointed Pope and its clown (CP “Train Ride” 277, “Clown” 382-3). He takes up O’Hara’s revolutionised apparatus of poetry, enjoying an overlap of temporality to and proximity with his hero, yet extends O’Hara’s thinking of self-mythologising in a way that is nuanced by an awareness of the limitations of these linguistic games of identity or “being the poet.” It is in the foregrounding of these limitations that the tragi-comedy of Berrigan’s work lies. Raphael Falco describes the movement of charismatic texts from person to “cult following” or institution, which involves the ritualisation of transmission. He writes of the difference between “an intense and immediate contact with what the actors involved believe to be the ultimate values and events, and a more attenuated, more mediated contact with such values or events through the functioning of established institutions” (66). Berrigan is a host for “values and events” held in the poetry of his ancestral New  Yorkers and promotes their sub-cultural institutionalisation, which he effects simultaneously through his person and his poetry. In Berrigan we observe “the mechanics of charismatic redistribution after the first blush of charismatic movement” (Falco 62). He is a brilliant reader of literary heroics and of identity as being highly manipulable in terms of posture, enunciation, and garb. “Turning out” the performance of the poet is an indifferent activity to writing for Berrigan. Whereas O’Hara opens himself to experience “to the point of distraction” (Ashbery ix), Berrigan opens himself totally to literary experience. Berrigan becomes adept at being a kind of slovenly duende, where poiesis and life are inseparable, both being simultaneously ludic and deadly serious. I advance and analyse a myth of Berrigan as the cosmophage, the one who eats everything, reading his first volume, The Sonnets, as tricked myth-machines, transforming the traditional form of lyric poetry into a “revolutionary apparatus.” Max Weber writes of “the desire to transform charisma and charismatic blessing from a unique, transitory gift of grace of extraordinary times and persons into a permanent possession of everyday life” (1112). Berrigan is this desire incarnate. Yet now that he has joined his literary heroes among the dead, how does he function as a charismatic text? I argue that The Sonnets worked to produce Berrigan as a poet and still work to produce

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Berrigan as a phantasmagoria, or phantasm, something which Berrigan promoted as the endless extension of his career, as he writes in “Red Shift”: When will I die? I will never die, I will live To be 110, & I will never go away, & you will never escape from me    who am always & only a ghost, despite this frame, Spirit Who lives only to nag. I’m only pronouns, & I am all of them, & I didn’t ask for this   You did I came into your life to change it & it did so & now nothing    will ever change That, and that’s that. Alone & crowded, unhappy fate, nevertheless    I slip softly into the air The world’s furious song flows through my costume.                       (CP 514-15)

Taking issue in his poetry with the intrigue of life and text, which he reads in the poetry of Byron and Mayakovsky (and loves), O’Hara plays constantly with the self as poiesis in a practice that must remain mutable. His mix of acquaintance, artist, film star, friend, and lover are placed through the constitutions of poems, creating a complex relational nebulae, a phenomenon of signal sociality, called “Frank O’Hara.” This creation remodels the poet as “something basically usable” for the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Ashbery x). Berrigan takes on this charmed mode of self-making, but in a way that is always at a remove or compressed. As the new myth of the mythmaker within the spectacle of the West, O’Hara has it covered; Berrigan dramatises the limitations of his position, keeping all styles of poetry in play, and he becomes a kind of folkindustrial transmitter of the poetry which charms him, in the effort to circulate the name “Ted Berrigan” as charm. For the Australian John Forbes (1950–1998), the model of the poet is always a trace: he cannot “touch the hem of the garment” so to speak. He has a different relationship to the myth of the poet, both temporally (following the deaths of Berrigan and O’Hara) and geographically; he is “beached” in Australia, always taking the position of an “elsewhere” that is paradoxically “right here.” He has no nostalgia for New York or America as the locus of poetic production. Rather he takes up the revolutionary apparatus of poetry as it is retuned by O’Hara and Berrigan and uses it as

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they have to both write and critique myths of the self and nation through his “vocation” as poet. Regardless of time and space, Forbes is connected to his fellow troubadours. He chooses O’Hara and Berrigan to weave into his narrative of becoming a poet. Berrigan’s intimate address from “Red Shift” to future practitioners in mythopoetics is partly the threat and partly the promise of a transfiguring communion, acknowledging the catalytic power of the poet’s voice to effect a personal metamorphosis in another: “I didn’t ask for this/ You did/ I came into your life to change it & it did so & now nothing/ will ever change/ That, and that’s that.” Who chooses whom? The contingency of choice in whom to be charmed by and accept as part of one’s self-mythology becomes necessary and happens through some fatal power. Forbes seems as much chosen by O’Hara and Berrigan as he chooses them; the ripple of the Orphic power to charm, which Frank gathers and charges, and which Ted modifies and modulates, was always going to envelope and change him. Rather than the replication or similitude that Berrigan deals with in terms of American myth, Forbes is more about difference, testing what might be an Australian sensibility against the rest of the world in a way that plays irony and sincerity with peculiar rigour. His rhetorical performance of self shows the filial relations between these two modes. Forbes is obsessed with the idea of the self as a function of language, which he reads so carefully in Berrigan and O’Hara, and I read in his work a performance of “metaphysical etiquette”: plotting the self as a linguistic event in good faith, that is, a mode of production that both enthuses over and maintains a sharp scepticism for these spurious identifications of the self in the world. For Aboriginal Australia, the whole of country of sacred, every part of it storied with the actions and presence of ancestors. For the settlers it is different. Colonial Australia has no Mount Rushmore. As an outer reach of empires (British and American), any monuments are constructed with an awareness of, and in the face of, uncertainty and transience. There is no naturalised mythos of Manifest Destiny or of being the refreshed horizon of the West. Instead, Australia is a raw theatre of ongoing colonialisation and ex-centricity that bears the Janus-faces of ignominy and pride. Its mythological frontier is an “uninhabitable” interior. In relation to myths of place, Forbes’s poetry is unrelenting in its sense of shame and discomfort. As a splenetic, witty, and vituperative poet-citizen of a would-be but

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never-quite-there Republic, he is a descendant of Catullus, yet Forbes never presumes to be at the heart of the civil. In Berrigan and O’Hara there is always an ambivalent joy and possibility in “becoming America”; in Forbes’s Australia, there is a sense of constitutional models as a form of pre-wrapped frozen dinner. What mythologies there are, are imported, and, as such, sit on the surface or shelf as obvious commodities past their use-by date. The telos of Australian “civilisation” cannot be easily made myth beyond a practice of continuing colonialism underpinned by capital, with the plundering of Australia as a resource for global markets being continued with rigour to the present day. For Forbes, this being at the margins creates a serious difference that is liberating as well as alienating; his “play” of identity through a functional ambivalence to myths of self and place is always more mordant, more saturnine, more questioning, and more sardonic. Forbes’s poems involve a sense of borrowing myths from elsewhere, and the ones that we have are often written off as a joke (fetishised outlaws, making heroes of horses and jockeys). He writes a lacerating humour of condition: we have sold off the place and silenced the people who could tell us about the place. America does not seem to function with the same collective guilt. John Forbes’s poetry is always wrestling with the inescapability of history, considering itself within an overwhelming late capitalism, tracking how the most mundane things and events are complicit in newly articulated forms of colonial activity. Yet Forbes also takes a hedonist’s glee in capitalism’s dark charms, licenced by the licentiousness of poetic self-making that he reads in Berrigan and O’Hara. He allows a sentimental attachment to “Australianness” precisely because he sees it as being not only “dicky” or impaired, but also in other aspects laconic and tonally “cool,” cashing in on the charm of certain stylistic turns of Australian wit to demonstrate its superior exchange value. What lines or limns his wicked satires of an Australian sensibility is a deep sensitivity to and affection for it. Forbes is attracted to the Orphic in poetry, the apparent power of language to make and critique selves through the charm of the lyric. Each fetishist of language sets store by different things or is differently charmed: in Forbes, we read a love of Australian vernacular and a love of “classical” poetic architectures. We read the restrained ethos of the laconic and a love of the absurd in slang. Forbes’s poetry is aware of its function as charm, and so is at times deliberately charmless, to expose and question its artifice, its status as technic. He also regularly hunts out the figure of the poet, to

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critique this figure as a system of postures and impostures. Forbes’s antipodean realisation of a revolutionised mythopoetics from America is fascinating for its difference in working out poetry as a reflexive techne for the making of selves as possible works of art. For Frank O’Hara, myth is always “on the ground running.” He extends its fetishising power to the everyday, to the near and familiar as an affirmation of one’s being in the world. Berrigan rejigs the myth of the mythmaker as a self-styled bohemian folk-hero and self-appointed arbiter of a poetry world. Forbes handles this emergent tradition specifically from outside: he is attracted to myth as process rather than archive, yet his impulse is to remain an acute critic of all practices of mythopoetics. Even so, he demonstrates a faith in poems as acts of grace and is a self-styled anti-romantic who uses poetry as a “current of social revolution” (Mead n.pag.).

CHAPTER 2

Frank O’Hara: Myth as Madrigal

One of the first poems in Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems is “Madrigal for a Dead Cat Named Julia” (4). Recalling Keats’s “Sonnet to a Cat,” its grandiosity of gesture for the passing of a domestic minor foregrounds O’Hara’s keen, often camp need to mark the worthiness of the ephemeral. With the banality of the phrase “dead cat” offset by its proper naming, there is a mourning of the tragic in what is almost sentimentally mundane. In this chapter, I argue for the madrigalist as a highly apt figuration of O’Hara as poet. In the multiplication of voices in a single subjective expression, the madrigalist resounds as a “charming artificer.”1 Still emulating traces of the baroque, O’Hara’s poems are polyvocal, polyphonic, and polytechnical. Having trained as a pianist, O’Hara was renowned for his love for the “pyrotechnics”2 of virtuosity (with composers like Rachmaninoff’s particular favourites). O’Hara’s method is something like the through-composition of the madrigal, where each turn of the song requires a different melody: it multiplies difference and is quickly able to cross a technical spectrum. In Modal Subjectivities, Susan McClary reads madrigals as sonic articulations of complex emotional states and signifying practices, which she 1  Marjorie Perloff seizes on O’Hara’s fondness for Apollinaire’s “charming artifice” and promotes it as a part of her conception of O’Hara’s aesthetic strategies (30). 2  Morton Feldman, “Lost Times and Future Hopes” (12).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Hose, The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94841-2_2

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signals as early types of polysubjectivity. For McClary, the madrigal both expresses the complexity of the subject and requires the listener to experience this complexity. She reads in the work of sixteenth-century madrigalists: modes in the service of a new cultural agenda that sought to perform dynamic representation of complex subjective states … Beginning with the madrigal … the performance of subjectivity moved to the fore as the dominant and self-consciously acknowledged project. (16)

McClary writes that as the madrigal demonstrates “alternative ways of experiencing affect than the ones we often assume, they may also lead us to interrogate the reasons behind the radical reduction of … [a] … more multifaceted emotional syntax to one with two principal options: major (positive) and minor (negative)” (170). I want to exploit this idea of the madrigal as a way of producing complex modal subjectivities that exist and operate simultaneously across the pages of O’Hara’s Collected Poems, developing a sophisticated ontology of emotional states through a vigorous experimentation with expression, in order to argue that in his wilful self-mythology, Frank O’Hara is not one but legion. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the madrigal as “1. Music. A part-song for several voices, spec. one of a style which originated in 16th-­ cent. Italy, with a secular text and featuring elaborate counterpoint, and … typically sung without instrumental accompaniment. 2.2. A short lyrical love poem.” I confess that casting O’Hara as madrigalist is a conceit of mine and, without doubt, inadequate to fully cover O’Hara’s poetics. But its power lies in its range of affect and its capacity to enchant its reader. The figure I hold of O’Hara inevitably generates a frisson of intimacy. O’Hara’s particular attraction as a madrigalist is his performative charm and skilfulness, something that differentiates him from simply being one more practitioner or lay poet. Indeed, his charm makes him a courted favourite within contemporary American poetry. As part of encountering O’Hara I engage with and recalibrate his charm effects; as reader I enjoin him in the act of poiesis. The madrigal is the plaintive song of many voices that continues to be different within itself; it is the song of simultaneous seriality. It not only makes a display of its own technicity but also foregrounds the affective powers of a demanding voice. The texture of O’Hara’s mythology is evident in both the poetry and the idea of the poet. As Svetlana Boym notes, art and life have been

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“correlated variables” since Romanticism, with an ever-occurring slippage between what Shoshana Felman calls a “vitality of texts” and the “textuality of life” (4). Boym suggests that “[s]ince Romanticism, the poet has been the primary example of the intersection of work and life and its poetic mythification” (11). While twentieth- and twenty-first-century America has increasingly turned to popular culture for its mythic iconography, Frank O’Hara manages to retain currency, even occasionally outshining his own beloved Hollywood legends like James Dean. Indeed, he functions as emblematic of charm and modernity in the cult television series Mad Men, an alter ego to the lead character Don Draper who cites from O’Hara’s “Mayakovsky”: Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. ............................................ It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.              (CP 202)

This “catastrophe” of personality is a necessity for the cultural mythologist, who, as Boym suggests, “has to experience a perpetual identity crisis.” The mythologist must take a borderline position that “involves a continuous interplay of distance and involvement, estrangement and engagement” (28). O’Hara generates a mythology through a poetic self-­ fashioning which derives its interest, to echo Stephen Greenblatt, “precisely from the fact that it functions without regard for sharp distinctions between literature and social life” (3). A fundamental aspect of the O’Hara myth holds that his first work is his personality.3 Bill de Kooning testifies to this: “I liked him immediately. Right away he was at the centre of things and he did not bulldoze. It was his manner and his way” (quoted in Gooch, 205). One might say that O’Hara himself functions as a charismatic text, yet the person in idea and

3  Dan Chiasson. “Fast Company.” This is Chiasson’s impression from his reading of Brad Gooch’s City Poet.

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in presence always exceeds this metaphor of text, because of the ineffable qualities of the social chemistries and charms of the living animal. Another part of O’Hara’s autopoiesis is the way he composes himself near the cultural core of mid twentieth-century New York. It is vital to consider New York City as the locus of his mythologising, not only a place that is chronicled through exquisite private specificities in his poems, but also a place that is already awash with myth. As Cyrus R.K. Patell discerns in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New  York, “New York can sometimes seem like the most un-American place in the country, its cosmopolitanism attesting to an accommodation of the multitude” (4). O’Hara’s New York comes after Walt Whitman’s New  York, Herman Melville’s New  York, Hart Crane’s New  York, and Federico Garcia Lorca’s New York to name but a few writers with whom O’Hara himself was enamoured and who function as key to his American imaginary. The territories that O’Hara works in his myth-making are interrelated conceptions of the self, geographical space, imaginary space, and the space of literature. O’Hara became a figure of myth in his lifetime, and his death gave licence for further elaboration of this auratic being.4 Frederick Garber’s review of Perloff’s Frank O’Hara: A Poet Among Painters gives this sense directly: Of the many fine things that this book succeeds in showing, one of the most fascinating is the tenacity of the myth of Frank O’Hara … Manhattan based culture hero …a middleman of the imagination in the New York of the fifties and sixties, a connector of trends and events who saw that some of the same issues were obsessing both poets and painters. As critic, poet, lover, and intermediary … O’Hara did as much as anyone to establish a sense of coherence among the swarming and extraordinarily creative New  York avant-­ garde of the period. In the process, and because of it, there grew an image of O’Hara as a frantic party boy, a diligent amateur scattering poems and seed among those worlds of the imagination which he sought to connect.                          (112)

4  I take “auratic” here in its Benjaminian conception of a product of culture that either exerts glamour or has glamour conferred upon it. Benjamin refers specifically to the work’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Illuminations 220). The aura of Frank O’Hara as a living “work of art,” and the effects of glamour this figure still exerts (and the traditions that it is folded into) is taken up in the following chapter (SW 2, 518).

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Immediately the figure of Frank O’Hara is taken as a metonym for a kind of epochal energy, the energy that Mad Men evokes by paralleling its central character with O’Hara. We must begin by locating the spatial and temporal scenes of O’Hara’s mythology, since they are indivisible from his self, noting that these “places” are at once textual and imaginative, actual, and contactable. The mythology of Frank O’Hara is in others: in the readers of his poems, through the living transmission or touch of poetry communities, and in the professional obsessions of scholars. So the myth of O’Hara is on University Place in New York, in the foyer of MOMA, but it is also invested in the bodies of Bill Berkson and John Ashbery, on the canvases of de Kooning, Hartigan, and Pollock, and in the poems. Gambling on O’Hara’s worth as a poet, Marjorie Perloff wrote the first sustained critical response to his work, and in doing so, set forth thinking of O’Hara’s difference as “A Poet Among Painters.” She saw her first move as demythologising O’Hara as poet so that we might see more clearly the value of his poems as literature: Because he wrote his poems very quickly—often on the run and during his lunch hour at the Museum of Modern Art—it has been assumed that his poetry is trivial and frivolous. Because his life was so colourful and his accidental death on Fire Island when he was only forty such a dramatic, indeed a tragic event, interest has centred on the man rather than the work. The purpose of my book is to right this balance.           (n.pag.)

Yet in naming O’Hara as a “poet among painters,” Perloff re-invents the myth. Her figuration has been unusually active, and any attempt to demythologise it will only effect a re-mythologisation of some kind. Perloff’s conception already echoes, as she knows, the relationship of Apollinaire to painters and to Paris.5 Her intervention in the O’Hara mythos is now read as a necessary corrective to the hapless trivialisation of the poet’s work, and she has since taken the opportunity to assess her own theoretical manoeuvre.6 5  For a consideration of Apollinaire’s career as a potentate of myth, see Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885–1918: Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire. New York: Vintage, 1968. pp. 253–299, and his Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire. New York: New Directions, 1971. pp. 3–13. 6  Perloff takes the opportunity to reflect on the changes of O’Hara’s reputation and her own contribution in her introduction to the 1997 edition of Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters.

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In this chapter, I focus on O’Hara’s Collected Poems as a catalogue of self-mythologising, the bringing into being of a polyphonic self. With each poetic composition, the self receives another chromatic expression. The poet demands this singular liberty as a kind of grace. The struggle to find new poetic forms is for O’Hara the struggle to continue with life. Myth becomes the binding agent: it is both interrogated and worked upon through poetry. The morphological figure of the poet exists within and without the work; it is the desirable body for criticism and it is the charming figuration that brings people to have a crush on Frank O’Hara. The lyric becomes the connective tissue between selves, making myths of personal relations that intersect with broader communal mythologies, including those of nation. I want to read the poetry of O’Hara as offering possible charters for new kinds of subjectivity in the twentieth century. Poems have the ontological lead by knowing themselves to be what Perloff calls a “radical artifice,” and O’Hara wants to give this same troubling privilege to our ideas of identity. It is difficult to isolate discrete personae in the poetry of Frank O’Hara because of his efforts to be constantly different from himself, to cultivate contrariety, contradiction, and metamorphosis, culminating in a dialectic that does not plateau. James Breslin writes that: O’Hara exists everywhere and nowhere in his poems … the self in O’Hara is at once transparent and opaque—perhaps his deepest contradiction … Many of the same features that make the poems seems so direct and immediate … also estrange and conceal the speaker from us, just as his use of the names of his friends, as if they were as familiar to us as to them … creates a tone of intimacy while pressing upon us the reality of O’Hara’s difference and distance from us. It is this sense of estrangement that makes these light, casual poems quietly unnerving and adds another voice to their rich, contradictory play of tones. (224)

It is precisely in this rhythm of intimacy and estrangement that we can tune our ear for the peculiar charms of O’Hara’s poetry and enter into a virtual and affective relationship with the phantom figure of the poet. O’Hara’s suggestion to “just go on your nerve” has been critically alluring. To track how the nerve goes exactly, to re-figure the poet on his terms, with signs that don’t hypostatise, is to turn to a modulation of erotics and hermeneutics7 because it is a pursuit. What makes O’Hara 7  In contradistinction to Susan Sontag’s provocative claim that “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (14).

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challenging is that he cannot be hunted down. Nothing that happens in his life is ever taken for granted but turned into something like a little myth: a formal remainder that does not function as a frieze or a statue or a photo but remains open precisely by making poems that are obscure, inscrutable, or silly in a way that is not just incipient but insurrectionary. As O’Hara writes in “Statement for the New American Poetry,” “[m]y formal ‘stance’ is found at the crossroads where what I know and can’t get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred” (CP 500). This is a sure O’Haraesque play of nervous wit that is undercut at the last with a suggestion of the dark, and within this rapier flick, there is something of the electric signature of the O’Hara myth.

Auto-Literaria, or on Being O’Haraesque O’Hara’s influences and his “style of living” have been captured most affectionately and lucidly by John Ashbery in the introduction to the Collected Poems (ix). O’Hara would claim Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé for free verse and the delights of symbolism, Williams for the vernacular and American Objectivism, Whitman for a cosmic fusion of energies and an appetite for cataloguing, Apollinaire for making a myth of the street one lives in and the faces one sees, Reverdy for “French Zen,” and Mayakovsky for what James Schuyler has called O’Hara’s “intimate yell.”8 It is not my intention to forensically examine O’Hara’s work for traces of influence, for despite Harold Bloom’s thesis on its anxiety for writers, the question of influence is not a surreptitious or jealous business for O’Hara. Instead, he has an ardour for the texture of the myth of the poet, freely and openly composing himself through the traces of others as an erotic project. Like Rimbaud he contrives to make himself an orphan, not just from his parents or birthplace, but of his genealogy, which is humorously performed at the beginning of the Collected Poems:

8  We might appreciate how exceptional the figure of Mayakovsky is in O’Hara’s personal mythology by witnessing his declaration in “A True Account of Talking of the Sun on Fire Island” that they are the only two poets ever to have a personal interview with the Sun, and they are in a sense consumed in precisely the same conflagration, or rather this is O’Hara’s preferred thought (CP 306).

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“Autobiographia Literaria” When I was a child I played by myself in a corner of the schoolyard all alone. And here I am, the And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine!        (CP 11)

In this nursery narrative, O’Hara’s speaker moves from being repellent to being the “center of all beauty.” He comes out for the whole world to come to him, and he does this by writing poems. This is a détente; a declaration of independence through dependence on all things. In his early genealogical poems, he never claims Irishness or American-ness as a guarantee of self or class of sentimentality. All his love connections are nominated. The scene overwrites an emotional history, O’Hara ghosting Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria and the stories it contains of “playing alone” and being an “orphan.” The title makes explicit what Coleridge keeps implicit. By adding “Auto,” O’Hara declares the notion of writing one’s life as a poem in anyone’s name. O’Hara fantasises Coleridge’s youth as his own, and its performance is not a precious association only. He assumes this sulky posture as a game of intimacy with Coleridge and with the reader, who will catch the echo of the original title: within the stickiness of the poem, all biographia becomes “auto.” There is the melancholic recognition that one’s miseries always have a cultural (literary) and Romantic precedent. This condensed pathos is the stuff of parody. Straightaway we tune for the sincerity of the lyric and find we cannot use the poem as a “machine of presence” without guile. Another parodic mode that O’Hara hunts for himself is the phantasm of the Russianist, for Russia is America’s exotic nemesis in the 1950s. O’Hara’s Russia does not exhibit the nascent paranoia of America’s Russia, only its veiled alterity. The young poet steps out cloaked in glamour in a secretly understood cult of passion: the “choicest choice of his own choosing.”9 If O’Hara wants to speak to the boredom of America, he 9

 O’Hara on Reuben Nakian. Art Chronicles 1954–1966. p. 87.

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addresses “Russia,” which he views as a reservoir of Romantic spirit. It is a space that holds a repertoire of postures of revolt and embodies a wanton gusto which is obviously a little satiric. But the performance still allows O’Hara to execute a Romantic impulse: “Poem” I ran through the snow like a young Czarevitch! My gun was loaded and wolves disguised as treed nymphs pointed out where the fathers had hidden in gopher holes. I shot them right between the eyes! …………………………………………           Then I ran through paper like a young Czarevitch, strong in the white and cold where the shots hung glittering in the air like poems.                       (CP 60)

This is a cute fantasy. O’Hara wants subtle control; he encourages fantasy but dislikes dreaming, for fantasy is partly directed and partly directing in a kind of fumbling play of the conscious and subconscious. It is symbolic confrontation, and the “I” is surrounded in every direction. The figure is O’Hara’s mythic shape, here prescient of Pasternak’s character Zhivago, who is not used by history as a poet or co-opted by circumstances but attempts to take control of his life by writing poems, by handling the received forms and conventions of literary culture.10 As a student of literature at Harvard, this oppositional figure of the Czarevitch might be something like a psychic reserve. Like O’Hara’s Coleridgian branding of his youth, this exercise in self-fashioning suggests that seriousness is a pleasure and vice versa. Instead of an earnest confrontation, the mode is a little buffo, cartoonish. As long as there are “grape arbors, vistas” Romanticism will need to be tended and the sublime will need figuring. Yet O’Hara’s assassination plot, his mythos, is devised suddenly and played out with the darkness and joy of something like Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Everything is a pose: even the wolves rearrange themselves as treed nymphs. Through the magic speed of association, O’Hara renders all hereafter as literature: the snow  See O’Hara’s “On Zhivago and His Poems” (CP 501–509).

10

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and the page are simultaneously the wilderness or whiteout. They become the negative space of possibility which O’Hara makes his “territory of conscience,” defined as “a very personal response to things” (CP 502). We see here that O’Hara’s idea of the person is always already affected by his artistic heroes. Arch and mocking, with the lifted brow of the aesthetic aristocrat but also still committed to literature’s power, the gun-toting “I” annihilates pastoral and symbolist tendencies while enjoying the splendour and drama these antique methods afford. It is a synthetic event in the adolescent mythology of a writer: Frank O’Hara and the poem both seek a kind of “regeneration through violence” (Slotkin). The pose of the Czarevitch counters the threat of boredom and conformity as well as the kinds of poetry being written in America in 1950. The poem functions as a projectile weapon clearing a space and the Czarevitch is a dashing posture, albeit tinctured with anxiety. This will to a chameleon self might be seen as a repair to protective masques. Andrew Epstein writes, “O’Hara’s occupation with change and the protean nature of the self can be seen as a strategy he uses in order to endure a culture of violent homophobia and homogeneity” (45). The Czarevitch is a persona that will do only for this poem. The Oedipal connotations are fairly naked, except that here both parents are to be destroyed. What remains is the desire to claim one’s self by writing one’s self, and it is aggressive in its desire to be “strong in the white and cold.” But note how this appearance of the poet “Frank O’Hara” is lousy with the figures of Coleridge, Pasternak, Zhivago, Rimbaud, and Pushkin. In the violent effort to clear some space for the self, we feel the tactics learnt from O’Hara’s heroes who have done this before. We see a serried line of ghosts in the “young Czarevitch.” The scene is an “intricate impeach” of impropriety.11 In poetry criticism and biography, proper names become descriptors for territory, and if we search for a synthetic pellet of someone’s character, a typical move is to contrast several territories to see if they have matching pitches and depressions. So we say O’Hara is the Walt Whitman of the 11  This notion of the hauntologue, though derived from Derrida’s “hauntology,” is conversant with Heraclitus’ “fragment 62” concerning the life of the dead in the living and the erasure of the living as they ventriloquise the dead: “Mortals, immortals, immortals, mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life” Hippolytus, Refutation of all heresies, IX, 10, 6.

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twentieth century, or the saucy Rimbaud of the “time of the assassins,” or the Mayakovsky of Manhattan. This correspondence is fluid, for we might reasonably say the early O’Hara poems have a touch of the “Rimbaudian” or the “Pasternakesque” just as now any number of contemporary poems can be viewed as “O’Haraesque.” This is not calling Pasternak into being, only a series of traces, manoeuvres, styles, tones, and postures of a figuration of a particular writer that may have a different user. As mythographers, then, we read in a situation what is both new about it and what has come before and how making and reading myth collapse into the same activity of the present. O’Hara’s poetry demonstrates that when we chase correspondences, we should take the tip from Nietzsche and be aware of it and do it stylishly and wilfully.12 If we archaeologise O’Hara and find traits of his ancestors, we find formal alliances which accent each other diacritically: we say “O’Hara is the Apollinaire of his time” or “Apollinaire was the O’Hara of his time.” What myths-of the-poet does O’Hara respond to, in terms of his thinking about poiesis? O’Hara is partly in the tradition of poetry as revolt. Yet any reaction against conformity that the poet can take by the mid-twentieth century is pre-empted by the work of another or licensed by another. O’Hara addresses this in “Memorial Day 1950”: Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world; just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down outside my window by a crew of creators. Once he got his axe going everyone was upset enough to fight for the last ditch and heap of rubbish.       Through all that surgery I thought I had a lot to say, and named several last things Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for; but then the war was over, those things had survived and even when you’re scared art is no dictionary. Max Ernst told us that.

12  Nietzsche declares, “To ‘give style’ to one’s character- a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye” (GS, 290).

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…………………………………………………        My mother and father asked me and I told them from my tight blue pants we should love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures. Wasted child! …………………………………………………      At that time all of us began to think with our bare hands and even with blood all over them, we knew vertical from horizontal, we never smeared anything except to find out how it lived. ………………………………………………… Poetry is as useful as a machine! …………………………………………………..        A locomotive is more melodious than a cello. I dress in oil cloth and read music by Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra.                      (CP 17–18)

It strikes me as an original declaration of the lust for influence, a ranging through the arrondissements of art forms, looking to couple with everything. It has the same blind energy of Mayakovsky and Marinetti (“A locomotive is more melodious/ than a cello”), yet it doesn’t gesture towards a furious and heroic utopia but to the desire for an impossible present. In choosing to break the lines or turn the lyric, we intuit O’Hara’s love for dance, the definitive structure of moves made in time and space that balances the inevitable with an ethos of improvisation. It is the tryst of handling the traditions of poetry and being handled by them. It is both highly artificial (“lovely as chewing gum”) and completely animal (“with our bare hands”). By arranging the genii of modernism into a specular relationship with the “I” of the poem, the writer dissolves in and partakes of the mythic aura of Stein, Picasso, Klee, Pasternak, Apollinaire, and the “Fathers of Dada.” O’Hara invites us to celebrate his personal tradition while making a

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declaration of continuing action or arrival.13 The “I” is positioned at the imagined lynchpin of its century, taking “young and toothless” possession of it (“Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul” CP 328). “Memorial Day” is a marker for ritually acknowledging blood sacrifice: fallen warriors, the state’s idea of the Great Dead who compose the official sacred. O’Hara is explicitly tallying his own list of daemonic forces who have the proper names of artists, nominating his own tradition. It is not a democratic or egalitarian poem, and by its definition or distinctions excludes and perhaps insults those who do not recognise its truth. The speaker formulates a syntactical eroticism: “I told them from my tight blue pants we should/ love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures” declaring the arrangement of figures that begins a new constitution. An arch address to immediate ancestors, the poem demolishes tradition and familial courtesy in favour of the elemental and chosen “heroic figures.” Inventing a place from which to speak, O’Hara chooses the fabric of the sex-symbol, the strutter, the bantam dandy: “tight blue pants” is the mobile position of being independently sexy, the phenomenal calling-­ card of a rare animal, saying “I look good,” “I feel good,” and “you won’t forget.” O’Hara is the art here, the heroic figure flirting with posterity via charming poise. When he asks later in “Meditations in an Emergency”: “How shall I become a legend my dear” citing “the ecstasy of always bursting forth!” (CP 197), the answer here is “from my tight blue pants.” Snap this line off the structure of the poem, and we have a mobile figurine of the poet and a charmed formulation for remembering the moment, now outside of time, of a truly charismatic stance. Even if it only happens once in a lifetime, who has not enjoyed the moment of speaking from “tight blue pants,” of achieving an instant of rare animal glamour. Such moments become jewels of a personal mythology, as vital and precious as “stones, the sea and heroic figures.” I want to put as much pressure as possible on this line, to check the lineaments of hard O’Hara charm. Speaking of Auden, O’Hara says “for instance, in ‘In Praise of Limestone’ he’s going along and then he says, ‘Green places inviting you to sit.’ That’s 13  The poem makes a conception of the poet as artist, interested in all forms of art, and here we might make an account of O’Hara’s career as an art critic, playwright, and museum curator, all of which contribute to or collaborate with O’Hara’s practice of poetics. This is of fundamental importance to O’Hara’s wilful problematising of the role of the poet and the role of poetry in the twentieth century. Lytle Shaw examines the generically destabilising style and intent of O’Hara’s art criticism in his chapter “O’Hara’s Art Criticism” from Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie.

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worth a whole career to have a line like that” (Standing Still 25). The insouciance of “tight blue pants” does not qualify it as a throwaway line; it is worth a whole career: its seeming camp or casualness lightly disguises the fact that here, O’Hara is dressed to kill. The constant hedonistic itch of these “tight blue pants” presses line after line, the poem troping the self through a series of identifications, never to be satisfied, never to be “scratched.” As O’Hara suggests of compositional verve in “Personism: A Manifesto”: “[a]s for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it” (CP 498). It is curious that O’Hara should invoke the democratic absolute of “common sense,” when an alarmingly few people choose the tightest pants possible. Clearly, what is personal or capricious is absolute. The constant itch, understood by anyone who has ever experienced “tight blue pants,” may create an instant knowing in the intended audience. In the context of the solemn national Memorial Day, this posturing is an infidel manoeuvre of civil insurrection, yet it also partakes of the martial dimension of male glamour: “tight blue pants” are not unknown to the United States Marines, and other equivalent “technical apparatus” mixing sex (seduction) and death are known to armies immemorial. The poem’s aggression, or as Ashbery prefers, “truculence,” should not be read as machismo even as there is a performance of it.14 As the poet O’Hara never remains any of these figures, they are simply poses to ­question what it means to be a poet. In the spectacular fashion of the matador, he invites the charge of his potent ancestors and then turns with aplomb as each one makes a pass. For O’Hara, we love the matador because of the way he looks: sexy, in his “tight blue pants.” Though oppositional, the poem is also filial, “like the kiss of love meeting the kiss of hatred” as the poet writes in “Ode on Causality”: A sexual bliss inscribe upon the page of whatever energy I burn for art And do not watch over my life, but read and read through copper earth Not to fall at all, but disappear or burn!                     (CP 302) 14  John Ashbery. “Memorial Day 1950” http://www.poetrysociety.org/journal/articles/ tributes/ohara.html.

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As Bataille and Freud have suggested, wherever Eros goes there follows a twin instinct of Death/Thanatos. In calling forth his figures of influence, O’Hara works to absorb them through the energy of the poem “just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down/ outside my window by a crew of creators.” What is gained is the knowledge and possible virtue of a cannibal, which allows one to move forward with a brand-new appetite: “[a]t that time all of us began to think/ with our bare hands and even with blood all over/ them, we knew vertical from horizontal, we never/ smeared anything except to find out how it lived.” It is this bloody permissiveness in the use of one’s ancestors, when done with élan, that lends O’Hara a magnetism in his testing of voice. This voice is spiked with the punk attitude of one who is sure of his virtuosity. It is not gracious or bowed with humility, having the still sheathed and protected nerve of youth. In an essay on Picasso, O’Hara writes: Unlike his European contemporaries, art for him was not a matter of deciding upon a style and then exploring its possibilities. He explored the possibilities for discovery in himself as an artist, and in doing so he embraced, absorbed and expanded all the material which he instinctively reached from, and which we later find to be completely pertinent to his work. (Art Chronicles, 13)

The scene that O’Hara creates performs an initiation for the young poet (“Poetry is as useful as a machine!”), sacrificing the monumental figures of the past to get at freshness. It generates a horizontal relationship with the past rather than a hierarchical lineage (“I dress in oil cloth and read music/by Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra”). This ritualistic shrining in the arrangement of oilcloth, sheet music, and the light of Apollinaire pays homage to the artist, perhaps in a similar manner to that of the matador who pays homage through re-enacting or performing violence. This myth-of-self as artist here seems composed by objects of taste or aesthetic decisions. In O’Hara’s acknowledgement, there is always the possibility of parody. Yet parody is not a thing one might gather or possess; it is a spectral, stereoscopic recognition, an event requiring two texts to make an imitation, as it requires a reader to bring about its effects. Rather than be dominated by Bloomian anxiety, O’Hara openly becomes his influences through parody, if we think of parody as a sometimes amorous relationship in which the beloved is teased. The cunning of parody is that it is able to partly be,

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or borrow, or inhabit the object of satire while satirising it. It is a life-­ giving process which preserves while it alters the object of its attention. Parody critiques and expertly reads through rewriting, reformulating a sensibility or posture by rescuing it from the tragedy of final form. What is Apollinaire to O’Hara? He is a cast form (“clay”) that offers occasional illumination (“candelabra”). O’Hara is brightened by Apollinaire as a proximate, an intimate, not simply textual appurtenance. In The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben contends: The human is the being that, bumping into things and only in this encounter, opens up to the nonthing-like. And inversely, the human being is the one that, being open to the non-thinglike, is, for this very reason, irreparably consigned to things. Non-thingness (spirituality) means losing oneself in things, losing oneself to the point of not being able to conceive of anything but things, and only then, in the experience of the irremediable thingness of the world, bumping into a limit, touching it. (This is the meaning of the word “exposure.”) The taking place of things does not take place in the world. Utopia is the very topia of things. (102–3)

The things that bind O’Hara to Apollinaire, the charmed articles, are words themselves, prior to the mirthful image of O’Hara in his saintly applications. “Losing oneself in things” is precisely the measure of O’Hara’s dispersal in the world through the transitive surface of the lyric, patterning the self and its signature objects, its imagined possessions, within what Ashbery calls “that almost unknowable substance that is our experience” (xi). In his poetry O’Hara is always moving up against things. Yet this idea of being required by things suffers a reversal in “Meditations in an Emergency”: “It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep” (CP 197). O’Hara here undercuts this idea of “things themselves” through a mock responsibility of the poet that comes from a “restlessness” expressed through a kind of roving erotic investiture that is wanton and occasional, abandoned as easily as it is taken up. This is to say that Eros is not an exceptional figure of engagement with the world for O’Hara, just as mythos is not an exceptional mode of speaking or discourse, its auratic quality pertains to everything.

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In the poem, “Those Who Are Dreaming, A Play About St. Paul,” O’Hara stages the self in a definitional encounter with love. Articulating the dialectic between love and knowledge (“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known”), the speaker is “everywhere, he is not/a character, he is a person, and therefore general” (CP 373). Being framed as “play” rather than poem, the writing foregrounds the existential. It is both representation and recollection, staging an individual’s exposure through a voyeuristic portal: He has no tic, unless someone else is observing him and no one is. He is allowed to look at the windows but not out them because the shades are drawn.                       (CP 373)

The uncanny effect is of observing the self, of being the original audience to one’s experience and the structuring of this experience into a self. The poem is a sensitive instrument testing the pressure of the room. Each line is the thought and the echo of the thought. Within this set of circumstances, the poet’s next act is generative:           ……………..He reflects mindlessly on the meaning of the philodendron, then on philo-, then on the nature of fondness, of love.                          (CP 373)

The speaker is both a distracted and a witty, transcendent observer; both actor and audience, which is the lonely theatre of thought. This double articulation is figured in the philodendron, which has an immanence and, with an observer, a life which transcends itself. The plant has ipseity or thingness, yet it cannot live alone without love: “He reflects mindlessly on the meaning of philodendron, then/ on philo-.” The figure is doubled (the plant/ the word) and all meanings are present but not sought. What remains is the abstract mystery of differentiation, especially in language: of love and its object (philo-dendron) which in this play are indivisible. The figure turns through philo—the Greek root—being the organic inevitability of the trope turning like a heliotrope to the phone and to love. The poem then becomes “about” intimacy; about the tension between a couple and the dialectic of vulnerability and bravado:

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It is then that he dials the phone               He says hello this is George Gordon, Lord Byron, then he just listens because he didn’t call to talk.                  (CP 374)

Instinctually, when he faces the beloved and is in want of a masque, the poet reaches for Byron. Taking up such a mythic persona is a reflexive defence, a measure of boldness and panic, at once arch and poisoned with a little self-loathing. Though Byron is adept at the quip, he is also the master of the mood swing, a mica-flecked blend of charm and rage. It represents a transient posture, since the poet’s persona is vacant, or curiously without will. In his (partly mock) “Personism: A Manifesto” O’Hara interrupts the compositional moment of the love poem: “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” (CP 499). In this instance, both poem and phone call are smirched by poiesis for, presenting as Byron, O’Hara’s art and life is rendered “hopelessly” calculated, theatrical, literary. In this poem, being “Frank” is precisely about operating “from behind a series of increasingly sophisticated … facades, whose very style and frankness are designed to convince, even as they disguise” as Peter Cochran suggests of Byron himself (xvii). Cochran writes of Byron’s “[a]daptability of tone, and deceptive theatricality of manner” as his “stock-in-trade”: “By the time he writes Don Juan he’s ‘being frank’ about it” (xvii–xviii). This is not a little blague for O’Hara. It is a candid self-critique of his techniques of love and sophisticated patterns of evasion. It suggests that these myths of self are tools, part of an image repertoire. But here, the pre-figured response of being Byron, or calling his lover St. Paul, is to give the encounter a plot (muthos) and so be able to make art of amorous failure or direct the force of amativity to art itself. It is a confrontation of O’Hara with his lover, O’Hara and language, and the extreme literariness of his life. For though the poet struggles to find new forms for himself, he acknowledges that he has aggressive default versions of the self. Geoff Ward thinks that “Byron … was one of O’Hara’s touchstones; along with the figures of Rachmaninoff and Pasternak, his associations are not merely those of cultural bric-a-brac, but becomes part of the poet’s personal mythology” (47). What can the poem do about it? “Those Who are Dreaming, A Play about St. Paul” is a reflection on mythologising patterns of suffering in a relationship:

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                   Behind, in his actual mind, he has a vague desire to write a long beautiful poem like Night of Loveless Nights but he has not known a loveless night for so long…                (CP 374)

The poem has a strange frequency, tuned somehow to the point of abstraction or its surface, as if fatigue were the vast territory of a canvas, which indeed it becomes, contemplating his lover’s face: he looks across at you and sees your face grow pale with sleepiness, and your eyes gleam abstractedly and your eyelids are the color of Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, a color nature has taken infinite pains to achieve and has achieved nowhere else.                (CP 374)

The only things graspable are the abstraction of self in representation; we have been in a play, a painting, the boots of Byron, and vaguely across Night of the Loveless Nights, Robert Desnos’s epic and bitter Surrealist poem. The poem spools aesthetic divagations of the real, a vast architecture of identity as art. A charter of desire, the composition of the poem allows the provocation of love to remain. It seems the job of the poem is to finesse and aestheticise the suffering as the prolonged and true pleasure: He thinks of the hard beige hills of Spain, of Morocco (where he has never been, Byron or no Byron), of certain poems which linger in the mind as essences of what he is, and each thought feels familiar, each object because you are familiar and have lingered as the hills still linger outside Madrid, through harsh rains, through the base rolling drought of daily sun as infinitely boring as a drunken conversation, through the civil wars which rage continually as one continues to try to make something appear between divided selves clear and abstract as the word thing preceded by another word, so you have lingered.                     (CP 374)

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The subject is determined dialectically by everything; other people, history, an idea of Morocco “(where he has never been, Byron or no Byron),” the texture of an eyelid as the triumph of nature. The poem examines the yearning for a graspable formulation of the self; “to try to make something appear between divided selves/ clear and abstract as the word thing preceded/ by another word.” The figure of Byron is only superficially an emblem of the Romantic poet or a great lover; O’Hara’s use of “him” here is endlessly complex. All being is relational and the thing sought cannot be possessed, though its pursuit through language both brings the beloved closer through imagistic “captures”; fixing the lover’s eyelid as having the precise shade from Rembrandt’s Polish rider is the most exquisite contact O’Hara can have, and then it is gone. The poem preserves this embrace, this association, but the warmth of it is fugitive: and in the color of your eyelids is hidden, as are your eyes, the meaning of abstraction, a color of general significance and beauty, but appearing only in your flesh, belonging only to you.                        (CP 374)

The poem involves itself with “the color of Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider.” It compares the beloved’s eyelids with those of the rider in the painting and with the experience of the whole painting. This is the drama of metonymy, of seizing a part in order to seize the whole, but the whole remains elusive as a transcendent abstract, like the idea of a final meaning or the perverse desire to wholly possess someone, or the singularity of a love, or love as anything other than the greatest abstraction. Perhaps the real act of love is poiesis itself. These lines as an “apparatus of capture” distance the beloved, who in the poem is always a thing apart, or just leaving, or never quite there. The poem tries to measure the precise distance of separation; of the lover from the beloved, signifier from sign. If one could grasp this, one could love and be loved. This is self-reflexively examined by calling the poem a “play,” putting the idea of a poem in play, seeing what is possible, but also to mark with melancholy that language and love must remain in a state of piqued desire; that it cannot have the thing which it loves. “Play” sets us at a distance, the action is a spectacle. It is a madrigal of pursuit. One cannot be

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the myths one has of the self, for they are fugitive. They are not really “us”; they are narrative techne borrowed from the hemisphere of symbols. The poem is straining against what might be possible, not for the sake of expression but for the sake of love. Being-as-poiesis here is not a romantic programme but a problem of aesthetic theory, of the ontological status of signs, and of love. The ecstasy of looking at the beloved is comparable to looking not just at a scene of high art, but the whole of creation, since the poem is romantically suggesting that all of evolution has had the purpose of achieving the being of this love’s object, which culminates in the perfect contingent detail of the aesthete or Byronic hero—the exquisite colour of the eyelid. Yet these Romantic topoi are continually undercut by the knowledge that these gestures will not cover the calamity of the gap between self and other. Besides the Romantic excess of Byron and Coleridge or the Surrealist illuminations of Apollinaire, O’Hara would also be enraptured by the strains of Rachmaninoff such as in “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday”: Blue windows, blue rooftops and the blue light of the rain, these contiguous phrases of Rachmaninoff pouring into my enormous ears …………………………………………. Only my eyes would be blue as I played and you rapped my knuckles, dearest father of all the Russias, placing my fingers tenderly upon your cold, tired eyes.                (CP 189)

The poem draws an erotic, filial connection with Rachmaninoff. It is a protracted swoon through ecstatic closeness, a thrill of imagined incarnation through the hands at the keyboard which become disembodied and might be those of Liszt, Scriabin, or Rachmaninoff. The hands exist merely as the object of circulating myths. The first stanza introduces Rachmaninoff as “blue phrases” supported by the phenomenal (windows, rooftops, light of the rain) which then synaesthetically become a sonic flow to pour into the ear, in a move reminiscent of Rimbaudian technique. This blue returns in the final stanza to be

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spliced into the genetic makeup of the poet (“only my eyes would be blue”) and the seen contiguity of Rachmaninoff’s phrases in objects is enveloped into the instrument of seeing. A way of overcoming one’s influences is to elementally become them, and here O’Hara composes a fantasy for the transmission of sight, as the poet is struck on the knuckles by the “dearest father” in a gesture of the cruel affection of piano teachers, then returns the touch by “placing my fingers/ tenderly upon your cold, tired eyes” which one might take not only for closing the eyes of the deceased, but also here for manipulating the ivory keys. Through playing he is able to conjure the other as a daemon of energies and sonic affect. “[D]ear father of all the Russias” is O’Hara as the young Czarevitch addressing Rachmaninoff as a decaying Czar. The rap on the knuckles stands as a hauntological injunction, the aesthetic dictum of “fait attention!” requiring a compositional rigour to meet the standards of one’s precedents, to satisfy the demands of the dead. O’Hara’s self-mythologising always hangs on an aesthetic standard, but his aristocratic tendencies are shot through with camp and the complete commitment of a “stormy heart.” O’Hara’s love of Rachmaninoff puzzled many of his contemporaries, as he was seen as a sentimentalist—and perilously close to kitsch—by the avant-garde. Morton Feldman writes: Frank loved virtuosity, loved the pyrotechnics of it … It is interesting that in a circle that demanded partisanship above all, he was so totally accepted. I suppose that we recognised that his wisdom came from his own “system”—the dialectic of the heart. This was his secret. That was what made it possible for him, without ever being merely eclectic, to write so beautifully about Pollock and Pasternak, to dedicate a poem to Larry Rivers one day and to Philip Guston the next. Nobody I knew resented Frank’s love for an irrelevant genius like Rachmaninoff. We all know it was not Rachmaninoff that was our enemy, but the second rate artists who dictates what art should be. (12)

Like death, O’Hara keeps Rachmaninoff or elements of yet another personae close at heart to ward off boredom or the threat of the same. The poem as the heart will always be a Romantic proposition. As the engine of circulation and revolution, it is an off-centre aspirational machine that requires continual transplantation: “My Heart” I’m not going to cry all the time Nor am I going to laugh all the time

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I don’t prefer one “strain” to another. ....................................................... I want my face to be shaven, and my heart— you can’t plan on the heart, but the better part of it, my poetry, is open.                    (CP 231)

Open desire is always buffeted in its contact with the other, that is, with what is strange, obscure, and indeterminate in experience. The poem ends with the declaration, “My heart is in my/pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.” Love for O’Hara is speckled not monochromatic, and the poem is the place for commingling light and dark strains, as “the better part” of the heart is the motor of these continually rejuvenated constitutions. The surface of the lyric poem is the heart’s democracy: this is its nobility as a techne for O’Hara, who willingly sees the working of his own precious organ in the poems of Pierre Reverdy and in the virtuosic hands of Rachmaninoff. I want to further explore O’Hara’s focus on the body as an erotic, social, and aesthetic nexus in the poem “Grand Central”: The wheels inside me are thundering. They do not churn me, they are inside. They were not oiled, they burn with friction and out of my eyes. comes smoke. Then the enormous bullets streak toward me with their black tracers and bury themselves deep in my muscles They won’t be taken out, I can still move. Now I am going to lie down like an expensive marble floor covered with commuters and information: it is my vocation, you believe that, don’t you? I don’t have an American body, I have an anonymous body, though you can get to love it, if you love the corpses of the Renaissance; I am reconstructed from a model of poetry, you see, and this might be a horseless carriage, it might be but it is not, it is riddled with bullets, am I.                 (CP 168)

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The title “Grand Central” suggests a definite organ or location but is conceivable as an abstract place of accumulation, of arrivals and departures, of “commuters and information,” or as a Deleuzian aggregation of thousands of tiny “desiring-machines” (Anti-Oedipus 183) that make up the body as an open structure for the transit of sensation and image. This poem is licensed by French surrealism and certain modes of Russian formalism in its marbling of the organic and inorganic, the technological and the human, the machine and the nude, sense and nonsense. It deals with locomotion, speed, and an uncertain trajectory and wants to deal with a basic quandary of carriage: is the final figure a riderless horse or a horseless rider? It talks explicitly about refusing the influence of the kinds of identification that an established or dominant culture offers the subject (“I don’t have an American body, I have an anonymous body”), and this struggle is figured parodically through the visual, cinematic conventions of the Western: trains, horses, bullets, and thundering wheels. This interpellation by Western culture is figured as an assault, the violence of which is inevitable, but not fatal: “Then the enormous bullets/ streak toward me with their black tracers/ and bury themselves deep in my muscles. / They won’t be taken out, I can still/ move.” The poem critiques the romance of the Renaissance treatment of the nude, calling such formal captures “corpses,” and instead offers an arch manifesto: “I am/ reconstructed from a model of poetry, / you see.” This poem, using the trope of grand central station for the body of the poet, marks for us a new consideration of the radical sociality of O’Hara’s efforts at self-­ mythologising, making new structures for myths of the cosmopolitan or seeing the gargantuan complexes of our culture as intimate appendices and machines of engagement. Even when these engagements are fraught and violent, they are to be desired. Susan Rosenbaum writes “in all contexts he attempts to remain ‘open,’ to affirm the present moment, in all its contingencies” (82). She adds, “his discursive appropriations of the city amount to more than ironic commentary. The ‘accident’ or ‘contingency’ always potentially signifies danger and pain” (83). Rosenbaum suggests that O’Hara transforms the idea of Grand Central from the site of the distribution of bodies not only for economics but also for pleasure. Like the body or the complex organ of the train station, the poem itself is involved in this corporeal scheme of being an apparatus of capture. The contingent content of this poem is the traffic of the poet’s imagination and the arrangement of imaginative thinking into art. It flickers between flesh and steel, or the interruption of these two human

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structures, but the conception of the city and a civilisation is almost “more than the imagination can hold.”15 It produces both fear and excitement. O’Hara pits poetry as machines for thinking against philosophy, because it handles contingent and ephemeral models of sudden cognitions rather than systems of thought. Richard Rorty reminds us of “the quarrel between poetry and philosophy, the tension between an effort to achieve self-creation by recognition of contingency and an effort to achieve universality by the transcendence of contingency” (24).This puts us in the loop of an endless paradox: if authenticity is in the contingency and ephemerality of experience, then the impulse to arrest it in art gives it a formal concretion that begs to be read as a coherent notion of the self, making the poet not a rampaging beast but a jockey of technique. Like many of O’Hara’s poems, it is a self-reflexive catalogue of the poet’s concerns: poetics, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, cinema, myths of America, sex, cosmogony, and cowboys. O’Hara is both the plural of locomotives and the station, which is perhaps to say he is a general intercourse. The poem roulettes a number of versions of the self without resting on a single preferred aspect. This writhing, this refusal to be still is the logic of tropes put on show for what they are. Rather than use a turned phrase, the continual phrase of the poem is kept turning and so instead of using figures as apparatuses of capture having some utility in representation, they are used to play a trompe l’oeil like rope-tricks. O’Hara prefers self-mythologising as a process, rather than making monumental works or conventionally tuned turns that will “stand the test of time.” “Grand Central” uses something of the energy and ratchets of Futurist poetry, blending man and machine, and the idea of a Frank O’Hara behind the poem is cast as a paradox of proximity through distance, a sly spacing of self and symbol. O’Hara’s pursues the local and ephemeral, not the symbolic or transcendent. Yet the idea of “Grand Central” station is itself a monument to transport, a mastering of time and space, and a colossus of modern American history. O’Hara seizes this idea of the transcendent or public symbol of a civilised ethos and makes it his own “anonymous” body: vulnerable, sacrificial, and sexual. Like an engineer, O’Hara lays out his mythologies for public traffic, the personal is converted for utility: “Now I am going to lie down/ like an expensive marble floor/ covered with commuters and information: it is my vocation, 15  The phrase is Kenneth Koch’s “All the Imagination Can Hold”—a notion he borrows from O’Hara’s poem, “Radio” (CP 234).

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you believe that, / don’t you?” O’Hara’s “Grand Central” is his self as a structuring poetics. This dramatic gesture of spreading out or a collapse into abjection is read by Peter Stoneley as vital to the rhythm of O’Hara’s “making and unmaking” of the self: in resigning himself to his pejorative or cast-down status, he perceives other possible “models” for the self. These other models confirm his alien qualities: he does not “have an American body,” but a body that links him with the European Renaissance. He looks to the Renaissance interest in death and the workings of the human, and this contrasts with the seemingly invulnerable enactments of U.S. military and industrial process. (129)

O’Hara explores this transversal in other poems. Like “Grand Central,” “Naphtha” renders the body into both machine and space that is travelled over: how are you feeling in ancient September I am feeling like a truck on a wet highway how can you you were made in the image of god I was not I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver.                       (CP 338)

O’Hara elides the vehicle and the driver. He is “feeling like” the truck but is “made in the image of” a sissy truck driver. Feeling is not coterminous with image. The “you” is perhaps the one who has their affect and appearance aligned, the figure of the human in the image of the god which is properly heroic. The truck, a machine of motivation, is kinked or queered in the figure of “a sissy truck-driver.” This undercutting or “self lacerating” manoeuvre is not a one-way reflex, we know it will change again. The sissy truck-driver as a kind of self-mockery is another pose: O’Hara’s queer method is always to have these figures know themselves as figures, to know themselves as performance, each posture never staying to be itself, or allowed to remain. Yet while there is relish in change, change is also threatening. This lingering ambivalence in all of O’Hara’s work brings his darkness to the surface. This theatrical stuttering of bravado and vulnerability structures the auratic frequency of O’Hara’s charm, and again we note its reliance on the

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things of the world and personal perversions of tropes. In Early Writing the poet declares: I want to move toward a complexity which makes life within the work and which does not (necessarily, though it may) resemble life as most people seem to think it is lived. If I am successful this should not need to be received as exotic or phantastic. The only simplicity I want is that of a coherent thing, a result of the work-as-a-whole’s integrity. (102)

This is perhaps to suggest that the poem is its own subject and does not seek to confer the glamour of the things of the world but would become a talismanic thing in itself, functioning paradigmatically as a licence to constitute one’s own self-mythology.

These Charming Things; or Polish Rider with Coke As emblematised in the auratic “thingness” of Apollinaire’s candelabra in “Memorial Day 1950,” O’Hara suggests that there is something of this in the way people, places, and poems can exert certain charms, can impress upon our sense of ourselves, which become more intricate as we divide out attention infinitesimally to the present. In reading O’Hara’s poems, the reader becomes aware of the glamour of objects so that our notice of them leaves us a little altered. This glamour of objects or contingent scenes is captured in O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You”: is even more fun than going top San Sebastian, Irun, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles.                           (CP 360)

Can we think of this as a scene of myth? The addressee and the speaker evade containment but the poem is drawn on through an attraction to the

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“partly because” of any moment. It is an ode to attention as a form of pagan composition (reifying the ephemeral things of the world) that wants to eschew symbolism, metaphysics, and statuary even as it makes a virtual saint of its “You” as a “better happier St. Sebastian.” It consecrates love, but like “A Play About St. Paul,” love is fugitive, and even the poem cannot “have” it, but only figure “whatever energy I burn for art.” What this poem declares on behalf of mythologising the self is that one might love but not be in awe of the art of the past and that in the continual making of the self, one can avail oneself of every conceivable code that a culture can afford: sensual spurs, hieratic and demotic languages, attention to rhythms of thought and speech, critical self-reflexivity. Poetry is the mechanism to put in place a composite of these things and to consider the phenomenal world as the extensive self. O’Hara has an appetite for not just the finest parts of culture but all of culture. This is perhaps a trait of many poets of his era, but it is O’Hara that makes of it an urbane charm that is streaked with scepticism. The charm of the poem is in both its loquaciousness and confidentiality that it wants to speak only to you. An example of such charm effects can be found in the line, “I look/ at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world/ except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the/ Frick.” The mixed conceitedness, insouciance, and belligerence make a shorthand of a brittle and soft camp sensibility, partly for its sprezzatura, its secret loathing of the beautiful and fear of the beloved. Its charm is reinforced by the archival footage of O’Hara reading this section of the poem and the pause he gives between “I look” and “at you.”16 The line is modulated, intensified by the grain of O’Hara’s voice, by his affective presence. In this video-recording, O’Hara offers us further into the company of his composite spirit. O’Hara capitalises on what Lytle Shaw calls “the phantom immanence of the name” (233). These are names of not just people but movies, 16  Available at http://youtu.be/YDLwivcpFe8. There is further work to be done in analysing footage of poets reading as concurrent textual tributaries of voice, image, milieu, and symbol. This would follow the interest of Steve Evans in undoing the metaphysical priority of meaning in graphic (written) text over sonic text. The sample quoted above is talismanic; the grain of O’Hara’s voice, its measure, and calculated breaks constitute an affective text. It offers a set of semiotic keys in its vocal turns and ranges which inflect the way his poems are read on the page. The technology allows a shift from an historically limited community of coterie to an infinite community and changes the relationship of the reader to the dead poet. O’Hara’s charm carries.

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histories, paintings, and ballets and not just broad architectural references but precise moments. These are not precise moments which become archetypes but muddy instants that are marred with fantasy, inattention, distraction, and prejudice. Language, like the self, is divided and so is the frontier of a dirty ontology, involved with what it tries to represent. O’Hara’s obscurity, or his radicalising of the principle of the personal in poetry, constantly risks presenting a culte du moi. It does not deal in a public symbolism or engage in a confessional rhetoric of “feeling” which tools a “mythology of the ur-self” (O’Hara quoted in Gooch, 217). Instead, obscurity is key to O’Hara’s charm. “Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul” demonstrates a further kind of charm effect in O’Hara’s poetry: It is 12:20 in New York and I am wondering If I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch Ah lunch! I think I am going crazy.                (CP 328)

This is a performance of immediacy. It plots itself as a person by checking the time to be in pursuit of the present: “It is 12:12”; “yesterday I looked up the rue Fremicourt on a map”; “I wish I were reeling.” Time is counted as different vectors of attention, of feeling, association, memories, and anxieties, without differentiating these categories. Time is plotted in that which is said (mythos) and the syntax or spatial arrangement of its saying. The poem makes a scene of the self by posting diaristic scratchings of the occasional, bidding “Adieu” (to Norman) and “Bon Jour” (Joan and Jean-Paul). Here, O’Hara is radically autobiographical. Through the poem we “know” Kenneth, Norman, Allen, Peter, Joan, and Jean-­ Paul. It suggestively flags networks of friends without using a system of tropes. Instead it puts the shine on the enigma of presence and the promise of the incidental: it moves into the daily events of one’s life and is “grabbing on late as usual.” There is an ironic nostalgia for Frenchness and for France, which the speaker enjoys as a kind of swoon instead of a sincere wish. Yet, the swoon is shirred through with darkness and anxiety: I wish I were reeling around Paris instead of reeling around New York I wish I wasn’t reeling at all it is Spring and the ice has melted the Ricard is being poured

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we are all happy and young and toothless it is the same as old age.              (CP 328)

As an ode to the present, the poem stages the switching of the guard, with Norman’s departure and Joan and Jean-Paul’s arrival. Change suggests that there is always an elsewhere and always a strangeness. Yet: the Bar Américain continues to be French deGaulle continues to be Algerian as does Camus Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb And Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher (I think!).                              (CP 329)

O’Hara makes complex this “simple” desire to continue, for nothing seems to continue just as it is (except for “Shirley Goldfarb” who is allowed the pleasant absurdity of the name). His own fashion for continuing is to summon a measure of verve through wit or disdain but in any case proceed through the form of a poem. This poem seems to gain energy from a latent faith not in the idea of a whole person or a whole knowledge but the potential capacity for surprise which a person embodies. Yet it also tracks the ambivalence of change, especially in the figure of Jane Freilicher, a one-time muse and friend, foregrounding the slipperiness of the self in the change of a name, and the anxiety of who Jane Freilicher is now in his life. O’Hara is here a madrigalist who creates the effects of presence through a polyvocalism or ambiguity of selves, which begins as “I” and becomes “you” and eventually an assumed community of “we,” playing on in a strain of poisoned optimism: and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy we shall be happy but we shall continue to be ourselves and everything continues to be possible Rene char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn’t it I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don’t believe it.                        (CP 329)

There is a desire for a “we” and the need to assert a “we,” because there may not be a “we” in the real. “It is possible isn’t it” undercuts the wish even as it is made: though the love of poets and poetry persists (“I love

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Reverdy for saying yes”), the motto of “we shall continue to be ourselves and everything continues to be possible” is annihilated at the last (“I don’t believe it”). In this short movement, we read the charm of a poet who is lover, friend, and flatterer, yet who nonetheless is goaded by sparks of doubt. O’Hara may be flirting with Reverdy, or with Reverdy’s “yes,” though he does not believe it. O’Hara has his own “yes” though we see it here maximally strained, shadow-boxing with Beckett’s “solution” in The Unnamable: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” To continue is to continue with the constitutional act of the poem. What is certain is the doubting presence of the poet in the text and to themselves. By being already a step away, O’Hara dodges the question of authority or sincerity. His much-admired insouciance is a tightrope trick, seducing us into experiencing the poem as “on the brink,” edgily occurring, and not simply a trace of experience. Poet and text are confused in this experience of “charismatic text.” Geoff Ward writes of O’Hara’s instinct to “cut to the emotional chase” which he suggests is “typical of O’Hara’s warmth and readiness to articulate personal risk”; yet what is also “typical” is “the quieter and ultimately more troubled acknowledgement of the difficulties inherent in the ‘love we bear each other’s differences’” (13). It is this articulation of the “dialectic of the heart” that makes O’Hara’s tonally complex and shifting madrigals so enthralling. Aside from indicating a song made of multiple voices, to make madrigal, from the Late Latin matricalis “invented, original,” literally “of or from the womb,” suggests the fundamental drive to be recast into new form and new feeling, celebrated in the hero phrase: “Grace to be born/ and live as variously as possible.” These madrigal compositions are constant “Meditations in an Emergency”: How am I to become a legend my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like a lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like the hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. (CP 197)

Unable to be contained in the bosom of another O’Hara depends for rebirth on the dialectic of his own heart which, as it produces a floral effulgence, also draws in dark matter which “slanders and pollutes and determines.” In “Memorial Day 1950” O’Hara bursts forth out of the “tight blue pants” as a way of becoming a legend, but here it is through a model

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of his own heart, and it is not a clean business. Yet O’Hara is sure to keep the dark particles or filth flowing as part of making poetry as making love. The functional heart of O’Hara’s myth-making is to present the self as a constant calibration of the existential weight of the effects that make up our experience. There is a constant re-forming of the self, taking in as much as possible of each scenes of the self, an ambitious compositional texture tempered by the knowledge that a fuller presence is not necessarily a less melancholy one (Breslin 176). The desire for form is crucial to the ability to continue, as O’Hara writes in “At Joan’s”: “I am lonely for myself/ I can’t find a real poem // if it won’t happen to me/ what shall I do” (CP 328). This little plaintive piece immediately precedes “Adieu to Norman” in the Collected Poems qualifying in a bloody, vulgar, and inimitably “Frank” response where he is looking for a way to make the self happen. We might read a myth of the poet who must find new forms for living (in the sense of Dante’s La Vita Nuova) and who can only proceed by writing a new constitution for the self: the question is a poem, as is the response. John Ashbery notes of this type of poem that there is “something basically usable about it, not only for poets in search for a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a livable space” (x). Here we get a theorising of mythopoetics as structuration, as a way of making the world as a project of the self while staying sensitive to difference, or the gap of irony between our identifications with the world and the promise of time to both erase and change our ideas of the self, and those events which comprise it. What can seem like name-dropping in O’Hara is a cosmic roll-call in the manner of Whitman. They are neither metaphors nor allusions but mythic shapes of the vernacular. This is what it’s like to be alive now and this is what it is like to be alive as a poem. O’Hara is epistemologically charming by managing a sophisticated scepticism of language and having so much life in the poems. He is both extremely select in his choosing of things to go in poems, but then wants them to operate with an unusual wantonness. O’Hara’s “chattiness” enables him to put anything in poems, and his cosmos is a giant atelier for acquiring “techniques of the self” for the twentieth century: cinema, painter’s studios, galleries, sculptor’s studios, photographers, and playwrights. The real work, the horizon for ontology is not in thinking alone but in being-with surfaces of every kind: people, paintings, even the weather. Kenneth Koch notes that:

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by caring so much for so many things, he gives us back things of our own and permits us to respect them. Garbo and Aphrodite are connected, but an exclusivist Yeatsian poetry can only say that they are one (like Maud Gonne and Helen of Troy) or that one is a cheapened version of the other. Frank O’Hara’s poetry gives us the freedom to respond to both—as we do anyway, but not so much before he showed us how. (205)

The self is a work of art for O’Hara, mythologising the everyday in all aspects of one’s being and so becoming engaged with one’s life as it is made, seeking the most charmed acquaintance with those things and people around you: he gives over a mode of poiesis that forgoes archetypes in favour of a full (pagan) affirmation of the sensual textures of his experience, not to impress upon others as “legend” but to be exemplary in one’s “style of being.”

The Democratic States of Self The poet’s job is to make myths personal and public at the same time. The point of exchange for O’Hara’s gifts is at the surface of the poems, through what has been called a push/pull dynamic.17 By graphing the details of living, O’Hara gives you permission to do the same with the proviso of keeping the dialectic open, of seeing the circumstances of your life known to you as little myths and thereby making them available for change.18 As a formal mode of suggestion, myth is fluid and indeterminate, highly mutable, and highly mobile. O’Hara refuses to isolate classical models for the self as citizen or the self as artist. Unlike Whitman, who figured himself as being antithetical in his practice to the traditions of Europe, O’Hara

17  Hazel Smith. Hyperscapes. The concept is derived from Hans Hofmann, detailed in his 1948 treatise “A Search for the Real in the Visual Arts.” 18  In “The Virtue of the Alterable” Helen Vendler suggests that “Frank O’Hara’s charms are inseparable from his overproduction” (179). In this essay she maintains the myth of O’Hara as the brilliant gadfly, tossing off occasional poems of “bon-ton” insouciance: it is precisely this figure of O’Hara that Perloff wants to reframe as a poet of serious accomplishment. My argument is that O’Hara’s “overproduction” evidences a total practice of poetry as an ongoing critique of what a poem and a poet might now be and that he revolutionises poetry as a technic of self-making. Towards the end of her essay, Vendler seems to develop a taste for such an appreciation of O’Hara, in whom she thinks “a modern ethos of the anarchically personal receives its best incarnation yet,” finally deciding he constitutes “a new species” of poet (194).

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makes it his business to have the whole of the Western tradition of art before him. Yet he does not come to it without ironising the process. “In Memory of My Feelings” functions within the Collected Poems as totemic, in which O’Hara chooses the things or scenes for making the self. It is a mess of a poem in a messy century, radically open to its contextual history: My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals. My quietness has a number of naked selves, so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have murder in their heart!              (CP 252)

This beginning is reminiscent of Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre (“As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers/ I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers”) with the feeling of moving inexorably forward. But we cannot place the vessel here: who is carrying who?19 The lyric “I” languidly observes the nature of its “selves,” partly wanting to take jealous possession of them and partly feeling the lassitude of the approach of something inevitable, like a trial. In their beginnings, selves have a basic cartography or empirical value, “like stars and years, like numerals,” but this is not identity. They are merely “likenesses.” John Wilkinson characterises O’Hara’s “incognito” here as a “mythic singularity harried by sheer numbers” (103). O’Hara places a demand on language to be both personal and public simultaneously. He uses it to build and destroy conceptions of the self: language protects him and is his undoing, which is the way he likes it: “so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves … (!)” This exclamation mark is a central spindle of O’Hara’s expression, just as much as the “I.” He stakes it across the territory of his poems not just to mark but also to guarantee jeopardy. The “I” thrives on crisis, or thrills (!), or camp surprise (!) “In Memory of My Feelings” is a manufactured aesthetic or stylistic crisis: how shall “I” be in the world and how shall “I” write? The poem then changes tempo, as well as the temporal status of these announced selves: 19  The initial trace of the poet is stalking and stalked by Byron through the Venetian gondola, the borrowed “pistols,” and the imminent appearance of Manfred in the poem.

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                  though in winter they are warm as roses, in the desert taste of chilled anisette.           (CP 253)

This shortened or modulated phrasing alerts us to the musicality of the piece, particularly its rhythm. The formal conceit of the poem’s five sections rebukes the idea that the poem is one of wild improvisation. These images, the roses, the desert, are all arranged and “still.” Wherever there is a syntactical break in the line, the carriage of the typewriter, O’Hara’s “machine of presence” does not return to the margin but begins from an advanced position on a new line, to suggest that this poem is in a sense after itself: “So many of my transparencies could not resist the race!” O’Hara begins a ritualistic                       love of the serpent! I am underneath its leaves as the hunter crackles and pants and bursts, as the barrage balloon drifts behind a cloud and animal death whips out its flashlight,                   whistling and slipping the glove off the trigger hand. The serpent’s eyes redden at sight of those thorny fingernails, he is so smooth!                       My transparent selves flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing without panic, with a certain justice of response and presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa.                           (CP 253)

The first movement sets the poem as a race or a hunt, perhaps la chasse spirituelle, and is locatable as a present tense, which is cut off by the figure of the Medusa. This might stand for form, or the turning into stone, fixing within words the spirit. To write is to capture and kill, to be a Medusa. Can one “possess” feeling and expression at the same time? The title suggests that as soon as one writes, the mode is in memoriam to experience. Handling experience without killing it, or “poetry that is not a form of murder” (Kristeva 68) is the struggle of this poem-as-serpent, that moves with “a certain justice of response.” Sam Ladkin marks O’Hara’s insistence on a “distinction between the mere representation of living things, and the vividness of life” and his recognition of “an insidious and dangerous potential failing in living things, that the very liveliness of one’s life

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can become reified into its own representation, a dead statue accreted within our lives when they cease sufficient movement” (224). It is a confrontation which handles shared mythologies while being full of the charm of the arbitrary. The momentum of the poem gives the feeling of pitched necessity, the scenes of the selves come as a torrent. It is not a confession but a creative response to these discursive forces, and the image of the Medusa suggests that to fix the image of the self is a curse. Lifting the action outside of life like a frieze, a poem is a tablature, a trusting to stone, as “presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa.” The figure of the Medusa is a perfect functional ambivalence. Just as we cannot be sure that the figure of the self is concentrated in the symbol of the serpent, or if the “transparent selves” might be poems, the nature of the symbol is to dissemble. The Medusa is not pregnant with a sense of the “monstrous feminine” but is a divided and dividing figure of a deathly subsumption that is both possessed and put at a remove: it is resembled. Friezes are stop-animations of the collective psyche often portraying gods, dying heroes, and terrible creatures: they are public archives of fantastic or ideal forms. O’Hara prefers a liquid art that contains ambiguity of form, doubt, and incompletion. The poem seems to say that this is what mythologies now look like in the messy twentieth century. While the poem searches out the possibilities of feeling through its play with figuration, it also suggests that any capture is a poisonous anti-climax. The symbol of the serpent persists throughout the poem, endlessly spawned in violent suggestions of multiplicity. “My transparent selves/ flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing” (CP 253). The poem moves like a serpent. It appropriates what has come before, and at any point one gets the sense that if one gets an idea, it will in turn be consumed. The more it pushes this point, the more I want to see the serpent as stasis or a Zen-like absence in presence within the poem’s symbolic action. This mythic armature manages to be both Pagan and Christian, always turning away from ideas of redemption for the convolutions of strife. “In Memory of My Feelings” stages a blitzkrieg of generic effects; from slivers of quiet autobiography, costume Surrealism, splices of “Golden Age” Hollywood films, scenes from antiquity and Greco-Roman mythology, the history of philosophy, to gossip. It is a highly contingent, personal history of formations of the self without the need for this person to have cohesion. In the Nietzschean sense, it is the forum of an (unruly) democracy of selves, travelling under the multipartite banners of “Frank O’Hara.”

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The reader is involved in the dialectic of immanence and transcendence. We compose contingently with the author both local moments of identification and their subsumption into an articulated scheme across time. Reading the poem we become involved in mythopoiesis. What if the poem is not meant as a surface of contemplation but an experience or the temptation to experience? Rather than proffer concepts for living, as philosophy does, it imparts a relentless kind of applied energy (kinēsis), an energy of scepticism and hyper-scrutiny for forms of the self. Lytle Shaw reads the poem as a skirmish with the structuring metaphors and constitutive discourses of subjectivity that describes and qualifies Western culture. That is, not as a symptom of local and cultic conceits, but as an acculturing strategy that is developed communally to move beyond the languid seductions of interpellation: The power of the poem resides in its attempt, in dealing with an excess of events and feelings, to think about subjectivity outside of its more normative explanatory contexts. The poem’s larger movements through familial, world-historical, national, and ultimately afamilial social structures can be understood in relation to the more daily poetry of afamilial intimacy in O’Hara’s other work—the “I do this; I do that” poems. It is in this sense that ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ is a metacommunal poem. (113)20

The poem could possibly contain all co-ordinates, all incarnations, from the “I” being carried by a transparent body “through the streets” in a kind of opiated abstraction, to being elevated to peer with mountains, to being

20  The poem demonstrates how coterie in O’Hara’s work can describe a conscious attempt to think through competing social frameworks and not merely a symptomatic effect for writing for one’s friends. Shaw notes: “For O’Hara, subject positions enacted in writing would not be stable abstractions for a unified psyche (what the New Critics would call personae) bringing insight to an abstract readership. Instead, the writing self comes from that community as well; its legibility emerges, in part, from the world of proper names inside the poems. ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ bears a crucial relationship to this process, then, because it positions constructed, afamilial relationships as an alternative to more organic structures of community like the family and the nation: selves become legible within social frameworks that seek to explain the self and its feelings. And yet these explanatory frameworks each pressure and condition the self that emerges from them, hunted or haunted by the norms that inhere in narrating life through them. This inflection is precisely what makes such frameworks seem partial and unsatisfactory, which keeps the poem moving from one to the next” (113–14).

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“amongst the pink flamingos.” It is like a metaphysical cabaret, comic and sinister, that takes in a sweep the history of the West:         And the mountainous-minded Greeks could speak of time as a river and step across it into Persia, leaving the pain at home to be converted into statuary. I adore the roman copies. And the stench of the camel’s spit I swallow, and the stench of the whole goat. For we have advanced, France, together into a new land, like the Greeks, where one feels nostalgic for mere ideas, where truth lies on its deathbed like an uncle.                          (CP 254)

In its second phase, the poet deals with family history and the war, which are rarely dealt with explicitly in O’Hara’s oeuvre:           My father, my uncle, My grand-uncle and the several aunts. My grand-aunt dying for me, like a talisman, in the war, before I had even got to Borneo.                 (CP 253)

The third movement is a précis of civilisations leading to the West: Venice, China, the Arabs, Greeks, Romans, the French, which leads to a consideration of oil as the true prize of modern culture. This does not constitute a telos so much as a denkbild, an image machine, which wilfully calls forward the processions of a contingent history to be dealt with.21 O’Hara adds: Beneath these lives the ardent lover of history hides,               tongue out leaving a globe of spit on a taut spear of grass and leaves off rattling his tail for a moment/ to admire this flag.                 (CP 253)

As well as being a Romantic symbol, the rattlesnake admiring its flag might be signalling early representations of the American Revolution (see Fig. 2.1). 21  Denkbild or “thought-image” is derived from Gerhard Richter’s study of Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch and Kracauer. Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.

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Fig. 2.1  The Gadsden Flag

As a “constitution of these states,” the struggle of different selves, “In Memory of My Feelings” represents a civil war. Charles Olson describes the insurrection of O’Hara’s work in a similar fashion: Frank O’Hara was engaged on the campus martii … Beyond the … idolized Enyalion, the Apollo, the perfect figure for today absolutely requires. In every respect in word in action and in person was hung up by Campus Martii. Which is the image of Mars as inherited to us as a military ROTC or aggressive or comparison figure which is Camp … Christ! If I wrote about the American Civil War I’d inscribe it to Frank O’Hara!22

Olson’s mythology of O’Hara makes an intriguing connection between “warlike” aggression and the formal subversions of the Camp mode: its attacks are not military but aesthetic. O’Hara’s critique of subject-hood works on the linguistic constitution on every level “in word in action and in person,” in a total praxis of mythopoeisis. Ladkin argues that “In Memory of My Feelings” is an “anti-memorializing poem designed to rid  Excerpt from THE PARIS REVIEW interview with Charles Olson by Gerard Malanga (April, 1969) Homage to Frank O’Hara 177. 22

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its speaker of certain past lives and the assumptions of the empire, both emotional and politically real, to which those selves live in thrall” (201). I read it as a duel between selves and the idea of history, between self and its expression in language, or the impossibility of a self outside language. It is the diabolical pax of liberty that one is both free within but ultimately bound by expression. The serpent, as Ladkin suggests, “is itself a figure of the ‘now,’” a “resistant figure of mobility, of charming quickness and attention” (205). When the snake admires the flag, it is the multiplicity admiring itself as the nation state becoming America which is also teased by O’Hara in “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art” (CP 233). Yet O’Hara still admits of this as part of his own constitution: the violence of democracy erases difference yet affords him the power of a momentary aesthetic triumph through a mess of forces. It testifies too to a struggle that is always unfinished. Olivier Brossard writes that “History is lurking in the background of ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ against the temptation to immobilise the self in philosophy or mythology” (69). I would argue that the action of mythos is rather in “that which is said”: the occasion of iteration, the contingent performance of language, image, and event. O’Hara plays with the logic of myth to keep the self mobile, and it is this which energises the notion of the self as a critical dispersal of its histories. Foucault writes that: The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all those discontinuities that cross us. (Nietzsche 162)

O’Hara practices this “usage of history,” moving from an objectifying “critical history” to re-engage with “the very movement of life” which is the evolving action of mythos (Foucault Nietzsche 164). Brossard also suggests that “[t]he ambiguous point of view … matches the multiple temporal dimensions conflated in the present of the lyrical voice. O’Hara’s self is mythology becoming History becoming personal history” (72). This is a happy equation if we allow the simultaneity of these discursive categories. I’m not sure that this telos operates in one direction of “becoming” and that personal history does not again become mythology or that the whole of Brossard’s equation here is not motivated by the logic of myth. History, personal history, and mythology are plaited, or perhaps serpent-scaled,

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into the charm of the lyric, which becomes a single, complex, and devious surface, and this is the poem’s argument for the phenomenological structure of the self. O’Hara uses the discursive forces of his culture to gain energy by turning away from them through the poem, searching out “both functional (rather than foundational) identity and heterogeneity as sources of value” (Shaw 109). What is insisted upon is the plural modality of the subject who has no single origin. Brossard writes that “[t]here is no coherence in the self: it is faulty by nature and feeds on a culture of contrast and violence” (72). What is bewildering about the poem is that it is all happening at once, despite the fact that it is sequenced in five parts. It enacts in the present the scenes of self-mythologising as a spectacle in the public domain. “In Memory of My Feelings” occurs mid-way through the Collected Poems and functions as its articulated spine. It is a signal testing of the idea of a possible autobiography in poetry, but one that is an event, not a notation. O’Hara claims this for the poem as Whitman has done before him in “Songs of Myself.” The logic of narrative wants to allegorise, to control the relation of tropes, but the settling of the action into known cultural codes is continually disrupted. What does it mean to launch into catalogue mania, to say “I am” and run into an algorithm that need not end? It has precursors in pantheism, and Whitman’s American charter for polymorphous being, but O’Hara’s choices here are deliberately perverse:                         …Grace to be born and live as variously as possible. The conception of the masque barely suggests the sordid identifications. I am a Hittite in love with a horse. I don’t know what blood’s in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist                   in which a face appears and it is another face of blonde I am a baboon eating a banana I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child and the child’s mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain I am a child smelling his father’s underwear I am an Indian sleeping on a scalp and my pony is stamping in the birches, and I’ve just caught sight of the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. What land is this, so free?                (CP 256)

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This passage is seen as a crucial moment in all of O’Hara’s work, where the identification with various selves is drawn into a critical vortex in an attempt to do something equivalent to splitting the atom, teasing apart the very fabric of matter trying to get at its incredible energy. It suggests that the possibilities of being are just as appalling as they might be exciting. Brossard brings our attention to the fact that the poem is a contestation of territory, as a metaphor for the self, and as the layered historic space of poetics in America. He spies the “Indian sleeping/ on a scalp” as being from Hart Crane’s effort of mythopoiesis “The Bridge,” where the poet cinches the question of ancestry, of the ever-running dialectic of coloniser and colonised. O’Hara gestures towards this ontological problem of origins, while pointing out that poetry itself is another territory to colonise and be colonised by. These “states” are always already written and O’Hara does not pretend to begin again. The poem progresses not so much through “conceptions” of the self but sampling versions of the self only to discard them as the flow of experience demands. It involves the figurative tuning of abstractions, arranging contexts and finding none of them to be necessary, for memory, fabulation, theory, and history are all contingent in their image or content. Alan Feldman is able to describe the struggle of the poem accordingly: The structure of “In Memory…” is complex. … it will suffice to say that the poem … is made up of fragments of biography and fantasy unified by certain recurring motifs. One of these, the motif of the serpent, represents the essential self that must be preserved despite the constant passing away of one identity after another. (92)

Is this sufficient? Feldman allows the triumph of an anaemic idea of allegory by determining an equivalence for the serpent, its “other” as the poem intends it, and shuts down its valency. If allegory is the trope in which the meaning is other than what is said,23 as a figure of permutatio, we must keep this potential of the trope open and give it the maximum scope of contingency: meaning always remains “other,” graspable only through metaphor or supplementary signs. In the mythos of the Collected Poems the serpent recurs. The contingency of its appearance is as both an aesthetic absolute and “the occasion of these ruses.” I would suggest that the poem is a showdown with this slippery “essential self” that keeps throwing up ruses that are seductive and well suited to the “I” as tailored mythemes. The ability to think multiplicity, to think  Donatus Ars maior iii.6: “allegoria est tropus quo aliud significator quam dicitur.”

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différance not as a concept but as a physic at once binding and shredding, effecting at once attraction and repulsion, is thinking in paradox. Like Fernando Pessoa’s experiments in identity, or a proschizophrenic domestic economy of personae, O’Hara does not gamble on what the self is “like” as a simile. He captures identifications by saying “I am…” in a frenzy of metaphoricity. Hans-Georg Wolf discerns of metaphor: If people came to recognise that their way of conceptualizing their “self” is nothing immutable, but rests on alterable schemes of metaphors … a great deal of understanding is achieved … the way we construe ourselves is crucial … and alternative metaphors may be vital for survival … culture invites and constrains possible constructions in various ways. Different narratives may be appropriate for different social groups … Culture also constrains self-narratives via the common stock of metaphors that underlie any narratives. (122–125)

The poem’s shock to the “common stock of metaphors” is through the charge of the riddle: what must it mean? It hurts to think. The serpent is a choice of the devious, joining stasis and movement, life, and death. In The Animal that Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida seizes upon Paul Valery’s use of the serpent as a Satanic figure who turns to say “I am,” in a gesture of “impure” being within pure nothingness: the all powerful and seductive ruse of the serpent comes down to speaking as God in the place of God, as the besotted creator, miming Jehovah’s “I am that I am” … Here the serpent says “Me! … I am! … I will be! … I am he who…” … This show of force … produces nothing other and nothing less, than being in the place of nothingness … The show of force, the tour de force, consists in turning this ontological creation, creation itself, into an act of seduction. This self-engendering act of the “I am,” this autobiographogenesis, is in its essence an act of seduction … Being becomes seduction, that is, the ruse of the most rusé of animals.

It is an act of revolt that leads O’Hara to “sordid identifications,” and in his catalogue of metamorphosis, there is an unmissable tone of mockery, even disgust: O’Hara makes his being both as seducer and the one who holds off seduction. The rolling French “r” (vibrating forked tongue) and accented flick-off of Derrida’s “rusé” becomes the animal of which it speaks; similarly for O’Hara, the serpent is the sign of the trope that proliferates sensations, figures, and scenes in a phantasmagoric field of

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engagement: the “I” cannot be extrapolated from these ruses but is the turning of this line of life. It can be hunted but not “hunted down.” As an animal, the serpent is known through its actions, its ethos perhaps, and O’Hara’s poem is the same. The poem teases hermeneutics, beckons it. But no figure of Frank O’Hara can be taken out of it. In this way it works like a charm: it flaunts itself as a “charming artifice.”24 It offers instead of “insight” or “salvation” the experience of experience which O’Hara claims is the point of art. Paul de Man writes of both the impossibility and even the undesirability of a stable taxonomy of tropes, since “tropes are transformational systems rather than grids” (63). This poem struggles to trope the self and therefore embraces obscurity, rupture, and run-on. As a starter motor to this passage of morphology, O’Hara turns to “Grace.” This then becomes a promise of multiple and mutating forms, which the “I” guzzles in an accelerating Bacchic jig. I want to pause at this point of “Grace,” which alludes, at once, to being blessed or accomplished, and to O’Hara’s collaborator, friend, and love, Grace Hartigan, to whom the poem is dedicated. Grace is partly a person, partly a prayer for a certain mode of living, and partly a declaration of the right or the necessity to keep turning, to always re-turn to things with a certain kind of attention, which becomes a refined worship of language itself as a living force, as something incantatory and enigmatic. Grace contains or compels the gift of “being born” and then honouring this by “living as variously as possible.” For O’Hara, Grace draws together both a public and a private mythology, to generate something which is conceptually common as a topos but approached most usefully through the precision and imprecision of intimacy with a person, thus having the texture of an open affair. Lytle Shaw has teased out this action of the “coincidence of a proper name and value” and argues that in O’Hara’s poetry “proper names operate not simply as indexes for actual friends, nor conversely as universal symbols of friendship, but as uneasy hinges between the immediacies of a social situation and the trans-temporal effects of poetic language” (104). The poet textures his mythology of Grace Hartigan by dressing the poems with personal sentimental detail, and trusting the name to do its own kind of alluring work, releasing what is wild in it for affect, including the obscure and the threatening. Ladkin identifies this as ecstatic, a force of excess, where love is also potential annihilation (217–18). In “Day and  O’Hara’s description of Apollinaire’s poems and prose, cited by Perloff, p. 30.

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Night in 1952” he writes, “Grace may secretly distrust me but/ we are both so close to the abyss that we must see a lot of each other” (CP 94). O’Hara further works the polysemy of the name in “Second Avenue”:                 Grace destroys the whirling faces in their dissonant gaiety where it’s anxious, lifted nasally to the heavens which is a carrousel grinning and spasmodically obliterated with loaves of greasy white paint and this becomes like love to her, is what I desire and what you, to be able to throw something away without yawning. “Oh Leaves of Grass! O Sylvette! oh Basket Weavers’ Conference!” and thus make good our promise to destroy something but not us.                            (CP 149)

Hartigan as muse is not an object to O’Hara but an artistic process of which they are both a part. The making of each other is forced to a radical indiscretion as part of an experiment of identity. Inscribed to Grace Hartigan, “In Memory of My Feelings,” is O’Hara’s self-constitution addressed to an other. The standard of it being an intimate communiqué is turned out as exposition. It is a gesture in effect to an aesthetic coupling. Hartigan’s pictures of the time frequently produce the figure of Frank O’Hara variously as being dispersed, indiscrete, formally excessive, and a wearer of masques. O’Hara and Hartigan, through their artistic practice, acknowledge that selves are made dialectically and so enjoin this as a project, where one might say “let’s make each other” as a wilful alternative to regulating forces. In the poetry of O’Hara and the painting of Hartigan, there is a flirting with the figural in the age of “heroic Abstract Expressionism.” The collaborative coupling on the canvas and page is suggestive of a moment of intense and playful speculation on what a self might be, what its de-limiting might require, and what new forms it could possibly take. Redell Olsen argues that the artistic posturing of O’Hara and Hartigan operates differentially to “the mythic genius and macho posturing associated with Abstract Expressionism. This in part reflects their respective marginality within or in relation to Abstract Expressionism” (182). Both O’Hara and Hartigan enjoy playing in their work with degrees of abstraction and figuration, running across boundaries of the “I” and “not I,” searching out the hum of intercourse in communal complexes. Both revel in queering the orthodox, Hartigan moving through the world of heroic male Abstract

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Expressionism, while O’Hara turns out possibilities for living and loving in an anti-gay, anti-communist, and paranoid mid-century America.25 Both play with conventions to produce something new, loving, while not being in thrall to, the history of art and the New York art world, concentrating instead on a mythopoetics of self as both plural and shared. How else are these symbols, Grace and the serpent, loaded for O’Hara? The poet renders “Grace” as an embodied, material form. Where do you find Grace? In those around you. It subverts Christian ideas of a transcendent mode of being: O’Hara’s recoded Grace is the profane that is indistinct from a sacred or Grace that licenses this enchanting of the world. Often there is the sense that people, places, and events are “elevated” to the status of myth, but O’Hara shows that everything can be “makingmyth” (mythopoiesis). The serpent is symbolically original in that it will summon scenes of the Old Testament, of promethean rebellion, or notions of pride and horned self-regard. The serpent as symbol also plays with Grace, with the felix culpa, the fortunate fall, and redemption. Grace is meant to come from above, through condescension, but O’Hara licenses for himself a horizontal distribution that goes both ways for mutual affect, and the practice of this as a form of love is in mobility: And now it is the serpent’s turn. I am not quite you, but almost, the opposite of visionary. You are coiled around the central figure, the heart that bubbles with red ghosts, since to move is to love.                           (CP 256)

O’Hara requires distance from this recurring motif of the self: “I am not quite you, but almost” as the serpent in the first part only comes to resemble the Medusa. The serpent is turned throughout the poem and returned to, but the poem realises that one symbol cannot swallow the whole world, that a real dealing with the self and the world, or the self as 25  Terrence Diggory suggests that “Masking and multiple identities are recurring themes in Hartigan’s Oranges (1953), a series of paintings based on prose poems by O’Hara, as well as in individual paintings such as The Masker and Masquerade (both 1954), for which O’Hara posed as a model. Among the many poems that O’Hara composed with Hartigan in mind (including “Poem for a Painter,” “Portrait of Grace,” “Christmas Card for Grace Hartigan,” “For Grace after a Party”) the theme of masquerade finds its culmination in “IN MEMORY OF MY FEELINGS” (1956) See Terence Diggory, “Grace Hartigan” p. 214 Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets.

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world, must take into account contrariety, antinomy, and paradox. It is this degree of ironic separation, of the comic corrective, that is O’Hara’s weapon against being turned to stone, to becoming a simplified myth. The promise of the poem is to not just carry forms (the root of metaphor: to carry, to transport) but also to murder them, to continually make way for the possible, or to keep the idea of the self in negativity. The dramatic ending of “In Memory of My Feelings” is neither a clear nor neat “victory”: …and I have lost what is always and everywhere present, the scene of my selves, the occasion of these ruses, which I myself and singly must now kill and save the serpent in their midst.                 (CP 257)

It is O’Hara’s homemade anti-heraldry. This is not allegory. This is a direct prescription for diseased self-mythologising. It is emblematic and a touch classical. It has the fury of the warrior-like St. George with his Dragon, yet this set-up is more germane since O’Hara is both the knight and the serpent. The figural action throughout the poem is not frozen, as in frescoes (indeed, it ranges wildly). As Ladkin suggests, there is an “animal satisfaction’ gestured by the serpent, and it is this animal materiality that offers salvation. In its turn between past and present, O’Hara refuses to allow feelings associated with past selves to settle (208). Here, at the ultimate point of the poem, the “I” is left poised on the sharp end of its will, in a mythic posture ready to strike. Breslin states that: At the very end of “In Memory of My Feelings” O’Hara rises up in what looks like an heroic gesture aimed at striking through all the masks, penetrating to authenticity and pulling himself together at last. But the phrase “I myself and singly” splits the self in the very act of unifying it and the final line declares O’Hara’s intent to “save” that slippery, invasive, poisonous, beautiful energy that keeps proliferating new transparencies, selves, guises— the energy that allows O’Hara to work inside all these old fictions and disguises and make them live again. (248)

This action is rendered eternal. The moment of killing is always now, so that this episode cannot be closed. Yet once the radical impulse is written or cast, once it is given form, it is in danger of becoming a conceit, a piece of decorative sculpture rather than an active mytheme. Or it would be, if the whole poem had not felt like a tightrope walk where the subject

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tightens the rope out in front of themselves as they proceed, only for us to realise that it is not tied it off at the end. Ladkin holds the virtue of the poem’s “murderous conclusion” as being one of “surprise,” “replicat[ing] the cunning strike of its serpentine prosaic model” (268). He classifies the beast of the poem as a figura serpentinata, both in conceit and in sinuous movement, driven by death in life, or dead forms of life, back to love in the compulsion of eros: O’Hara refuses the right of suffering to possess the self as a virtue, as proof of depths of sincerity. The dream is to turn back to love, which makes of the present a memorial, precisely the kind of cancerous statue the close of the poem defies. Nostalgia for love is precisely not-love: nostalgia for love is the active prevention of present love. (220)26

Ladkin argues the serpent’s charm is in its constant turning so that one does not fall for the consolations of aesthetic representations of life. The poem as serpent evokes or contains “life itself.” The scaled dark charms of O’Hara’s serpent is not only in its murderous temperament, but also in its slipperiness and its penchant for “switching”: To save the serpent, and whatever deathly promise it contains, thereby assures the perpetual invention necessary to remain truly alive and also to kill off the lingering of past lives, of memories, in the present … How to be truly alive? The serpent’s fluidity must sever deadening causality. (237)

The figura serpentinata is a classical framing, a new/old topos for the dream of life in the static forms of art. Ladkin’s use of it is classificatory, wanting to pin down the serpent and O’Hara. It becomes (precisely) a fetish, the signature of an obsession for pursuit. O’Hara toys with the heroic, wanting a bit of it, just as he flirts with suffering and martyrdom. These things are to be played with (not to be “loved”) in a series of tricks (ruses), they are there and not-there. O’Hara bathes in suffering and martyrdom, but he is not going to “own” them. Unlike the five-act play structure, there is no release from tension or anxiety, there is no denouement. The mythos of the poem is maintained as an open, if troubling, charter. O’Hara makes a cartoon of his will to 26  Elsewhere Ladkin refers to this erotic “dream” as “a return to the fundament of sentimentality, the authority of feeling in the body, and in love” (Frank O’Hara’s Ecstatic Elegy: “In Memory of My Feelings” in Memory Wallace Stevens in blackbox manifold 10; http:// www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue10/SamLadkin10.html. n.pag.).

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mythopoiesis in the poem which immediately precedes “In Memory” in the Collected Poems: “Hunting Horns” How nice it is to take up a familiar sound again and draw new lines from the traditional mouth to the still wet-ear.            (CP 252)

We are drawn back to the ancient definition of muthos as the visceral act of “that which is said,” and O’Hara pinches the collapsed distance between the ear and the tongue: the speaker is the first audience of self-­ presentation, there is no self until the lyric lick begins and one starts talking; the self is the equivalent to its moments of muthos. The mouth is tradition (the dead) and the ear is always being born (still wet); this is the closed circle of the hunt or the life-cycle of a self-mythology. As a totem poem, “In Memory of My Feelings” does not stand as a monument but functions best as an occasional poem. Commenting on a number of David Smith’s sculptures, O’Hara says: They present a total attention and they are telling you that that is the way to be. On Guard. In a sense they are benign, because they offer themselves for your pleasure. But beneath that kindness is a warning: “don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.” (Quoted in Berkson and LeSueur, 226)

This is apt advice for reading O’Hara himself. One must decide the mortal weight and import of the referents of the poem and whether they will have currency. This is a draft constitution, catastrophic for a lazy ideal of American individualism as it is possible to be. What is startling about O’Hara’s poem is the fury with which he takes on not only his personal mythology but those of his culture as they occur, contingently, within the event of the poem. He does not reinvent the superstructure of a self, or archaeologise the symbols of a culture as a sacred trove of the commonwealth. It is a struggle which delights and appals in conceits as they happen. It is an incitement to do the same, not as a monumental act but as a critical style of being. It is in a sense an autobiographical act which oils the latch-pin between personal and public

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mythologies, between the sensible and the semiotic, producing an effect of the self as the surface of what transpires. Its ontological status, then, is tricky. O’Hara writes for his selves a constitution so that they might continue. This is accomplished as poiesis, but we must note again how much wilful killing there is in this poem, that its charge to life, its kinesis, is also its own “ceaseless going.” The poet remains open and remains under attack, but the poem is kept as the possibility of an axiomatic space where this struggle is realised. There are perils in this enterprise, for as Ward suggests: “To see through the illusions of the nominative is not necessarily to feel neutral, let alone happy, in one’s emancipation; indeed, to see through is not necessarily to be emancipated at all. This is one of the themes of … ‘In Memory of My Feelings’” (97). One must keep in mind when reading O’Hara, the action of dedoublement du moi. Poetry is a specular technology wherein we not only recognise the self, but also meet this self as an other, in unexpected form. There is a radical gap between a “field of consciousness” and the reappearing and disappearing “I” on the page. O’Hara stages strength, querulousness, and charm, as well as melancholia and vulnerability. But the figure of the poet does not remain as a function of these feelings or as an auxiliary to universal conceits, he is too fleet. The work gives license to live in flux, for as Deleuze reminds us “[t]he struggle for subjectivity presents itself, therefore, as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis” (Foucault 106). Yet O’Hara’s poetry shows that this struggle is necessarily strained with terror and doubt. O’Hara’s gift is in the way he conducts himself in the world, recording bios and paying attention to things as a form of poiesis, not as episodes which later might become the subject for poetry. Perloff’s preference for an aesthetics of presence rather than transcendence veers away from the hotspot of contact here to make a thwarting distinction (Aesthetics 796). Deleuze’s conception of a “plane of immanence” is perhaps more appropriate, where the ideal, ideas of transcendence or the phantasmatic, are not outside substantial experience (Pure Immanence 27). Language is both immanent within and exiled from the material world and experience, but O’Hara’s mythic method has a self-reflexive grip on this. His style of being, his myth-making, appeals through his compositional method, to worry the gap between living and writing, to include all activities in a kind of being as poiesis, simultaneously making and interrogating selves as they appear. For O’Hara, poetry is the ultimate technic to achieve this; it is not a hieratic technology for priests, bards, or the magus of a culture, but a

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plane of engagement that makes trouble for both the sacred and profane by thoroughly confusing them. O’Hara’s method of distributing poems leads to a particular idea of a utopic practice, since he is renowned for being careless with his poems, gifting many of them in letters to friends without first making a copy. Writing poems for O’Hara is not only a way to continue, but also a way of fleshing out and literally making graphic the psychic processes of mythologising which are happening anyway. The poems are thrown down as steps into the present—stepping stones across the abyss. There are no irrelevant lines in O’Hara’s work; they are all necessary for creative survival since he is abandoned to it. William Watkin suggests that: His Collected Poems is practically a life on paper as it happened, he can see the dangers inherent in such a processual myth. Time and again he always notes he is a “step away” from the everyday, from them, and that to merge entirely with the day to day would result in the loss of identity and ultimately death. (250–51)

When O’Hara writes of “how/ black my heart is” the work is unquestionably dark (“Proud Poem,” CP 52). What O’Hara presents and pushes to present do not look the same but they are the same: there can be no insouciant self without “my insufferable/ genius my demon my dish” (CP 52). Frank’s sociability and Frank’s black idea of himself are one. This is the affective complex of his self-mythology. O’Hara seems to offer a “dirty” ontology of saturated association with contingent detail, an immanence, perhaps. Yet as he says, the closer you get to words, the further they look back from. As his final words attest in “Oedipus Rex” (see Fig. 2.2): He falls; but even in falling he is higher than those who fly into the ordinary sun. 4/7/66

The signing of a name is myth-making. Joe LeSueur is struck by the difference of O’Hara’s last inscription: “Oddly, his name as scrawled on the cover is not in his immediately recognizable hand. Did Frank consciously change his signature, and if so, why? Make of that what you will” (296). Through letters and correspondence, O’Hara’s extensive circle of friends and acquaintances would be familiar with his signature, the sign of his proper name, that also serves as the mark of presence and has material

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link through the ink as a proxy for blood. O’Hara’s “beautiful hand” was widely remarked upon. Nietzsche declares that “everything bears witness to what we are, our friendships and our enemies, our glance and the clasp of our hand, our memory and that which we do not remember, our books and our handwriting” (“Schopenhauer as Educator” n.pag.). It is a performance of the self to sign a type-written letter by hand, a gesture of touch. O’Hara’s decision to change what would be his last known signature is a subtle exposition of his poetics: another example of the reconstitution of the self. Fittingly but by chance, he signs off on his myth, the enigma of the self (Oedipus Rex) with difference. In this last act of poetry, it is as if O’Hara knows how charged his mythology is, how he is being made by others, and so to change this final signature marks a prescience of the style of his exit: a “fatedness” or lick of the tragic.27 This signature is troubling, because it expresses both intimacy and built-in difference: it is the stamp of Frank O’Hara’s nerve (Fig. 2.3): OEDIPUS REX

Fig. 2.2  The single entry in Frank O’Hara’s final notebook. (Reproduced with the permission Maureen Granville-Smith/The Estate of Frank O’Hara)

27  See Russell Ferguson, In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and America Art. Berkeley: University of California P, 1999, p. 138.

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Fig. 2.3  Frank O’Hara’s final notebook. (Reproduced with the permission Maureen Granville-Smith/The Estate of Frank O’Hara)

CHAPTER 3

“You in Me, That Is What the Soul Is”: The Traffic of Frank O’Hara’s Daemon

The study of Frank O’Hara is for us, as it is for the poet himself, a pursuit. O’Hara’s poetry comes from a fascination with the expressionistic capabilities of language that thrives on the shuffling play of presence and absence, the object of desire and its permanent retreat. In a striking work of homage, Alex Katz offers this prose portrait of O’Hara: At times Frank seemed to be a priest who got into a different business. Even on his 6th martini-second pack of cigarettes and while calling a friend, “a bag of shit,” and roaring off into the night. Frank’s business was being an active intellectual. He was out to improve our world whether we liked it or not … The elusive quality of Frank is his sense of style. To say he was interested in what was right and what was wrong wouldn’t make him different from a lot of people. Frank’s particular idea of what is right, is what negotiates with maximum vitality. Vitality being what emanates from the surface, manners and intent have no meaning. (Memoir 99).

Katz’s equation of O’Hara’s bearing is crucial, in the sense of trying to find O’Hara in the crosshairs of speculation: “the elusive quality of Frank is his sense of style.” This is demonstrated in the final hand-written signature of “Frank” as he signs off on his mythology as Oedipus Rex. It is an apt phrase because it so confounds its subject, equating aesthetics and ethics. A description of O’Hara’s character, which we might cumulatively © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Hose, The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94841-2_3

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appreciate through observing a “sense of style,” remains what is most “elusive.” Katz tells us that what drives O’Hara to excess and to go “roaring off into the night” is not a conflagration of self for its own sake but part of a calculated and generous transmission of something. Like a “priest” who acts as a go-between for humankind and their gods, O’Hara takes charge of a metaphysical force to goad people around him to more fully realise versions of themselves. Katz’s sketch, taken from the Homage to Frank O’Hara edited by Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur, is a rich example of the O’Hara mythology as it is modulated by others. It enjoins the ethos of O’Hara’s self-mythologising by searching for a formulation that maintains the mutability of the figure and by being itself a work of art. Katz captures the formal and phenomenal contradictions of O’Hara as an expressive animal: what is most effectively charming is not O’Hara’s style but his “sense of style.” A fixed style of being would indicate a predetermined vocabulary of gesture and posture, of “manners and intent,” but what Katz admires is a sensitivity to performance and aptitude for engagement. He reads in O’Hara a thinking animal on the loose, who maintains a cunning gap between a sense of self and its impromptu expression in a contingent atmosphere as a social event. Drew Milne argues that O’Hara instinctively prefers “Performance over Being.” Using the trope of the theatre to test and examine the wilful artifice of O’Hara’s being as a poet, he gauges a high reflexivity in the performance of self as a work of art and being knowingly perceived as a work of art. Katz puts his finger on the point that O’Hara knows the self as performance. His homage hails that which “negotiates with maximum vitality”: someone properly mercurial. Katz bears the impression of this contact, and he has perhaps subtly changed his own outward bearing because of it. O’Hara remains an isolate subject “roaring off into the night,” yet he also remains to commune with Katz, to possess him and to give Katz too, momentary possession of the myth. We get the sense of “Frank O’Hara” as a mobile figure that leaves a trace, but which in art or through logos cannot be wholly reconstructed. The myths of person and poet are to be toyed with, negotiated, reconstructed, disfigured, but never become a final imago outside of time. Within Katz’s notion of the priest is also a wild, transgressive, vituperative, and scatological O’Hara. The light and dark strains are not contradictions in the O’Hara mythos but they do conspire to make the complex figure of O’Hara the lure that he is. In this chapter, I want to take up Heraclitus’s “fragment 119,” which proposes a metaphysical hypothesis for human being: ethos anthropos

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daemon. Ethos has been translated as “character” or the “outward bearing” of a person in which we can read behavioural codes through the repetition and difference of affective qualities over time (Liddell & Scott 766). To the ancient Greeks, the daemon was an attendant spirit that guides a person through their life, or “generally, [a] spiritual or semi-divine being inferior to the gods,” acting as a go-between for mortals and immortals (Liddell & Scott 366). Accepting the translation of the Heraclitean fragment “ethos anthropos daemon” as “a person’s character is his daemon,” Angus Nicholls complicates the final term: the term daemon may mean either one’s fate or one’s guardian divinity … the fragment may in fact carry both meanings … on the one hand, a daemon may be the soul of a noble individual who has died—a soul that will subsequently function as a guardian divinity that protects another person during his or her life, thereby influencing his or her fate. On the other hand … the fragment may also mean that the person’s own character, and not the soul of another individual who has died, is their daemon. (38-9)

A more common translation of Heraclitus’s diabolical equation is “a person’s character is his fate” (69). This seems to tie the open-ended concepts ethos anthropos daemon together in a kind of trefoil knot, a design that is perilously close to aspirational kitsch. Such a translation wants to remove the anxiety of one’s fate being determined from without, and we need only to have faith in our character, which in this interpretation takes a distinctly moral tone. A more dynamic function of the equation would be sought through thinking the permanent flux of relations between ethos and daemon, maintaining anthropos, what the human might be, as a question. It seems possible that for Heraclitus each of these three abstracts (ethos anthropos daemon) must remain mutable in order to maintain the equation’s capacity as a differential motor. Thinking ethos makes us think about the daemon, about metaphysical drives and pulses that are not ordinarily perceptible; as the daemon is only ever readable through ethos, we search for its expressive trace in the complex text of the person. Ethos always already belongs to culture: it is suited by the application of figures and tropes in a differential system of recognition like language itself. An ethos lives and dies with the face of a person as the transitive iteration of a culture. The daemon is classically that which is not only beyond conscious control, but also beyond mortality. It precedes and succeeds its host and is

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generally allied to the slippery notion of “spirit.” Anthropos, which the equation sets out to capture, ends up being the most chronically fugacious figure of all: its proper position is to be held just out of sight—it is not directly thinkable or conceivable outside of the shifting and conflicting forces which produce it. All the terms of Heraclitus’s formula carry the fury of contradiction and work only when in dynamic play. The human question here is Frank. The figure of O’Hara is an exemplary translation of Heraclitus’s riddle of the human, for he plays so closely his daemon and his ethos. One is always immanent within the other: the daemon is not the afterthought of the metaphysical but is firmly fitted to the ethos. Katz testifies to a sense that O’Hara’s ethos is not fixed but is constantly performed, taking its life in each iteration and not resting on “manners and intent” but rather always being negotiated with “maximum vitality.” The daemon delights in pushing the profile of ethos as an artifice. An O’Hara poem is something like an introduction to the figure of the poet as a daemon of literature. Following our argument of the erotics of influence from the previous chapter, this daemon would be composite. If we accept that daemons could be thought of as “tutelary spirits” from a “golden age” (Liddell & Scott 366), we could say that O’Hara has chosen his daemons in the figures of Pasternak, Whitman, Mayakovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Rimbaud. The daemon, then, might be conceived as the energetic signature of a person which becomes super-personal, remaining to charge a perceivable ethos as an affective and intellectual register. O’Hara worked on his daemons, actively courting them: he takes charge of the assortment of these “tutelary spirits” through the writing of poems, nominating his heroes and inviting their interference as daemons. In reading O’Hara’s poems we begin to read an ethos of responsiveness, of being supple in attention, of a re-imagined sociality spread vertically into the past and horizontally through coterie in the constitutive act of the poem. By doing so we are exposed to what charges this ethos: we inherit, physically and metaphysically, not just his daemons but Frank O’Hara as the daemon. What Katz testifies to in the Homage remains to work upon us, through living with O’Hara’s poems and through reading the biographical literature which plots his life. So we might say that O’Hara’s daemon can be experienced by reading the force that pushes the ethos of the poems and engaging in a hermeneutics of “maximum vitality.” The power of this daemon is best read as a willingness to manipulate tropes: Bruce Clarke asserts that “writing itself [i]s a daemonic power—a material

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substance taken within from without and transforming the self” (22). The daemonic inheres in language itself to stymie any ideal reading of a figure’s sole function or stable character, whether this figure is a phrase or a single word. Because it is suggestive of metaphysical forces the daemon has always been the signature of the inconceivable. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe sought in the daemon a discursive figure for his work on the metaphysics of genius; of how and why certain individuals are chosen as exceptional conduits in human relations with the cosmos. What is ripe in his application of this figure, which is not a figure, is that he uses it as a technic to fashion a self in a move that is both autobiographical and autogenetic. In plotting his conception of the daemonic, Goethe is his own subject, talking about himself in the third person: He thought he could detect in nature—both animate and inanimate, with soul or without soul—something which manifests itself only in contradictions, and which, therefore, could not be comprehended under any idea, still less under one word. It was not godlike, for it seemed unreasonable; not human, for it had no understanding; nor devilish, for it was beneficent; nor angelic, for it often betrayed a malicious pleasure. It resembled chance, for it evolved no consequences: it was like Providence, for it hinted at connection. All that limits us seemed to penetrate; it seemed to sport at will with the necessary elements of our existence; it contracted time and expanded space. In the impossible alone did it appear to find pleasure, while it rejected the possible with contempt. To this principle, which seemed to come in between all other principles to separate them, and yet to link them together, I gave the name of Demoniac, after the example of the ancients, and of those who, at any rate, had perceptions of the same kind. I tried to screen myself from this fearful principle, by taking refuge, according to my usual habits, in an imaginary creation. (157)

Goethe does not so much seek to investigate the daemon as an inherited idea but to rewrite it as a Romantic principle synthesising nature and the human. He is careful to preserve the daemon as a figure of paradox and declares that his construction is a private action of mythography and mythopoiesis, which he doesn’t so much want to socialise as to sign as his own thought. It is a personal conception, but one which makes claims on the territory of daemonic thought; he smothers it as a retrievable object for philosophy. He also exploits the impish and pagan connotations of the

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word’s Christian homonym demon, appealing to the decadent demimonde that appears to decorate the enlightenment in the nineteenth century. Perhaps we should suspect that by speaking in a magisterial third person, Goethe wants to appear as being ventriloquised by the daemon itself. This is a wilful interpretation and occupation of an enigmatic and inexhaustible figure. For Goethe, the word daemon folds in the substantial and the insubstantial; it is a kind of dramatic phenomenology or theatricalised dialectics. Goethe’s daemon is individuating and fatalistic but casts the individual in a pantheistic relation to the things of the world. He returns to and re-­ tropes the figure of the daemon so he can begin to talk about a Romantic concept of the genius within the traditional sense of the go-between. He personalises it, so that now his name is forever infused within ideas of the daemonic.1 This is a traditional career move for poets, to pick up an ancient enigmatic figure and sign it as one’s own; as Goethe perceives, the figure of the daemon is built to beguile and is a tantalising ticket to socialise with immortals.2 In “Proud Poem,” O’Hara connects his own genius with the demon (“my insufferable/ genius my demon my dish”), but his appropriation moves from the symbolically cunning into the camp (CP 52). In making a meal of it, he satirises the consumption of the self as a Romantic impulse and an act of literature. The death of Frank O’Hara signifies the initiation of the full play of the O’Hara mythology and the return of O’Hara as the daemon. We ought not to say “his” mythology, for O’Hara the person is no longer in possession of it. Rather it comes to possess others and give them a fleeting sense of touch or connection as, in the end, no one can ever have or hold “Frank O’Hara.” In a sense “Frank O’Hara” is more present to us in this total absence. For O’Hara, poetry is the space of possibility, and though it is continually filled, its horizon is never fenced. While the first chapter focussed on O’Hara’s constant constitution and recurrence of selves, this chapter analyses the collaborative texture of the O’Hara mythology, checking the ways in which the poet’s ethos is enjoined by others. I begin by 1  The daemon is always “personal.” In the Greek text, the formula ethos anthropos daemon is preceded by “Heraclitus said that …”: (ράκλειτος ἔφη ὡς ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων) This staging of wisdom requires the mouth of Heraclitus to speak it; his person is part of his signature thought, though most translations occlude this detail (see T.M. Robinson Heraclitus: Fragments 68). 2  We read the courting of the daemon especially in the work of Coleridge (see Gregory Leadbetter: Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination) and later Yeats.

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considering the collaborative but fraught constitution of self through O’Hara’s intimate working relationship with Larry Rivers. For if no one could have Frank O’Hara, so too could no one have “Larry Rivers.” In Rivers, O’Hara found someone who generated as much of a provocative and challenging mythos as himself, who ceaselessly fabricated and reworked the self and who endlessly tested lines of tradition and freedom. The chapter then moves from examining their staging of a shared self to a broader collective myth-making in the Homage to Frank O’Hara, edited by O’Hara’s friends Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur. In O’Hara’s poetics, the “self” of self-mythologising is at once an ineffable isolate and a plural state of selves, an individual and a polis. A collective elegy, the Homage is a roll-­ call of the artists and writers in mid- to late-twentieth-century New York City. To some degree, it consecrates O’Hara’s own efforts to trouble a discrete idea of personhood and to actualise a praxis of collaboration in the making of selves. The Homage gives a sense of the ways in which O’Hara functions as a figure of community, partly totemic but also licensing modes of being open to others. Each offering in the Homage testifies to a necessary affective boundary-crossing that gives mythos its charge. As we saw in the previous chapter, part of O’Hara’s making of himself as a poet is to manage his haunting by poets of the past within his poems. He drafts his own hauntologue as a fluent exchange between the living and the dead, taking up their mythic shapes through the “phantom immanence” of the proper name and through stylistic parody, which we cast as a kind of erotic appropriation. O’Hara’s transit into the hauntologue is perhaps better thought of not as the historical moment of his death but as a sort of transmissive play of the always absent presence of the author that persists throughout the poetry. Ernst Cassirer writes: If all reality is taken only as it is given in the immediate impression, if it is regarded as sufficiently certified by the power it exerts on the perceptive, affective, and active life, then a dead man indeed still “is,” even though his outward form may have changed, even though his sensory-material existence may have been replaced by a disembodied shadow existence. (37)

Through its history of literary and philosophical appropriation, we are licensed to name this “disembodied shadow existence,” or what is transacted of the person through the poem, the daemon, which comes to express itself as ethos by possessing the bodies of the living.

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Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara: The Faming and Flaming of Friendship Born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg, “Larry Rivers” was always an invention, just as Francis Russell O’Hara makes himself be Frank. Rivers, like O’Hara, is a shape-shifter. Peter Schjeldahl offers this composite mythology: “Rivers’s existential torments are discharged in a series of dandyish poses: young old master, connoisseur of American cliché, clinical sex fiend, Jewish prodigal son, painter among poets, good bad boy of art. In each pose there is true, desperate sincerity” (41-42). Rivers was so successful in making of the artist as the work that some critics were anxious about the value of the artworks themselves. Sam Hunter writes of him: “Too often he has been taken as an engaging public performer … [critics] make the mistake of confusing his irrepressible exhibitionism with an imagined artistic flaw of fitful or unsteady inspiration” (11). Alternatively, Gavin Butt celebrates “the performative dimension of Rivers’s ‘self’ and his ‘work,’ and the complex ways in which these can be seen to fold back on one another” (108). O’Hara recalls meeting Rivers at a cocktail party in 1950 and of Rivers saying with an accompanying wave to the surrounding crowd, “After all it’s life we’re interested in, not art.” O’Hara continues: A couple of weeks later when I visited [Larry’s] studio for the first time … he said with no air of contradiction or remembrance, “After all, it’s art we’re interested in, not life.” His main interest was obviously in the immediate situation. (Art Chronicles 107)

Both O’Hara and Rivers found in the other a diabolical foil for testing the formal discretion of the idea of a person, of love, of collaboration, and the situation of the artist. O’Hara writes of Rivers’s irruption within the artistic community: “[he was] rather like a demented telephone: nobody knew whether they wanted it in the library, the kitchen or the toilet, but it was electric” (CP 512). Rivers, in turn, talks of O’Hara as the excitable object of an artist’s attentions: There was always a dialogue going on during our working sessions. He gave me feedback and made me feel what I was doing mattered, and after a while I found I needed him for my work … He was a great model. For one thing, he liked to model … I had no idea I was doing so many pictures of him … I always felt I was close to getting him but I never did, so I kept on trying. (Berkson and LeSueur 57)

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We might read in their relationship a processual ethos, a conspiratorial agreement to keep revitalising the figure: Rivers must keep turning the figure of O’Hara, as O’Hara turns the figure of himself in his poetry. The crisis of critical distance and the inability to capture the other is driven by this playfully intense collusion. Andrew Epstein has theorised how felicity is underlined with competitive tension in the friendships of the New York School, persuading us that darkness, paranoia, and rivalry are vital in producing the frisson that marks creative friendship. Epstein’s point of fascination is a “tense dialectic—between a deep-seated aversion to conformity and a poetics of friendship [which] actually energises postwar American poetry and poetics” (4). Doubt, in both love and art, becomes a productive virtue. O’Hara writes “what am I to say of Larry? Who really resents the fact that I may/ be conning him instead of Vice and Art” (CP 92). Besides setting forth a dialogue between painting and poem, Rivers and O’Hara routinely began and finished letters with noms de plumes and noms d’identite as a way of flirting not just with each other but also the historical action of fashioning identities. Such name-play perhaps carries a greater guarantee of sincerity or love, in being designed for a particular occasional moment. The insincerity stamps each letter as a loving provocation, making the letters more fetching for their witty associations. Each signature is a new way of “bursting forth” (CP 197). Rivers addresses O’Hara as “Dear La Boheme,” “Dear Franco-Prussian,” “You Rat,” “My Dear Fabiola,” “Dearest Franklin (Bahnjmhan),” while O’Hara addresses Rivers as “L.R. Barry Grey,” “Omar Bradley,” and “Luminous Larry” while signing himself as “Frank ‘Il leopardi’ O’Hara.”3 This practice of the nickname is part of a courtship process in which the mutability of the shared mythos is pronounced. The idea of “us” shows itself as being created: it is the beginning of collaboration. The nickname is also possessive; it is a stamp of knowing or having privately perceived something of the other, in a certain time, at a certain place, which is then given a name that is amusing, affectionate, undercutting, bitchy, or complementary. This lover’s trick was not the sole domain of O’Hara and Rivers but used by a number of New York School poets and most consistently applied by James Schuyler.4 Schuyler’s nominations are always 3  Larry Rivers Papers; MSS 293; Box 11; Folders 7-8; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 4  See Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951-1991. New York: Turtle Point Press, 2004. The intricate deposits of names within the letters, both obscure and well known,

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­ erformances of wit. Urbane and camp, they either sum up the aesthetic p atmosphere of a moment or are deliberately perverse comparisons designed to be enjoyed for their wickedness. O’Hara and Rivers are different: their relationship is competitive, volatile, inciting each other with regular eruptions of spleen. There is an intense sparring involved in their turnover of these ephemeral personae. For O’Hara and Rivers, their nicknames for each other always hold potential as myth. These names demonstrate Lytle Shaw’s idea of the “phantom immanence of the name,” conjuring versions of intimate relations that beckon, even as they become remote in space and time. Significantly, O’Hara and Rivers encode in their correspondence a desire for futurity, Rivers declaring that, “From 1950 on, Frank and I wrote stacks of letters to each other. We wrote as if the committee that decides who goes down in history was looking over our shoulders at them. We kept every letter” (232). Part of the work, then, is to make a cult of these selves in collaboration as a way of quoting and queering the idea of a muse function. O’Hara lives through Rivers the scene and action of corresponding minds, and their nicknames for each other, as chosen intimacies, are potentially cosmological, and it is this relation that operates throughout O’Hara’s practice of mythopoetics. The letters are simultaneously private and “open.” Many of the letters are taken up with approximations of each other’s talents and strengths, as a form of diagnosis and poeisis:

have been carefully archaeologised by the edition’s editor William Corbett. A standard example is Schuyler’s letter to John Ashbery, dated “Nov. 2, 1939 (good heavens)” which begins: “Dear Glen Tetley…” Corbett footnotes this with “Glen Tetley (b. 1926), ballet dancer, choreographer, and a friend of Gold and Fitzdale’s” (117). The camp move here is to assume a mutual acquaintance or public figure as a persona, which sets the rules of what follows in the enunciation of identity as a kind of play of localized knowledges. Schuyler chooses to address Ashbery as Glen Tetley, mixing their mythos to see how it fits: it is a proposition characteristic of a bitchy and ephemeral wit. This particular usage of the name has a sunken history: was Tetley an object of mutual admiration and desire for Schuyler and Ashbery? Is Schuyler dangling a thread of gossip or teasing at a secret, or simply celebrating a shared sensibility? For a contemporary reader this sampling of identities serves as an introduction to the artistic milieu of mid-century New York producing an accumulative sense of intimacy with a virtual community.

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Dear La Boheme                   11 Sept 1953. You Rat. A more peculiar person than myself I have never met except of course you. You are like a landscape painter whose success in the work can depend on where he is.   In your case it is the emotional climate and who is there that you are drawn to either release or move, which determines what the texture of the work will be.   Your model is your conception or reaction to the surroundings.   Very very.   You must someday take a trip to the North Pole.   I like that way of being in poetry.   Fuck all the poets.5

Here, the beloved is addressed for the way he moves among his materials, not as a sole fetishised determinant of beauty. Sexual and artistic desire are deliberately confused, and the territories of the self, both corporally and affectively, are overlaid. These original transgressions, this desire for an emergency of shared surfaces, later becomes a source of anger and disaffection in certain letters, where the intimacy has become painful and the parties withdraw. This is manifested in an argument over a turn in Rivers’s paintings or in new formal tendencies or pranks that O’Hara professes not to like. In Digressions, Joe LeSueur recalls O’Hara exploding at Larry Rivers’s glib approach to designing a production of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex in 1966 (310). This anecdote of Frank exhorting Rivers to not only do justice to Stravinsky but also to himself (and significantly to Frank too, who signs his last piece of writing as Oedipus Rex). The incident enacts mythos. It confuses the signature of the daemon in generating a nexus, where affect is not dissociated from O’Hara’s intellectual or aesthetic judgement. The argument of taste may have marred the love relationship but demonstrates O’Hara’s idea of a “critical love” or criticism as a force of love. He would write to Rivers a decade earlier: To stay alive as an artist one must be able to astound and disturb precisely those who admire and understand one’s work—the others don’t pay close enough attention to be moved out of their habits anyway, they give a blanket approval or disapproval no matter what’s being done because they have a lazy admiration or dislike for one’s talent and don’t really care about what the talent produces.6  Larry Rivers Papers; MSS 293; Box 11; Folders 7-8; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 6  Larry Rivers Papers; MSS 293; Box 11; Folder 9; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 5

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O’Hara turns this action to personal rather than archetypal gestures. Myth is not an accretion or a second-order effect but a cocksure atmosphere to work within as a shaping pressure of the present. Rivers and O’Hara practice a canniness for myth and continuing sensible practices of the future-famous. Their mythology is an uncertain work that will outlive them like the material traces of their art. Collaboration in this instance does not undermine the idea of a Romantic genius but rather promotes a lover’s formation that consciously works its mythic precedents to produce an idea of the ultimate collaboration of art and life. O’Hara had a talent for understanding people’s self-myths. Rivers writes of O’Hara’s habit of verbally skewering someone, then reforming himself over the phone by reforming his version of their self-image. “Drunk, Frank could be an aggravating monster … [h]is recasting of insults as insights into your character became a performance you had to admire” (228-230). This is a mythology of someone who understands mythologies; that affects are workable, that the little figure of hypokrite, the actor, is wired to the nervous system and responds paranoically or ecstatically to praise or condemnation. Allen Ginsberg said of O’Hara: “His feelings for me seemed to vibrate with my feelings for myself. I think he saw my ideal self-image; he articulated it and made it sound right” (quoted in Schjeldahl, 141). O’Hara does not simply read the myths of the other, whether in conversation, letters, or art criticism, he authorises them as well. In “How Roses Get Black,” the first of the Collected Poems, O’Hara writes                  I, who can cut with a word, was quite amused. Upon reflection I am not. Send me your head to soak in tallow! You are no myth unless I choose to speak. I breathed those ashes secretly. Heroes alone destroy, as I destroy you.          (CP 3)

Here, the target remains anonymous and seems to be more an opportunity for O’Hara to pose as a petulant Salome. What is impressive in this passage is the equation of speaking and making myth. O’Hara confers upon himself the powers of mythopoiesis in the service of both

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destruction and creation that are embodied and spoken in social performance. This is to say that O’Hara is a poet in his social relations as well as on the page. Peter Schjeldahl senses a bit of Rivers in O’Hara’s self-fashioning, citing “the giddy mixture of tones, from the guttural laconic to the high parodic, that was [River’s] great natural gift to the poetry of Frank O’Hara” (Hydrogen 42). In his autobiography, Rivers calls his chapter on O’Hara “Sketch,” suggesting that an approach to this person is never finalised, and one must improvise an “apparatus of capture” in a response that is more a dramatic performance than fixed representation.7 He noted how O’Hara “walked on his toes, stretched his neck, and angled his head, all to add an inch or two to his height. I never walked the same after I met him” (228). We might view O’Hara and Rivers as having a metamorphic exchange: Larry walks Frank’s walk and Frank talks something of Larry’s talk. Their relationship as artists is through sharing or collaborating on an ethos, and in doing so, they come to share a daemon. As a blurb or myth-bite for What Did I Do, Allen Ginsberg writes of a “creative erotic genius co-dependency” between O’Hara and Rivers. The undertones of “co-­dependency” should give us pause: inherent in the desire to be made through the other is the anxiety of being lost in or swallowed by the other (Fig. 3.1). Larry Rivers, Double Portrait of Frank O’Hara, 1955 (Museum of Modern Art). In finding himself unable to “get” O’Hara in a portrait satisfactorily, Rivers produced “Double Portrait of Frank O’Hara” (1955 Museum of Modern Art). It is an image that holds the self as a living dialectic of identity and alterity. We can read in this painting twin iterations of the idea of a person, or the person and their attendant daemon that takes their resemblance, creative and destructive forces shifting in the same beast. This is a portrait of Rivers’s relationship with O’Hara as well as the person of O’Hara. Trained as we are to read the human face in an instant of difference and repetition, merging the canny and the uncanny, the faces seemed 7  Theorising the techniques of “American Action Painters,” Harold Rosenberg valorizes the idea of a “sketch” as trace (graphos) that holds the fraught energy of the moment of confrontation with not just a “subject” but also the medium itself: the sketch is valuable as an art of process rather than a finished product. His idea that a “sketch can have the function of a skirmish” (569) sits well with both Rivers’ and O’Hara’s ethos of artistic process and Andrew Epstein’s cherishing of the notion of “beautiful enemies” with which he frames the antagonistic and productive tensions between the individualism of American pragmatism and the erotic, filial, and competitive formations of community and friendship.

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Fig. 3.1  Larry Rivers, Double Portrait of Frank O’Hara, Museum of Modern Art, 1955. © Larry Rivers/Artists Rights Society [ARS]. Copyright Agency, 2021

to drift in recognition between O’Hara and Rivers, as they appeared in 1950. They disappear into an erotic fold just as the two literally disappeared behind a curtain when they were first introduced into the dark to try each other out. There is no neat divide between narcissism and abandonment of the self. As both familiar (heimlich) and strange (unheimlich), the double exists as the psychological point of recognition and frustration. At O’Hara’s funeral, Rivers lamented the loss of O’Hara’s contentiousness, saying “Without doubt he was the most difficult man I knew. He never let me off the hook. He never let me be lazy. His talk, his interests, his poetry, his life was a theatre in which I saw what human beings were really like. He was a dream of contradictions” (“Speech Read at Springs” 138). The artist, for Rivers and O’Hara, is not a hero alone: this is an aesthetic, philosophic, and political correction made to the tenets of Abstract Expressionism. O’Hara’s poems and Rivers’s paintings can be read as draft constitutions for the self that is always in community, with the city, the world, and the phantasmatic procession of identities: friends, artists of the past, and movie stars. The notion of identity is eschewed for a rapid turnover series of identifications while complicating the metaphysical underpinnings of European figurative painting and of the lyric. This is demonstrated in

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Fig. 3.2  “Washington Crossing the Delaware” Oil on canvas, approximately 7 feet × 9 feet. The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Rivers’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (Fig.  3.2) and O’Hara’s response, “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art.” In Rivers’s painting, the figure of Washington hovers between being a caricature and an expressionistic blur. His features are the only ones which resolve at all, though done in graphite the relief is light and vacant: the other faces are the pink smudges of “general persons” of history. Where does Washington end and the scene begin? The figure bleeds into its background of patched winter colours. The work partakes of both folk art and monument: it is both patriotic and an attack on the visual rhetoric of heroics. In Rivers’s version of an iconic scene of revolution, the players bleed into each other; the cellular or luminal membranes that keep people apart are both transgressed and maintained through the organisation of colour. Instead of taking its composition through strident figures, like the bombastic Washington of Emanuel Leutze’s well-known original version,

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it examines the texture of mythos in the overlaid dimensions of private and public, “personal” and “national,” teasing these things as principles distinct from each other. The notion of “the crossing” is itself a dynamic motif of myth: a perilous, transformative passage, moving between worlds. Washington’s crossing is an episode in the coming into being of America, it is a creation myth, but in Rivers’s painting, the General looks surprised, unbalanced, and shocked at being discovered. On minute inspection, Washington’s pencilled eye is both an opaque orb of fear, a mysterious vacancy, and suggestive of a “wall-eye” that tends towards the comic-grotesque. Rivers states that “I took the face from a DaVinci demon, a man screaming” (cited in Dehrer 15). This stands as a quotation of classical technique and of the daemonic as inscrutable metaphysical force and destiny. O’Hara writes of Rivers’s work that the “fluctuation between figurative absence and abstract presence comes from an adamant attachment to substance, which is its source of energy. That is all, no identity” (Standing Still 96). Yet, it is perhaps not so much identity as a subtle invocation of a mutual sensibility with O’Hara. The classical execution of the white horse puts into focus the background object of a horse rather than the foreground figure of Washington. The rider on the horse cites Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider which O’Hara quotes in love poems as the aesthetic gold standard, the genius moment of art “that is achieved nowhere else” (CP 374). “Washington Crossing the Delaware” is an example of Rivers picking a scene from the public imaginary and taking it back to the loom, to thicken or loosen the warp of the mythos, to customise through caprice and private reference. According to O’Hara, Rivers demonstrates Tolstoy’s colossal ambition to hold in art an epoch in a single work (Standing Still 171). Converging traditions of painting around the figure of Washington allows “Larry Rivers” to sign into American history with a presumptuousness reminiscent of O’Hara’s signature as Oedipus Rex. If we allow a possible allegory, the painting makes a new constitution for the self by being select about what one notices and how. Michael Clune suggests this when he declares, “Rivers’ art transforms the symbols of the public world into objects that are interesting to Rivers himself.” He adds that their “value should depend entirely on an evanescent association” (194). The self is a private mythos turned out to work on a public one, not to reproduce it but to hold out its epistemological problems and respond to its provocation of thinking selves and histories. James Breslin writes that “Rivers does not merely

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parody Leutze and debunk heroism; he redefines it, locating the mythic in the real” (228). We might say that what Rivers is kinking is not “heroism” or “the real” but the action of making art itself, remodelling the articulated vehicle of transference as a war machine in a skirmish of colour and line. The painting is its subject, becoming part of the American Revolution, and what is being fought for is the right to practice a personal mythopoietic technique without having a single allegiance, while acknowledging that one cannot work outside mythos. This is the question of determining the real, becoming Washington contemporarily as a problem of heroism. O’Hara’s poem confronts Rivers’s painting as part of an ongoing revolution of remaking selves and histories: he is exposed to its drama as art: “On Seeing Larry River’s Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art” Now that our hero has come back to us in his white pants and we know his nose trembling like a flag under fire, we see the calm cold river is supporting our forces, the beautiful history. To be more revolutionary than a nun is our desire, to be secular and intimate as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile and pull the trigger. Anxieties and animosities, flaming and feeding on theoretical considerations and the jealous spiritualities of the abstract the robot? They’re smoke, billows above the physical event.                   (CP 233-4)

Here, O’Hara presses the spectrality of figures like Washington and the narrative bloom of their exploits: “they’re smoke, billows above/the physical event.” Washington has become a national daemon: somewhere between humans and the gods, between the physical and the metaphysical. He is the revenant, the ghostly father of America, that begins by always coming back: “Now that our hero has come back to us.” O’Hara figuratively takes Washington’s “bones” as a talisman or apotropaic charm “crossed on my breast like a rusty flintlock, a pirate’s flag, bravely specific.” The general’s bones become a charged relic which O’Hara customises as a pirate flag, but this merely translates the sign of one phantasy syndicate to

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another. It touches on the potency of invested articles and what they might grant their owner.8 O’Hara’s poem tracks his contingent and personal experience of Rivers’s painting that includes the affective atmosphere of Washington mythologies, the “beautiful” histories that precede and inform it, and his own mood. By suggesting that the poem is always an occasional poem, O’Hara uses the process of poetry to track the action of self-­mythologising across different selves, as a dispersed but collective phenomenon in which the temporal zones of past and present are always happening simultaneously. To create a crisis of figuration is to enact a perpetual moment of mythopoiesis, a formal coming into being that never quite arrives, one that must be negotiated through a recurring series of personal decisions. Leutze’s painting is a static configuration that relies on a Romantic (Napoleonic) tradition of monumentalising the hero as a guarantee of a democratic affect: it commands us to feel the same way before it, to accede to a single interpellation, as if from God. Both O’Hara and Rivers resist this; their responses are warlike, using subtle sorts of violence to deface this idea of Washington. They both engage with the politics of the image by wrestling with the figurativity of “beautiful,” seductive histories. O’Hara’s and Rivers’s works are not outside their subject, they are more correctly plagued by it. Breslin writes that O’Hara poses the antithesis between the real and the mythic, the immediate and the fictive, only in order to dissolve it by showing how the opposing terms are implicated with each other … O’Hara (like Rivers) does not so much de- as re-mythologize Washington; in fact, the poem playfully rejects the idea that we can shed all myths and abstractions and become, at last, free persons. (228)

Breslin makes the further point that, rather than allowing a hierarchy of “myth” and “the real” “in the … dialectical O’Hara, they are in perpetual motion” (228). This is a fine point, touching as it does the rumour of the fugitive. O’Hara is always between de and re mythologising, re-reading and re-inscribing forms for the subject in a metamorphic algorithm. Any post or posture in which we might catch the poet is always already a knowing one. 8  O’Hara’s hero Byron held great contempt for Lord Elgin’s souveniring the marbles of the Parthenon, yet at the same time he purchased the bones of Burgundian soldiers who died at Waterloo, perhaps to be closer to Napoleon, if not the aura of the Napoleonic.

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The idea of the hero—perhaps in the model of Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock—is hardly surrendered. What is tonally curious about the painting and the poem is that they both rest very closely to the comic without crossing over into laughter: O’Hara’s Washington has a trembling nose and Rivers’s has a stumbling dyspepsia. Yet the pique of each is more correctly absurdity or nausea; there is no relish in it. The “brave specificity” of O’Hara’s contrary method, his pirate’s flag, is sailing over a torrent of anxiety. Washington has become a static god as the father figure of a divinely confirmed American destiny, and in the Roman fashion, his coined image is everywhere dispersed among the American populace as a mobile technology of assurance and surveillance. Facing the one dollar bill, Washington is transacted daily, passing from hand to hand, guaranteeing the blessings of capitalism and the distribution of a heroically authorised republic. Washington replaces the divinely chosen figure of the king to stand as the prototype of the revolutionary democratic subject of the new world, yet the technic of his memorial, cash, is a borrowed technic of sovereignty. As with the example of Napoleon, revolution and reaction come to settle with equal canniness in the territory of the same face. Dong-Yeon Koh observes that Rivers called the image of Washington crossing as [sic] “national cliché,” and the wide circulation of Washington’s image made Rivers’ painting an efficient vehicle by which to reconfigure notions of the proper subject matter for high art, just as the New York School poets pushed the boundaries of appropriate content for literature. (168)

Rivers and O’Hara reconfigure the subject as a matter of mythos and choose for the logic of myth “the bravely specific” as a way of staking out a new, pertinent, and troubled kind of heroism to taunt “the jealous spiritualities of the abstract.” That is to say, the occasion and execution of the work is a new calibration of what myth is, to be “secular and intimate” and to account for contingent effects like “white pants” or “his nose/ trembling like a flag under fire.” The subject is flirted with because it is a “national cliché”: it is chosen because it is schmaltz. What is taken up is the scene of action, where character is a function of plot in Aristotle’s sense of mythos, it is the play or costume drama of someone fulfilling the role, enacting a “crossing.” General Washington is in a sense a blank

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mythology, exerting neither good nor bad charms, vacant until it is proposed for a particular purpose.9 O’Hara dives into the action of remaking the mythic scene that the painting entertains: he responds to it both as a territory to be felt and encountered and as a prod to artistic production through “evanescent association.” Clune writes that O’Hara “treats River’s work as an encouragement to form his own instant, contingent private associations … O’Hara’s ‘true abstraction’ elicits a state of being interested without being self-interested” (193-4). Rivers and O’Hara act for each other as competitive spurs which turn to be mutually reinforcing or complementary parts. The poem is about the experience of seeing the mythos of the other as a modifying episode of mythopoiesis on behalf of the self, to think through the other as part of the structure of the extensive self. One’s experience of art becomes the subject of art: as urban creatures, art is part of their habitat. The notion of the “self” becomes a specular techne for poetry and painting, a position from which to regard themselves as social technics, rather than poetry and painting being in the service of the self. Hazel Smith writes of “[t]he creative tension between representation and abstraction (figuration and gesture)” that is exploited in the art of Rivers, Hartigan, and O’Hara (180-81). She suggests that O’Hara’s poem characterises “Washington as afraid, gun-happy and a liar,” because Washington was “the father of debatable notions about the freedom which honors individualism rather than community” (185). The coming into being of the subject is an elaboration of forces in Rivers’s painting and O’Hara’s poem, and they both move to occupy this tension: availing themselves of the strut and the posturing of a public Washington, while queering it in the same instance, as Smith suggests: “the attitudes being questioned still have a presence” (185). The prospect of a remote, statuesque, and godlike Washington is intolerable, but in remaking Washington, one is making something like a god, only terrible and human, something that smacks of the vagaries and anxieties of personhood. In wilfully inhabiting this “cluster of ‘character’ and ‘event’” (Morris 27), O’Hara considers Washington’s guile to be much like his own “so alive/ you must have lied incessantly to be/ immediate”: presence is performance, a confidence trick, and immediacy a facility of rhetoric. Even “our desire/ to be secular and intimate” and “bravely 9  The “evacuated” bust of Washington on Mount Rushmore is the perfect kitsch statement of this.

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specific” are undone by being “ever so light in the misty glare.” The immanent proposition here is that mythos, while substantive, is rapid, atmospheric, and in some ways ineffable. The work of art and history to fix mythologies is a lie: the work of a jealous power. These works dismantle the idea of acting with piety towards the Master Narratives or the grand telos of the West, by being “more revolutionary than a nun,” a nominal term Rivers and O’Hara both used for each other when there is some perceived moralising or when camping it up. Gavin Butt reads camp here as being a more sophisticated kind of destabilising mode than bald irony: to conflate camp with irony is to miss out on its wider potential for undermining conditions of meaning. Irony works to shore up binary structures of signification by producing oppositional meanings to those stated or apparent. Camp, on the other hand, can be understood as a performative technology of subjectivity and meaning which denaturalizes the process through which any determinate meaning is produced. (114)

It seems the figure of the nun is revolutionary after all. The camp is perversely aggressive by not seeming so; it winsomely undoes its opposite: the performance of a militaristic swagger (Butt 114). O’Hara and Rivers’s focus on the interplay between public-held myths and private revolutions of desire is perhaps most adventurously played in their Stones collaboration (a series of 12 “tabloscripts” or lithographs). This collaborative work threatens the integrity of touch if we consider touch as being defined, as Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, the “simultaneity of distance and contact” (Derrida, On Touching, 199). As Nancy elaborates, touch paradoxically preserves the otherness of the other, discovering the boundaries of the self through what is not the self. In producing the lithographs, once a gesture is played out there can be no revision. What is beguiling about these works is the way they flicker between the casual and the serious, resulting in what Lytle Shaw calls their “refreshing awkwardness” (38). They have a sense of the “unfinished,” and this is the point: they are constitutional drafts of an art/life praxis. As with O’Hara and Rivers’s mock manifesto “How to Get Ahead in the Arts,” there is the direct sense that unalloyed seriousness would spell death. The stones are testamentary, but not monumental; they construct an opposing logic to that of Roman type or the heroic image. The quality of both the words and images is not graven but capricious. Perhaps we should rather say that it is the capricious moment made grave.

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Part of the charm of the Stones collaborations is imagining the scene of composition: one is invited into a ritual of the personal as it is carried out in a pas de deux, and this secret inclusion involves the reader in the charismatic moment, the moment of transmitted grace. The stones represent a strict finitude of form for O’Hara and Rivers and the unusual discipline of operating strange materials on a strange surface (with O’Hara having to practise his “beautiful hand” [writing] backwards). It represents a cloistering of these two, a close space in which to compel each other on. Defining “its status as an event,” Marjorie Perloff registers the Stones as performative art as well as art objects in themselves (101). Making “I” as “we” or the possibility of “us,” the above stone stages Eros. The art was in the doing of it, and the action of reading them now consists of “seeing” the ghosted hands as they blur together and merge. The first of the Stones, “US” (Fig. 3.3), suggests a unifying of states although there is a little spat

Fig. 3.3  “Stones” © Larry Rivers/Artists Rights Society [ARS]. Copyright Agency, 2021, and the Estate of Frank O’Hara

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over territory: “Poetry belongs to me Larry, painting to you.” Yet this is “what G[ertrude] said to P[icasso]”; its provenance is actually a joke or an echo that carries on as Rivers and O’Hara size themselves up to their artistic heroes of the past, while practicing bickering as a couple. Grace Glueck quotes Rivers as thinking about his work as “visual gossip,” and in this stone, there is certainly a display of intimate exchange, one that places the viewer as its intimate public (35). Preceding their Stones collaborations Rivers and O’Hara have the example of Picasso and Stein, Rivers declaring, “We were grown up but we wanted to taste that special lollipop Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Apollinaire, Eluard and Aragon had tasted to find out what it was like” (Gooch 298). In his early poem “The Muse Considered as Demon Lover,” O’Hara impishly ventriloquises the ghosts of Rimbaud and Baudelaire: “‘Que mangestu, belle sphinx? … Suis-je belle, ô nausée? … Trouvez Hortense!’” (CP 12–13).10 These stylised ejaculations import the daemons of the French poets. Another of the stones invokes Rimbaud and Verlaine (Fig. 3.4). Opening with a quote attributed to Mathilde Mauté (Madame Verlaine), Rivers and O’Hara link themselves with and assume the erotic mythology of Rimbaud and Verlaine. Sketching their faces from two wellknown photographic images, Rivers captures a proto-punk posturing through Rimbaud’s sullenness and Verlaine’s moue. With this stone, Rivers and O’Hara assume a part in the immortality which transports the French lovers as figures of literary myth. Rimbaud is the darling of the avant-garde, a cupid of transgressive artistic and social pranks, and a writer with a life lived seemingly in the service of his myth: he is the literary daemon par excellence. Rimbaud and Verlaine are joined mythically by a bullet, as the lithograph stylises phallic erotic projectiles that are transformed by O’Hara’s phrase into a choreographed performance of bodies: “the bullets arrive as beats/ in the corps de ballet of the white air.” Terrence Diggory argues that in this “erotic entanglement” collaboration sublimates the potential violence of competition (42). The short (and deadly) stop sound of “bullet” is turned (by grace) to the open manoeuvres of “ballet.” This couplet’s image of “bodies in space” is one of slowing down, of postures and pauses. The medium of the stones was an unfamiliar one to both O’Hara and Rivers, being hard and peculiar physical work. In this sense they both must take an equal restraint of their techniques of composition, part of  What are you eating, beautiful sphinx? … Am I beautiful, oh nausea? … Find Hortense!

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Fig. 3.4  “Stones” © Larry Rivers/Artists Rights Society [ARS]. Copyright Agency, 2021, and the Estate of Frank O’Hara

this collaboration is of them being put in a shared visceral solution: “[t]he sum of all existences is a pint of blood on the windowsill.” Yet in this ideal commingling we see the potential over time for clotting and curdling of the mixture. The scene of the poem is at the “City Center” on an “enormous staircase.” New York displaces Paris as the theatre of magnitude, the historic scene of consequence. A striking phrase, “There they are, all covered in blood and semen,” was actually quoted in public at them by John Meyers, another lover of Rivers and in this instance an offended partner (Gooch 230). Biliously quoted to them as a curse, O’Hara and Rivers take up the phrase to physically and textually invoke other artists to whom they have been attracted: O’Hara/ Verlaine/ Rivers/ Rimbaud become a configuration stuck with “blood and semen.” Meyers uses the phrase as a dark charm in an attempt to strike at the pair; in assuming the mouth of

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Mathilde Mauté, he collaborates in this compress of mythologies, giving a night out at the opera the frisson that Rivers and O’Hara actively crave. The homage to Rimbaud and Verlaine is as much to a certain style of living which leads to artistic legend, tinged with fate and tragedy. Rivers and O’Hara want to get dirty by association, not in a moral sense, but instead to assume something of the fuming aura the French authors possess as a duo of literary myth. This aligns with their use of masks and the public posturing of the self as part of the art. Rivers and O’Hara seize the comparison and in turn authorise it themselves, becoming involved in its sticky mythos. The phrase also resonates with the collaboration’s medium of ink, the stones enabling degrees of smudge, containment, and a bleeding across (a transfusion) of fluid. The lithographs therefore are the traces of an actively performed shared selfhood for Rivers and O’Hara, while still thicketed with difference.11 In one of the abandoned lithographs, “Heroic Sculpture” (Fig. 3.5), art is presented as a form of animal scratching. O’Hara’s poem in it challenges thought as a reified thing apart from the body: We join the animals not when we fuck        or shit not when tear falls but when     staring into light     we think            (CP 311)

Thought here is captured as a kind of dumb effect: “staring into light.” Given that O’Hara signed himself as “Il Leopardi” in a letter to Rivers, the idea of the sphinx is a temporary delectation. Through the peristaltic motion of its various gizzards and ducts, the living sculpture stands as an anti-monument. Favouring the animal in metaphysics, O’Hara writes in the play “Act and Portrait”: “Religion is very Gothic. I’m agin it. Fergit it. I get nervous enough around real living palpable pulsating smelling persons, without something coming over the horizon at me. And yet I do look up and I do see the sky. What is it? Why is it blue?” (Selected Plays 165). 11  See Hans Namuth’s 1958 photo “Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara working on the portfolio ‘Stones’,” for a dramatic image of their duelling or worming hands at work.

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Fig. 3.5  “Stones” © Larry Rivers/Artists Rights Society [ARS]. Copyright Agency, 2021, and the Estate of Frank O’Hara

In Stones, O’Hara and Rivers offer an idea of art which, as Pasternak suggests, should be a collaboration with one’s “sister, life,” an injunction O’Hara quotes with approval (CP 505). This is a deliberately open formulation and an invitation to formulate one’s own notions of “art” and “life” as personal blood relations: it is also an evocation of eroticism on the brink; a fraught attraction which risks fracture or severance. The frontispiece of the portfolio hints at the nuptial quality of the work, not just for O’Hara and Rivers but also for painting and poetry as lovers: “[w]here the artist and poet are inspired by the same theme, draw and write on the same surface at the same time, fusing both arts to an inseparable unity.” This prelude tablet12 looks like an invitation to a wedding as much as a movie bill with title, stars, hero phrase. The event is a ritual performance “[d]irected by Tatiana Grosman” for which the portfolios are receipts or  https://www.moma.org/collection/works/21658

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mementos; perhaps the greater part of what is purchased or acquired is the glamour of this coupling, the promise of “inseparable unity” with the art, the artists, with each other, and this ritual is guaranteed with a little sacrifice with the original “[s]tones destroyed after printing.”

Touching Frank or the Perverted Charms of Animal Charisma O’Hara would practice this sense of eros widely, finding kinship with a range of artists and writers, and constantly falling in love. Kenneth Koch observes that “Frank O’Hara had the ability to fantasise himself to be almost anybody, anything, anytime, anywhere; and he also had an unusual gift for love, for identifying himself with, and for transforming other people and their concerns” (Homage 206). O’Hara would fold his friends into his art, or as Paul Goodman suggests, he “puts his arms around them,” and in doing so he socialises a sensibility or an idea of the artist (375). He takes a curatorial role to his life and his mythologising, which is at once generous since, in reading the poems, you are a participant in producing the myth of the life. I want to read the Homage as a collective response to O’Hara’s style of living as part of poetics and as a radicalising of mythopoetics. Reading the Homage has a cumulative effect of moving within the milieu of Frank O’Hara, and it is a milieu, or a kind of epochal sense, that O’Hara was instrumental in creating, giving the feeling that something was going on, but within this particular arcade, one is not only bumping into Frank O’Hara, but also consorting with Frank O’Hara through the regular transmission of the affect of his charm, his enthusiasm, and his generosity. Through the “torn fragments” or snatches of the separate entries, we are able to read 60 variously developed personal myths of “Frank O’Hara.” We are able to read his existence in others, dwelling for a while in the extended and complicated territory of “Frank O’Hara,” for while the Homage is a ritual of mourning, it is also a ritual of self-nominative affiliation. While The Homage would be the first, it is certainly not the only memorialising reliquary of O’Hara. Joe LeSueur’s Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara is a vehicle for LeSueur himself to activate a myth of self through his love of O’Hara and his poetry. LeSueur’s formal method is to “present” O’Hara through a poem, and then present himself through

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O’Hara, to see a resulting commingling of selves, and the formation of selves as an endless filigree of digressions, which each selected O’Hara poem as a discrete body holds together as a charmed occasion. A more official relic is the Museum of Modern Art’s In Memory of My Feelings which sees the coupling of O’Hara’s poems and the visual artworks of those he conspired with or was inspired by in making art but also “making one’s days” (CP 307). Published by Berkson’s Big Sky Press, the Homage to Frank O’Hara is not so institutionally bound as In Memory of My Feelings and has more the sense of the consecration of a cult: a charming relay of the person of the poet not as a transfixion but as an open nexus of desire. Structurally, the Homage is an atmosphere of affective nimbuses, with the contributions similar to gospels in seeking to vivify O’Hara, to testify to his style of being. They respond to both the person of the poet and to the poems, often conjoining them into a singular charismatic text. Moreover, they seek to extend this to themselves, actively following O’Hara’s notion of personhood as being always in community. “[Y]ou just go on your nerve” is now a well-worn catch-phrase of O’Hara’s “cult of spontaneity” and ephemerality (Ladkin 201). Yet there is an urgency in these testaments in the Homage, drawn by the vacuum of loss. Many of the contributions are provisional, fragmentary, motile, deliberately unfinished, and together give a cumulative sense that this is the key gesture of homage: to improvise, be intimate, and contradictory. In the first section of this chapter, Rivers and O’Hara do not position themselves in abeyance before the figure of Washington as a glamorous hero. Rather, they occupy the figure through a very personal response, actively recomposing it, and so it is with those who come to pay homage to O’Hara. There is no hierarchical exchange with the world of an exulted being, for O’Hara’s work as a poet and a person was to extend this range of enchantment horizontally to the whole of his acquaintance and give permission for others to do the same. In a letter to Lawrence Osgood, he writes: “We Americans are all [the] more lonely for glamour than for each other, and until we learn to find it in each other and around us, that is to say in something which we can comprehend, relax with, and use, glamour is just an elder brother’s cast off exoticism” (quoted in Gooch, 140). Reading through the Homage’s manifolding impressions, one finds recurring, complex, relooping O’Haras; each proper name authorising a differently tuned dialectic, a different version of Frank O’Hara. Reading them haphazardly one gets the sense of “Frank O’Hara” as a force of the

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human (the daemonic) rather than carved features, a quotable quote, or a monumental mark. As O’Hara’s poems seek to “touch” the other, the roll-call of names in the Homage all want to “contact” Frank O’Hara. The Homage might be viewed as a companion volume to the Collected Poems: it establishes a textual cosmos of sociality, between O’Hara and these other proper names, where selves are cast as acts of art or histrionics, not factual history. It returns to the name of O’Hara himself as an erotic “Grand Central Station.” The poetic function of the proper name is to occult the addressee and involve the reader in the glamour of an association that is both intimate and remote. Now that his poems are no longer absolutely contemporary and can be seen as a symptom of their psychosocial atmosphere, the names of O’Hara’s friends, which possessed a “phantom immanence,” have achieved their own kind of fame. They are becoming consecrated in the dispersed community of O’Hara’s readers and are drifting towards a category of the reified symbol which they were invented to counteract. O’Hara gave permission by example to treat the self as a myth in a way that shuffles authorisations, and one can plot ideas of the self through shifting and contingent set of cultural identifications. Lytle Shaw writes that: his deployment of the name demonstrates an interest in what happens when these values and attributes undergo ambiguous shifts and transformations as functions of contexts beyond his control. Thus, if names do operate as sites of identification and affective intensity in O’Hara, these effects frequently shift from instance to instance. (69)

Pursuing the constitutive ingenuity of O’Hara’s use of proper names, Shaw goes on to demonstrate how he productively merges the personal and public value or amplitude of a name in any given case. Shaw recognises this as a manoeuvre in the realm of bios, where the process of subjectivisation is always political: one determines kinship structures and the kinds of selves they produce, most critically by keeping them under interrogation. He writes: Proper names are, of course, literal mechanisms in kinship structures. But it is also true that in O’Hara this literal, immediate quality—what seems to make proper names more substantial than other words—has been everywhere pushed and pulled, motivated and destabilised. This is what makes … “In Memory of My Feelings” and many of O’Hara’s other poems into such

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rich considerations and enactments of social relations. O’Hara’s model of coterie operates as an experimental kinship structure precisely through this denaturalizing of the name—both because names in the present undergo a radical shifting of attributes and because a similar version of this fluidity happens in the appropriations of cultural and literary history. (234)

We might also speak of the glamour of the proper name in O’Hara, not just in the sense of celebrity, but the way that the name as cultural prize of association, or desired object of knowledge, shimmers to perception and apprehension; it both invites and confounds types of identification. The Homage is a vivid receipt of this play of proper names, and within it we get a full hormonal play of its chemistry, a dense erotic calculus. John Weiners’s three pages of “Chop-House Memories” represent a critical mass in this regard: Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby, Rockefeller, John Ashbery, Hugh Armory, V.R Lang, Mary Manning, Edwin Muir, James Merrill, George Montgomery, May Sarton, John La Touche, Lyon Phelps, Jack Spicer, Joseph LeSueur, John Bernard Meyers, Tibor De Nagy, J.R Morton, Larry Rivers, D.H Lawrence, Jimmy Schuyler, Fairfield Porter, John Button, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart, Giulietta Masina, Federico Fellini, Thomas Hardy, James Dean, George Washington, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Morris Golde, Aaron Copeland, Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein, Alvin Novak, John and Jane (Wilson) Gruen, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Kenneth Koch, Kynaston McShine, Stella Adler, Rudolph Burckhardt, LeRoi Jones, Bill Berkson, Barbara Guest, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Stephen Spender, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound.                          (64-66)

I would argue the importance of the proper name or the signature as the armature or potential space of a blank mythology; a possibility of knowledge, of association, of being charmed, of being lured through the device of the name towards someone worth knowing. This, along with the will to restructure the relations of selves through reimagining coterie, is part of the generosity of O’Hara’s poetics, and it is here we might read something like the formulation of Agamben’s “coming community,” that poems might make connective tissues between discrete subjects, and the West might check its obsession with the self through insights into the symbolic dynamics of self-formation.

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O’Hara leads the myth-making in his naming practices. His skill as a mythographer is to not only read people’s mythology as they have it and make it sound right; he makes and sells the mythology of the other to the other, in ways that seem very seductive. This does not necessarily make O’Hara a malign trickster, as we might read through the generosity and intensity of attention to the artistic practices and capabilities of others. Even so, as Larry Rivers and the contributors to the Homage variously attest, O’Hara routinely cut people to ribbons; he could annihilate selves as well as create them; he was a producer of bad charms, of curses, even as his texts continue to charm. Love is a sometimes savage, not always civilising force. The poet’s trace is accentuated by his absence: what we really desire is desire, and in the Homage, we have our desire teased through the functioning commodity of a proxy or a virtual presence. Barbara Guest’s myth of O’Hara has him refusing to go into the historic lair of Picasso and Max Jacob in Paris “bateau lavoir,” quoting him as saying “that was their history and it doesn’t interest me. What does interest me is ours, and we’re making it now” (Berkson and LeSueur 77). Guest is charmed by O’Hara’s commitment to the present, by what crackles, and we might read in Guest’s story a motto for a style of being. O’Hara is aware of the recording machines of history, the potential of the scene for mythology, and so steals the show with his quip as a coup de grace. He overwrites the prior mythology and re-territorialises it completely, knowing that this, too, is a “ghostly demarcation” (Davidson). O’Hara knows he is living as a scene of literature, and it is converted in a poem: “With Barbara Guest in Paris” Oh Barbara! do you think we’ll ever have anything named after us like rue Henri-Barbusse or canard a l’Ouragan? have infected a pale white moonish bateau-frigidaire with our melancholy lights and vaguely proud dissemblings?               (CP 310)

O’Hara sifts the mythic possibility of the moment, and the poem calibrates its control and the impossibility of control. Poetry controls the style

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of being here in the sense that, as David Shapiro puts it, “poetry never masters irony, poetry is the present and constant mastering of irony”: the only way to stay on the tightrope is to keep walking (quoted in Bolton, n.pag.). Contingency becomes necessity becomes contingency again. One cannot ignore history, yet one must be mindful of the style in which one “bears” it, which is here balanced between its connotations of “standing” the situation or bearing a load, a self-reflexive knowledge of one’s bearing. The texture of myth as it is made is not heroic but full of affect, “with our melancholy lights/ and vaguely proud dissembling”: feeling out the intangibility of the moment and the fickleness of remembrance. Presence itself is uncertain, “infected,” “pale,” “frigid,” “melancholy,” “vague,” yet while it is wistful for and doubtful of immortalising, the poem is doing just that. The “Bateau-lavoir” is a “bateau fantome”: a ghost ship which O’Hara renames the “bateau Frigidaire.” The first two stanzas ask Barbara what they might possibly have in terms of impressing their living onto history, making commemorative marks, or being a sacrificial dish like “duck a la hurricane” with its mock pathos. The poem’s satisfaction, in the dueling sense of the word, comes from “Care,” for “the lap of Mallarme/ is right in our Pushkinesque enclosure/ as greatness sleeps outside.” If we think of the Romantic setting of Montmartre, which the poem partly resists and partly laps up, this sonnet to Guest ending with a rare rhyming couplet, ties them together in a gesture of mythopoiesis. O’Hara structures an alternative mythos that yet encloses the ghosts of literary Paris, but in the poem he makes them the ghosts of his own choosing.

Animal Magnetism In “canard a l’Ouragan,” O’Hara returns to the self as “dish” and the need to consume myths, to partake in them physically. The alignment with the animal reinforces the corporeality required. In O’Hara’s quip as in “Proud Poem” there is also ownership of outrage rather than wanting to be remembered through a more proper cenotaph. One of the most apparent aspects of the Homage is how so many contributors refer to O’Hara’s corporeality, an animal presence, that being-in-person that was so powerful and the loss of which is now also overwhelmingly felt. Through a sensual register of presence, contributors express a knowledge of the poet that acknowledges or yearns for some kind of embodied transference or

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connection. In Christianity, such knowledge is symbolised through the disciple touching the hem of Christ’s garment or by Christ’s body and the blood being transubstantiated into bread and wine for bodily possession. Such knowledge is both phantasmatic and corporeal, powerful through its focus on a transmission of a charismatic substance. Just like Rivers, Alice Neel sought to capture O’Hara in painting. She recalls: I met Frank O’Hara in the fifties at the Abstract Expressionist Club. He came to see me in Spanish Harlem, where I lived, and said he would pose for me…When he posed I first painted the poetic profile where I thought he looked like a falcon and then when he came for the Fifth time I really had finished the profile so I asked him if I could do another one quickly and I did the second beat one in a day. When he saw it he said “My God those freckles—still the fauves went as far as that.” The reason I wanted to do the second one was that when he came in the door he looked beat. I started with the mouth and those teeth that looked like tomb stones and then included the lilacs that had faded. I feel that the second one expressed his troubled life more than the first. (Berkson and LeSueur 96)

The first picture (Frank O’Hara 1960) presents O’Hara’s profile with the historical stamp of authority and Classical bearing (if we think of Caesarean, Elizabethan, or Victorian coinage). Neel knows it as a “poetic profile,” having an angularity or sharpness to lean into the present; she generates a metempsychotic idea of the heroic by likening it to the falcon. J.S. Marcus writes that the first has “a haunted, romantic quality, while the second, finished in a single sitting, was marked by something much stranger … It treats O'Hara not as a glamorous, brilliant matinee idol, but as a doomed grotesque, whose ugliness heightens his humanity” (n.pag.). Marcus’s appreciation is rhetorical, eliding what the “human” might be, and pushing the melodramatic “doom” of the daemon as fate. The painting properly occults its subject, drawing out the “para-normal,” showing what is hidden or obscure to knowledge. If the first presents the profile of an ethos, the second picture gives us what is not so perfected or idealised. Death is already present in his body, with its “teeth like tombstones,” and there are no freckles on the Greek statues of heroes, the standards of idealised commemoration. Neel presents a complementary mythology that undercuts vitality with entropy: we see the weathering and decay of the creature.

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In the second painting (Frank O’Hara no.2 1960), she traffics the daemon back to death, rather than from death to life, and this is marked in the blackening of the flowers. Animal spirits can be ugly and O’Hara’s grace to Neel is to treat this as an aesthetic discovery. He adds his own shade to the mythos, remarking to the painter: “My god those freckles—still the fauves went as far as that” (Berkson and LeSueur 96). The (blue) eyes recall the demon borrowed from a da Vinci sketch that Rivers used for Washington: in the fabric of the individual person we contact what Valery calls “the animal abyss” (quoted in Derrida, The Animal, 66). The daemon is what passes through, transcending life or death. The portrait of ethos is carefully made over time through a number of sittings, as Neel says, the encounter with the daemon is spontaneous, improvised, more of a sketch. Reading the Homage, we find an uncommon number of visual representations of the artist: the person of Frank O’Hara was worked and reworked as art, as a model for the artist in many senses. Jane Freilicher writes: “Frank was very well put together physically, the scale of his body, the delicate but irregular features of his face remind somewhat of the drawings of ideal male proportions by Durer. He was very pleasing to look at & I sometimes wonder if this attractiveness was one of the reasons so many painters enjoyed knowing him” (Berkson and LeSueur 23). For her entry to the Homage, she writes of her portrait of O’Hara: my painting was just an attempt to capture a fleeting sense of his physical presence as he seemed, often, to be standing in the doorway of a room, one arm bent up at the elbow, his weight poised on the balls of his feet, maybe saying something funny or charming, proffering a drink or listening attentively, alert and delightful. (23)

Dan Chiasson writes of O’Hara as a site of physical attraction for the New York School visual artists: “The body of Frank O’Hara—the broken nose, the bouncy gait, the jaunty posture—was a special fixation, almost the Mont Sainte-Victoire of this coterie” (n.pag.). This is to say that a key part of O’Hara’s charisma is his fleshly composition or style. The way O’Hara walked is commented upon often in the Homage. In his contribution, Edmund Leites writes in “Frank’s Charm”: “I liked the way he walked. Once I saw him going up Second Avenue. An angel with sneakers” (172). Joe Brainard also writes “I remember Frank O’Hara’s walk. Light and sassy. With a slight twist and slight bounce. With the top half of his body slightly thrust forward. Head back. It was a beautiful walk. Casual. Confident. ‘I don’t care.’ And sometimes ‘I know you are

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looking’” (168). Like Alex Katz, what Brainard admires is O’Hara’s sense of style, and we can in a sense trot along with the poet in his poems, in the company of his daemon. This may well seem delusional, but O’Hara everywhere practises the intimate address in his poems on a whim. Schuyler writes in “To Frank O’Hara”:      And in the crash of certain chewed-up words I see you again dive into the breakers! How you scared us, no, dazzled us swimming in an electric storm which is what you were more lives than a cat dancing, you had a feline grace, poised on the balls of your feet ready to dive and all of it, your poems, compressed into twenty years. How you charmed, fumed, blew smoke from your nostrils like a race horse that just won the race steaming, eager to run only you used words.           (Berkson and LeSueur 187)

This is Frank’s style. Schuyler is careful to give the sense that we are both facing O’Hara and inside a poem in an instant. In Schuyler’s poem, “Frank O’Hara” is an instant of both reading and writing myth. It is both fixed and fugitive, and the myth lives in its iteration, as we commune with the text we remake its moment as mythos. As Nick Selby suggests “the very act of elegising is presented as the site of renewed textual energies, as a scene of continuing poetic production” (“Memory Pieces” 229). Schuyler crosses the feline and the equine to suggest the quality of O’Hara’s amorphous super-daemon. The daemon is both fundamental to the human and not human, like language itself, which is where Schuyler seeks the energetic signature coming again to live through “the crash/ of certain chewed-up words.” This appetite for the absent person is partly

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sated by enjoining mythopoiesis in the act of the poem. In a letter to Guest, Schuyler confesses: “I can’t type on Frank’s typewriter. My touch is much too pastoral: It’s like trying to go for a canter on Pegasus” (Selected Letters 23). The poem machine, like the poem as machine, holds the daemon of its author, which Schuyler cannot exercise, preferring the rhythmical image of a pastoral canter. Schuyler shows his own affective signature in the wit of this distinction and the deft undercutting of pretension. In his homage “Frank’s Physique (A Selective Inventory)” Lawrence Osgood recalls the tincture of the poet’s breath: Beer, gin, and Camel cigarettes – a musky mixture. But there was another odor to be caught that was as distinctive as a whiff of ground rhinoceros horn. (But was it on Frank’s breath, or did it come, like the effluvium of an essential oil, from his pale Irish skin … For years, I could summon it into my nostrils at will. (24)

Note that this experience is conjured, phantasmatic, yet it is not an image that is required but a set of sensually provocative stimuli, a personal algebra of an intangible effect. This chemical breakdown of O’Hara’s aura, which Osgood locates as “breath,” cannot be ultimately codified. One can only attempt to capture what is truly “distinctive” through a poetic analogy: “a whiff of ground rhinoceros horn.” This equation is absurd as it is generous and precise: it is a personal and intimate usage of a connoisseur’s phrase that suits Osgood’s exotic and fugitive O’Hara. It could easily have come from an O’Hara poem like “Second Avenue.” And so as we return to read O’Hara in such phrases, in both the Homage and the Collected Poems, we can expect to get these distinctive whiffs of the poet’s breath. We could say Osgood’s phrase functions in the synesthetic manner of Proust’s madeleine, but rather than it being an accidental trigger, Osgood can seemingly “summon it into my nostrils at will.” Osgood’s mythology of O’Hara, of himself and O’Hara together, is partly olfactory, and within his homage he treats with a range of physical effects: “His nose, His lips … His Breath … His Hands … His Clothes … His Voice” (24-5). His poeticisms become apotropaic charms to charge the O’Hara myth. As a carnal inventory it develops for us the charisma of the poet, both within and without the poetry, and erotically invests the writing through a flanking movement of suffusive peritexts that compel us to summon the person of the poet, in alliance with the sensual elicitations of the poem. The flesh is a text (pale Irish skin) read by the nose; the poem and the body of the poet are overlaid.

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C. Stephen Jaeger writes of a possible “physiology of narrative” which would be: a study of how narrative attaches to the physical presence of the subject that inspires it and is derivable from it, how, to recur to Proust, the notions we form from a person’s destiny or infer from the physical presence, sits in the curve of his cheeks, follow exactly the line of his nose, blend harmoniously in the sound of his voice – in short, how the body contains the stories that it implies and that have formed it – and becomes the medium that expresses them. (30-1)

For Jaeger there is a remarkable co-incidence in the complementary forms of trace and organism, of the constituting animal that is by its works constituted. He explicitly reads for the daemon (a person’s destiny) in “the curve of his cheeks … the line of his nose … the sound of his voice.” Our notion of selves being constituted through the logic of myth, existing as amorphous and changing apprehensions, which nevertheless rely on a common formal vocabulary, can be extended to the body: a particular posture and a precise timbre of voice are part of a visceral signature that we can keep affectively impressed as erotic modulations of presence even (or especially) in a person’s absence. O’Hara’s nose is an abridged version of his myth: it is prominent; it is literary; it divides the profile, making O’Hara different from himself; it is a “boxer’s nose” as a result of several knocks in youth. It is the nose of a broken hero, and it is this toughness and vulnerability which we read in the emotional tempo of the poetry. The nose is at once human and animal; it is an organ of civilised distinction and an intuitive protuberance. Besides the focus on his now-famous walk or nose, O’Hara’s voice is remarked upon for its charmed frequency. Ron Padgett pays homage to O’Hara with the following: “Poem” Funny, I hear Frank O’Hara’s voice tonight in my head e.g when I think in words he’s saying them. I’m glad

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I heard him when he was alive and I’m glad I can hear him now and not be sorry, just have it all here, the way Jimmy, stark naked with rose petals stuck to his body, said, “Have you seen Frank? I heard he’s in town tonight.”           (Homage 134)

Padgett holds O’Hara’s voice as a means through which he is able to attune the circumstances of his own life. Padgett is possessed by O’Hara’s voice or talk as a preferred frequency for thinking. He cultivates a myth of O’Hara as a vehicle of comfort, the voice becoming a metonym for the hero himself. This experience is supplemented by memory or imagination, where he sees Jimmy [Schuyler] who is sensually and shockingly present (covered in rose petals), but within the poem is actually just as much of a phantasm.13 Padgett carries the receipt of the quality of presence of these poets, available as vivid abstractions that operate theatrically, and they are phantasmatic technics of Padgett’s own presence. Who now speaks? The charm of O’Hara’s voice succeeds Padgett’s own: thoughts are better said by Frank and this continues as a hauntologue outside of the living presence of the person. O’Hara’s voice as a musical authority is archived in Padgett, as it is archived in Kenward Elmslie, who writes in “First Frost” of this absent presence “no Frank O’Hara/ snatches of his voice in certain intonations/ blotting out process// no red leaves left/ ritual” (169). On the page facing Padgett’s poem, within a chronic and physical embrace, is Schuyler’s own homage to O’Hara, “Buried at Springs” (“There is a hornet in the room/ and one of us will have to go”) (135). These poems conspire. Schuyler is standing there naked. His poem has 13  Gooch reports that Schuyler experienced “breaks during which he felt he saw visions of the dead Frank O’Hara…One such incident was mentioned in Ron Padgett’s “Poem” written in 1971” (287). Padgett’s joy is not nostalgic but is confirmed as a living desire of community, taking in the seductive potentialities of O’Hara as daemon through the currency of Schuyler’s “sighting.”

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evacuated its subject and is dispersed in its surroundings, taking in details of a landscape which includes (lightly) the figure of O’Hara. The details are desiring signets for presence while acknowledging that the words of the poem might be all that is possible. Both poems are underwritten by death. Death may be the “hornet in the room” that Schuyler deals with gingerly, and death is also indirectly mentioned and uneasily welcomed in Padgett’s poem, as he tests the uncanny effect of being able to speak as the revenant. Schuyler’s poem exquisitely sets this emotional balance. It is both exhilarated and exhausted: A day subtle and suppressed in mounds of juniper enfolding scratchy pockets of shadow while bigness- rocks, trees, a stumpstand shadowless in an overcast of ripe grass.            (136)

With horror, amusement, and indifference, the poem wonders at being buried at the source of life (SPRINGS) just as Padgett wonders at the superiority of the presence of O’Hara’s voice and his charm as an enunciator. These poems produce O’Hara dialogically, while the authors make delicate filiations with the self as other, as the things of the world. This works in the “spirit of O’Hara.”The O’Hara accent seems lodged in most who knew him. Indeed, his voice has a mythos of its own, as Ned Rorum writes of his: “now-famous and mourned Brooklyn- Irish Ashberian whine” (39). Osgood sketches the expressive range of O’Hara’s voice as an aesthetic work in itself:I still sometimes hear Frank’s voice. I hear no words, only a rise and fall of pitch ringing with great clarity in some chamber of my inner ear. But no words are needed to tell me what his voice is saying. It twangs jauntily along, then bubbles into a laugh, suddenly jumps forward like a motorcycle revving up a hill, and finally swoops down like a Rachmaninoff glissando in a delighted pounce of a final, unintelligible word. The sound says that life is exciting, that honesty is joyous and pretension silly, that all discoveries are good, and that energy is all. (25) What is sought is an affective register, a tempo. It is the aural signature of O’Hara’s daemon: it occurs to Osgood and is nourished as a possession in many senses. The modulations of O’Hara’s voice are recorded in various audio and film archives, as more and more contemporary poets are

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presently archived in this way. The person of the writer, when it is so much a part of social poetics, returns to intonate the poems.14Bill Berkson also focussed on O’Hara’s talk, bringing it together with his walk to convey the sense of O’Hara’s charisma as simultaneously physical and intellectual:Frank’s was the most graceful, quick, courageous, sometimes terrifying intelligence. Often, no matter how intimate or involved you might be, you could only begin to imagine what and how much he was feeling. It was electric, full of light and air and blood, amazing, passionate, and full of sense. As a poet, a genius, just walking around, talking, he had that magic touch. He made things and people sacred”. (quoted in Schjeldahl 139-140) O’Hara himself focussed on the power of talk as a kind of shared breath (“air”) to overcome the abyss of death. In “To Jane, Some Air,” he writes:              Oh space! you never conquer desire, do you? you turn us up and we talk to each other and then we truly are happy as the telephone rings and rings and buzzes and buzzes so is that the abyss?   I talk, you talk, he talks, she talks, it talks.          (CP 192)

This Beckettian exchange of just talking, to keep talking, harks back to “Personism” where the poem is as good as a phone call. Here, the poem “comes squarely between the poet and the person” as code, and like the technic of the telephone which “rings and rings and buzzes and buzzes” something is happening, though what “it” is and whether “it” can be communicated is another question (CP 499). The Homage is a community’s testament to this unconquerable desire for the effulgence of speech: it works to give a receipt of the presence of the poet, to incite desire even in those that did not know and cannot know O’Hara, we are delivered of a sensual catalogue to function as a proxy object of desire. Taking up the paradox of presence, what is sought for in the Homage is O’Hara’s force of the human at the limits of mortality, that is, his daemon. While O’Hara socialises his private mythologies, this holds true in some degree for all technicians of the lyric. What is unique is that this action is 14  See Steve Evans’ work on phonotextuality and the digital and magnetic graphology of the trace of the poet’s voice and the preserved buzz of poetry readings.

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not confined to the poem but that O’Hara’s whole manner of being, as a social and intellectual animal, is involved in his practice as an artist. As this chapter demonstrates, this is a calculated mythos but it also exceeds O’Hara. Derrida gives us the concept of “hauntology” in considering both the possibilities of presence and to deal with the impossible, the revenant. Colin Davis writes that, “Hauntology supplants its near homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (373). In death we read the figure of Frank O’Hara taken up by the Homage as hauntologue; the fact of death activates the working of mythos, as an abstract potential of presence, and the instances of commemoration, re-iteration, and re-animation that are potentially infinite. What remains of O’Hara in the ethos of his poems and in the memory of his friends continues to charm readers that come to his work. Eva Horn asks: “[i]s charisma a personal quality or capability, a ‘gift of grace,’ as the Greek word χάρισμα indicates? Or is it psychological manipulation used by certain personalities to obtain the obedience and loyalty of others?” (1). Horn then asserts that the potency of the charismatic “is essentially bound to his person. Its basis therefore seems attributable less to rational insight or consensus than to an affective bond, a bond between persons” (2). Through his own poetic, ludic, and double-edged gestures to others, O’Hara rescues mythos from a static archive, replacing it in a living practice of language where the act of enunciation concentrates the historicity of usage, person, and community. His generous, tainted, and embodied conception of personhood views the self as not an event but an open and local situation of the event. As this chapter demonstrates, the traces of his creative exchanges with Rivers and the contributions to the Homage constitute a rich “working out” of Pasternak’s legend “you in others—this is your soul.”

CHAPTER 4

Tricked Myth Machines: Making Ted Berrigan Making The Sonnets

Ted Berrigan has become a kind of folk or counter-cultural hero of American poetry. His poetry rolls out a mythology of “Ted Berrigan” as one who infinitely, brokenly, and affectively tests not only what it is possible to say in a poem, but also what a poem and poet might be. In this chapter, I argue that The Sonnets is a strategic debut for Berrigan the poet. Indeed, “Ted Berrigan” does not exist until he begins banging The Sonnets out on a typewriter and becomes a series of phenomenological transactions that any idea of self vainly tries to contain. Underlined by a persistent scepticism about any essential ground for the self, Berrigan selects the figure of the writer—specifically the poet, who is necessarily and intricately involved in myth-making—as a preferred figuration. Berrigan also chooses New York City as the locus of this mythos, following O’Hara’s sense of the city as always already myth-laden. Lastly, Berrigan seizes upon and incessantly circulates the idea of a cult “New York School” of poets, gambling on its significance as a historical literary phenomenon. Gestating the Berrigan mythology, The Sonnets is both radically communitarian and intensely “self-regarding” in a way that annihilates the habit of thinking about these ontological tendencies as necessary opposites. Berrigan’s Master’s thesis was titled “Bernard Shaw’s Treatment of the Individual’s Problem of How to Live as Illustrated in Four Plays” (Padgett 6). The “problem of how to live” was a lifelong question for Berrigan and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Hose, The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94841-2_4

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as much a preoccupation in his poetry as it is in O’Hara’s. In his memoir of Berrigan, Tom Clark writes: I learned a lot about Ted’s philosophy of life, before even meeting him, from reading The Sonnets, which contained a kind of composite self-portrait of the author—or at least his projection of himself. The modern post-­ romantic art-hero, maker of big, perilous, splashy “major statements” was a persona that developed gradually between and through the lines. I later came to believe this was a persona Ted borrowed from Frank O’Hara, who’d developed it as a description of the New York abstract expressionist painters, those bigger-than-life figures who remained great heroes to Ted, as they’d been to Frank, his favourite poet. (21–22)

While Berrigan takes many cues from O’Hara, they differ in approach firstly due to Berrigan’s own sense of coming after, that all models of poetic virtuosity had already been tried. Accordingly, he exhibits proficiency through a self-conscious handling of various models but sharply revealing them as simply poetic tricks at his disposal. Secondly, he presents the poet as shabby, uncouth, plundering, and paratactic, revelling in an interrelated rogue ethos and aesthetics. Berrigan’s Sonnets are modern art machines that deliberately produce the illusion of action through the rapid rotation of tropes and phrases. One senses that these are tricks or a game, but it is precisely the charm of the artifice, a blend of innocence and scepticism that fascinates. These machines, instead of giving us a predictable sequence of action in space and time, chop things up and render their images, events, and scenes garbled. Sentences are lifted and unfinished, syntax is shattered, and the whole cycle is wound with heavy and partial repetition, both sonic and imagistic. Every succeeding image is usually sequenced at a radical disconnect to the previous one and that which follows. Through a process that couples action and watching, praxis and scopophilia, The Sonnets manages to be “new” while still being caught in expressive finitude. Indeed, its radical suggestions about time are quite old.1 Berrigan takes the traditional form of the sonnet as a kind of novelty toy, but his “play” is serious in the manner of an art prankster like Marcel Duchamp. As a symbological “spinning” machine, The Sonnets undermines the construction of a stable 1  Alice Notley argues for a radical treatment of time in The Sonnets in the introduction to her edited Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan.

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self through time, memory, literature, and experience and instead projects Berrigan as a literary impresario. In choosing the sonnet cycle, he invariably calls up, becomes synonymous with, and occupies the aura of William Shakespeare. Berrigan allies himself with Shakespeare’s earlier enquiry into the metaphysic of the lyric, for the identity of the “I” that speaks in a Shakespearean sonnet is typically unclear.2 Shakespeare’s sonnets present identity as an intricate system of erotics and manners, that is, as a social construction of affect and a will to presence through sequence, numbers, conceptual rhythms, and through the subtle schemata of difference and repetition. What is put in process are versions of the self that are sensible but not easily available for fixity. The self in both Berrigan’s and Shakespeare’s sonnets is not historically located but best viewed as a mutating abstraction that can be made only as the line of the lyric and is best apprehended by thinking poetically. As an object of thought, the self is furiously fugitive. Berrigan exploits Shakespeare’s trick of pronominal algebra. That is, where Shakespeare modulates “I, me, my, myself, mine” and “thou, thee, thyself, you” into revolving plots of intimacy and estrangement, Berrigan turns this method to include the names that populate his personal mythology. Through their repetition the reader develops their own dynamic of intimacy and estrangement to these figures, though they are no less abstract or opaque than the other addressed by Shakespeare. The principle here is that “Berrigan” slips into the magus figure “William Shakespeare,” the most accomplished chameleon in the English language. Jorge Luis Borges represents Shakespeare as a substantial emptiness that seeks articulation through an infinite set of human integers, traces that compose “the human.” As he does so, he gives us a lesson in sympathy and pathos: THERE was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun to speak of this emptiness showed him his error and made him feel always that an individual should not  See Mac D.P. Jackson’s essay for an extensive account of Shakespeare’s pronominal modulation and an analysis of their sequential progression: “The Distribution of Pronouns in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” AUMLA 98 (May 2002): 22–38. 2

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differ in outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find a cure for his ill and thus he learned the small Latin and less Greek a contemporary would speak of; later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person. (Labyrinths 284)

Here we have a configuration of the author as an infinite regression and progression of masks: a dynamic virtuosity of identity through difference that has no absolute base. The author-function remains only a function, the author existing in abstract and animated ratio (Berrigan: Shakespeare: Borges: Ovid). Aaron Gare states that for the philosopher Friedrich Schelling: Whatever product or form exists is in perpetual process of forming itself … the process of self-constitution or self-organisation, rather than being a marginal phenomenon, must be the primal ground of all reality … Dead matter, in which product prevails over productivity, is a result of the stable balance of forces where products have achieved a state of indifference. Organisms are self-organising beings in which productivity cannot easily maintain products in a state of indifference. Living organisms differ from nonliving organisms in that their complexity makes it even more difficult to maintain a state of indifference. They must respond creatively to changes in their environments to form and reform themselves as products. (35)

Gare describes a desire to move from ontologies of substances towards ontologies of relations. No self is developed alone; its contours are formed dialectically, dialogically, diacritically, and in flux, and a vital part of its material sustenance is played out in the realm of the symbolic. Myth is the original phenomenology, the technology for a ritual folding of the phenomenal world into a symbolic economy to make it contiguous with human being, to make human being immanent within the sensual and metaphysical world. Classical myth in the Western tradition addresses the interference and manipulation of the fates or gods to show the absolute contingency of human being. By offering encyclopaedic narrative

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precedents of the exchange between bodies and of the trans-substantiation of people into things, it offers a means through which we contain and read experience. In “Sonnet LX,” Berrigan calls up Ovid’s rhythmic ideas of metamorphosis and his rhetoric of fate and contingency in considering how a twentieth-­century version of self and poet might be articulated: Old prophets     Help me to believe New York!   sacerdotal   drink it take a pill Blocks of blooming winter. ……………………………………………… Areté   I   thus I   Again I ……………………………………………… Berrigan  secretly  HEKTOR  GAME ETC. More books!  Rilke  Stevens  Pound   Auden   & Frank Some kind of Bowery Santa Clauses   I wonder Who am about to die   the necessary lies.                     (CP 61)

“Sonnet LX” can be seen to collage a purely associative field. While the capacity for the number of different hermeneutical readings is infinite, we could also say that the poem represents as precisely as possible who the character “Ted Berrigan” is. The Sonnets were composed through an admixture of chance and intuitive selection. Berrigan promotes their “machinic” method of production, suggesting that he worked through his own notebooks of unfinished poems and freely lifted lines from whatever material was around him: overheard conversations; the poetry of others; or his own transcribed impressions of visual art. That is to say, he positions his attention as a vacant “I” within a saturated atmosphere of the sign then begins to construct poems through the action of bricolage. “Sonnet LII” declares, “It is a human universe: & I/ is a correspondent” (CP 57). As Berrigan says in an interview: One of my principal desires is to make my poems be like my life, and my life is the way I think I am, ‘cause I don’t know how I am. I can’t see myself the way you see me. But I can see everything else around me. If I can make everything around me be the way that it is, presumably I can create the shape of the self inside the poem, because there is a person inside almost all

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of the poems … I couldn’t have it be inside that person talking unless I created an outside first. Inside doesn’t exist without the outside.                       (Talking 133–4)

This positions us somewhere on a continuum between “the death of the author” and the absolute cult of the author. Within Berrigan’s practice there is a transductive theory of the subject which implies that there is no interiority without exteriority, that sentient being exists on a plane which only seems to have sides or disjunctive surfaces, and that the Cartesian duality of self and world becomes a fallacy. There is a singular positioning of the artistic self when one accepts lines from one’s own imagination as “found material.” This notion circumvents Coleridge’s argument distinguishing fancy and imagination and disarticulates the anxiety of influence by robbing the ground upon which the ego erects its self-congratulatory statuary. This suggests a structuration for “being-in-the-world” as a loose king of dialectics, without the mortifying kinds of identification that reproduce fixed versions of the self.3 Using words as currency, Berrigan courts what is baffling in experience and language, or language as experience, but there is always a careful regard for control, for being in some sense a sovereign in the exchange. This is a dialectic of anarchy and autocracy. Structurally, the impulse is towards formal derangement and the new is sought in the syntactical derangement of pre-existing vocables. “Sonnet LX” works with received cultural “blocks” and arranges them in such a way as to flatten the depth of their connotation, creating a Cubist plane of imbricated surfaces, while also exaggerating the effect of connotation to the point of absurdity. The poem invites the reader to resist the logic of narrative and regard the page as one would a pictorial field of reference; the eye has permission to stray and assume the agency of the bricoleur. We might also see the piled structure of sheaf-like lines as planes of affect that tolerate only surface contact, yet somehow produce a spacious interiority. The first daub of the poem (one begins harvesting in an habitual left-­ hand corner) is an apostrophic address to the poet’s precedents (“old prophets”) that immediately places the poet in their company. To 3  The figure of a king here is akin to Alfred Jarry’s creation of Ubu Roi, an obscene farce of autocracy and divine right that comes to take over the writer’s life. Berrigan spies this proto-­ dada prank in “Sonnet LXXXVII” where he writes, “These sonnets are an homage to King Ubu … These sonnets are an homage to myself.”

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complete this intrigue, the last line announces the poet’s own death, impishly putting him in place with the “old prophets.” Even in this beginning Berrigan makes his death part of the work and of the poet’s plot; The Sonnets eulogise the self as a passing thing even in the act of creating it. John Palatella remarks on this “posthumous vein” and Berrigan’s early habit of “speak[ing] of his dead self in the first person” (27).4 This is a potent ploy. Gesturally it moves to control the legacy of being and the idea of reputation as a fundamental part of beginning. The revenant is located in the first turns of the myth machine: it ensures the trace, the graphic turn, always has the exquisite press of mortality. These tricks of presence are not sentimental though; they are the wilful manipulation of “necessary lies.” Berrigan’s manoeuvre is both a reflexive gambol of immortality and its question. Berrigan further positions himself by addressing “New York!” and asking the prophets to help him inhabit the myth of the city. He frames them and it as part of a mystical process (“Help me to believe”). He also throws in the word “sacerdotal,” which has certain mystical tailings, alongside the idea of a hedonist’s communion (“drink it take a pill”). He lets loose the figure of “The best fighter in Troy” as a proxy for the poet-as-hero, then splits this figure into a love triangle with the Almighty through the injunction, “Be bride, groom and priest.” Finally, he ridicules the scene by placing them “in pyjamas” with the promise of an infantile rapture: “Sweet girls will bring you candied apples!/ Drummer-boys and Choo-Choos will astound you!” The middle, axial, or spinal line of the sonnet “Arete I thus I Again I I” marks the traditional strophe, a structural necessity of the sonnet form where the poet turns the theme. Berrigan has the mythical figure of areté, the trope of one’s personal grace (or “excellence” or “effectiveness” in Homer)5 as the engine of a little train of auto-biography that has virtually no cargo, except for linkages (“thus, again”) spaces (“”) and the repetition of the sign of the “I,” which in successive steps is re-stationed throughout the line. This central spindle is a little eulogy for the action of tropes themselves, their quality of always turning and their return to life around and 4  Palatella goes on to say that “…such forms of poetic address may sound sappy or naïve, but they are quickened into significance by the intimation of mortality always lurking in Berrigan’s poems. Berrigan is an elegist of the present for whom the things one does to fill hours and days comprise life’s most important works” (27). 5  See the entry for “Areté” in Liddell and Scott, p. 200.

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within the “I.” Giorgio Agamben would not accept “thus” as a functional linkage but as a condition of being that is in rhetorical relation to the things of the world:         Being-thus, being one’s own mode of being—we cannot grasp this as a thing.   It is precisely the evacuation of any thingness. …………….      In every thing affirm simply the thus, sic, beyond good and evil.  But thus does not simply mean in this or that mode, with those certain properties. “So be it” means “let the thus be.”   In other words, it means “yes.”         (This is the meaning of Nietzsche’s yes.   The yes is said not simply of a state of things, but of its being-thus.   Only for this reason can it eternally return. The thus is eternal.) (102–3)

Berrigan’s faith in the redemption of the thus is faltering: “An organ grinder’s monkey does his dance.” This gives the sense that the poem operates the person, and the organic creature becomes a function of the machine of language. To interrupt this ventriloquism, the poet tries the trick of saying his own name (Ted) and the names of his close friends Ron (Padgett) and Dick (Gallup), a trick that he dismisses as “Didactic” and “un-melodic,” and a stylistic identification against which he rebels. Berrigan then re-assumes the mythical shape of “The best fighter in Troy”—“HEKTOR”—the warrior who must face Achilles. The irony of the myth is that Hektor knows it is his fate to die and that Troy must fall, yet he must be fooled into fulfilling his fate.6 The struggle is heroic because it is hopeless. It is, to emulate the style of emphasis here, a TRAGEDY. Yet it is also a “GAME ETC.” and Berrigan’s formulation of being “secretly HEKTOR” is another toreador pass or feint as we make a charge of meaning against it. Berrigan-as-Hektor turns to face not Achilles but “Rilke Stevens Pound Auden/ & Frank”; he undertakes combat with the “old prophets,” the 6  In 1962 Berrigan writes to his wife Sandy after seeing Gregory Peck play Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter (1950): “Jimmy Ringo represented the legendary American hero, tough, competent, heart of gold, nerves of steel, doomed to die, but living resignedly and heroically while alive. The Wild West version of Hektor … It may never have been that way, the age of heroes may never have existed, but we all have nostalgia for it anyway.” Dear Sandy, Hello p. 74.

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masters. Like Hektor, he knows he must perish: “I wonder/ who am about to die.” But there is time to make public his love for O’Hara by addressing him in the familiar tu. This poem is acutely self-conscious about the matter of influence, and it involves these names as talismans that become part of the poet’s self-composition, a part of the wilful creation of one’s ancestry through the traditional action of acknowledging one’s ancestors and so claiming their aura of intrigue. The tender link is “Frank,” a more intimately scaled name, and one that Berrigan takes to be the living transmission of poetry. Berrigan is writing himself a ticket to be an arbiter of poetry and he extends largesse to his friends to occupy not just the space of poetry but Western mythology. Through a seemingly “accidental” or chance method, he casts himself inevitably as a demigod. In contrast to O’Hara, who trippingly makes lines of affiliation and who addresses his heroes with coterie-like intimacy, Berrigan’s appreciation of the “phantom immanence of the name” is at a remove: it is a learnt tactic. And so as a clever person with one eye closed, Berrigan’s calling of “Rilke Stevens Pound” is an exquisite ploy of subscribing to their signatures and making them signatories to himself. He sets them up like a valley of monuments, and perhaps they are so monumental that they represent the Impossible, like the idea of defeating Achilles. Hektor’s victory is in his “Arete,” the striving for personal grace, and so it is with Berrigan. The radical use of recombination as a method of composing The Sonnets is this poet’s trial, his way of struggling through the historical necessity of pastiche and achieving a style. This gives us a mythology of the subject akin to the mythology of the Gods generated by the Greeks: fatal; willing to interfere; willing to disintegrate; or upset the human simply for one’s amusement. The subject is both capricious creator and sacrificed hero. Part of Berrigan’s attraction is to stage the poem as a dramatic object, inviting you to be at court with himself as poetry’s heir. Yet this radical cut-up technique is borrowed from Duchamp and Burroughs, so Berrigan’s use of it is a kind of burlesque. He is committed to the performance of techniques, of the vaudevillian, but if questioned backstage he would admit the contrivance, the source material, and say he has nothing to hide, that this is show business. Berrigan plays this posture for its vibrato, for its mix of vulnerability and machismo, or as Rifkin suggests, for “the tension between pathos and procedure” (112). In his 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, John Cage describes his music as “a purposeless play” which is “an affirmation of life—not an attempt to

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bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living” (4). Through their aleatory method of composition, Berrigan’s sonnets are also odes to contingency, a structural homage to the messy arrival then figural density of fact, detail, crossed paths, identifications with mythic heroes, flashes of infant memory, and unstructured desires. They are a celebration of the arbitrary through a deliberately dislocating syntax where they are charged and left open indefinitely to encourage aberrant discharges. Questions of proprietorship circle more frequently around Berrigan’s Sonnets than appropriations apparent in the work of others such as Cage, Duchamp, Tzara, Burroughs, Ashbery, and Warhol. This is perhaps because there is an ethos of reckless stealing at work in The Sonnets. As Berrigan says in an interview, “And we are in control of another power. We have stolen something, namely those lines. I mean one has to be as witty as one can in the face of the holocaust.”7 The looming “face” of final things licenses a spree of Bacchanalic consumption, yet this is a serious hedonism that works against propriety, property, and authorisation. Against the idea of control, Berrigan fully subscribes to and relishes Keats’ idea that “a poet has no identity.” In a letter to Richard Wodehouse [October 27, 1818], Keats writes: As to the poetical Character itself … it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto. … It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion [sic] Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no other identity—he is continually for—and filling some other Body

and later: I am ambitious of doing the world some good: if I should be spared that may be the work of mature years—in the interval I will assay to reach as high a summit in poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer. (947–48)

7  Ted Berrigan in an interview with Lyn Hejinian and Kit Robinson. “Any Possible Way of Making Words” from In the American Tree 1978. http://jacket2.org/interviews/ any-possible-way-making-words.

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Attracted to Keats’ negative capability, Berrigan collars Keats several times in The Sonnets, climactically declaring in Sonnet LXIII that “Keats was a baiter of bears who died of lust.” The embrace of subject is tightly modelled here: Berrigan both owns and distances himself from it. The line could count as a slanderous piece of poetry gossip (baiter of bears), filled with the aura of scandal that follows a love of low-life entertainment and blood sports. Or perhaps it is a piece of alloyed admiration (died of lust). Or might we simply regard it as a musical phrase with Shakespearean measure? It is all of these. Berrigan might also be equating negative ontology with lust, suggesting that the horizon of possibility can only function through (hopeless) desire. However, if Keats preferred the subtle elision of the signature (“here lies one whose name was writ on water”), Berrigan names himself as belligerent, semi-tragic combatant, and exploiter of the muse, perhaps. As Berrigan writes in one of the few titled Sonnets, “From a Secret Journal”: Dreams, aspirations of presence! Innocence gleaned, Annealed! The world in its mysteries are explained, And the struggles of babies congeal. A hard core is formed. “I want to be a cowboy.” Doughboy will do. Romance of it all was overwhelming Daylight of itself dissolving and of course it rained.                       (CP 33–4)

The poem might be “about” the closing down of possibility, the ossification of the ability to change. But who is the author of this disappointment? Berrigan has said that he composed the sonnet from lines in his friend Joe Brainard’s journal,8 thus producing myth out of the other. This is an act of coupling, a personal wink to a friend, and yet we are invited to enter the terrain of The Sonnets as a familiar. Similarly, Berrigan enters the fray with Keats, crossing their signatures and becoming himself a baiter of bears. Libbie Rifkin argues that Berrigan reads himself more carefully into the career of Keats than Shakespeare, precisely because he prefers to identify with Shakespeare, referring to Keats only obliquely within The Sonnets. Even “being in mysteries” already 8  Berrigan reading The Sonnets, New Langton Arts, San Francisco, June 24, 1981. Available at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Berrigan.php.

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has a phantasm. Yet Rifkin makes the provocative point that The Sonnets quotes Keats’s ambitions as a poet, then moves on Shakespeare without Keats’s “labor of formal imitation and innovation” (110). The gesture is to inhabit Keats’s genius for self-mythologising, not to copy his formal artistry. The wit of The Sonnets plays on the wit of both Keats and Shakespeare, becoming an act of love that takes the form of reading: a personal hermeneutic. Shakespeare loves Petrarch, Keats loves Shakespeare, Berrigan loves them all. This does not preclude jealous rivalries. On the contrary it is perhaps jealousy that spurs each writer in turn to action. So as an historically specific articulation, The Sonnets has a memory, but Berrigan’s poems also have a capacity for irony that is not simply fundamental to their design but also atmospherically dispersed. If we follow Leo Bersani and think “[i]rony is the style of a mind in constant metamorphosis,” then we can read in Berrigan’s machine the desire for repetition as an obverse part of the will for constant change (107). Alice Notley makes a case for the sonnet as a form [especially] suited to detached self-scrutiny, using lines and phrases from past and present poems, reading material, and ongoing mind, in an order determined by numbers rather than syntax. The pieces of the self are allowed to separate and reform: one is not chronology but its parts and the real organism they create. (4)

She cites Berrigan’s breaking and remaking of the form as the method that enables the sonnet to be used “as more than argument.” As she reasons, “one could condense cognition into fourteen or so lines, if each piece, each segment of the fourteen, even each phrase in a line, meant enough” (4). In a way, the testing strength of Berrigan’s Sonnets is to hold the fragments of experience apart: the assemblage holds forth in its negative spaces the possibilities of disassemblage, of a radical openness to contingency in a will to re-assortment through language. Berrigan knows when to make the cut. Taking experience as text, one is always already moved, quoted, and a step apart from the moment. Each rhetorical gambit or lyrical sling seems to land back at the zero of presence where one must begin again through the poem: LII It is a human universe: & I Is a correspondent

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………. and O I am afraid!   The poem upon the page will not kneel   for everything comes to it gratuitously… …………. O wet kisses, death on earth, lovely fucking in the poem on the page, you have kept up with the times and I am glad!                        (CP 57–8)

Here Berrigan takes up the megalomania and affirmation of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in a seemingly more humble fashion, using Whitman’s poem as an enabling constitution, substantially generative, and as apotropaic charm.

Territoire de Moi: Berrigan and America With his reciting of Whitman, Berrigan turns to a specifically American articulation of self. We may think of Berrigan’s poetry as a kind of sophisticated folk-art tableau, combining traditional European forms, American history (Benedict Arnold and Benjamin Franklin), and highly localised “heroes” (such as Dick Gallup). In a similar manner to the way American English transforms standard English through specifically expansive American histories, Berrigan appropriates the sonnet for America as a vessel for its vernacular and for his own localised usage. The idea of making a person through The Sonnets is allied to Gertrude Stein’s formulations of personhood in The Making of Americans: the poems are obtuse, difficult, formally experimental, and open expressions of the self as language. This is not the idea of America as a sovereign state, but the human principal conceived of as a wildly dispersed and perpetual frontier. In Berrigan, as with certain Abstract Expressionist painters like Pollock, de Kooning, or Kline, an abandonment of the idea of self to the lyric line is always tempted to a recuperation by the solitary, starred heroic figure. The recurrence of phrases and motifs in The Sonnets shows that the occasion of mythos is always for the first time and always the same: this idea of synchronicity and time as a looped abstract is analogous in these poems to the idea of identity “itself.”

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LXXXV They basted his caption on top of the fat sheriff, “The Pig.” Cowboys   and banging on my sorrow with books No lady dream around in any bad exposure The dust fissure drains the gay dance ……………………………………………. Davy Crockett was nothing like Jesse James The most elegant present I could get! ……………………………………………. dazzling slim and badly loved You are asleep. Lovely light is singing to itself.                        (CP 74)

You could count these lines as pieces of smashed narrative or accept that the basic unit of sense is the line, but taken together this is a systematic exposition of a metaphysical conceit. Art, Cowboys, Romantic Symbol, Comic Strips, Music, Rhetoric: the poem lays a claim on “everything” and seems to metabolise a solipsistic light through the glyphs on the page. It gets its energy to continue from itself. The charm of language is here tightly bound and tested as charm. Berrigan finds a new control by being out of control. The internal quandary of the poem is in its mixed syncopations: “The dust fissure drains the gay dance” suggests finding poetic “meaning” through its mellifluous texture. Yet, perhaps what is more important is the gambit of performance, that meaning is a sensual linguistic experience. As Renny Pritkin discerns, we might consider the subject matter of The Sonnets to be “the stretching of language’s ability to make meaning” (24). The prize of being present is perhaps continually discovering one’s difference from oneself or one’s difference through the other. “Davy Crockett was nothing like Jesse James,” declares Berrigan, adding, “The most elegant present I could get!” The manner of choosing the nexus of proper names underwrites a private mythology. Patti Smith explained her lack of declared American influences and her preference for Rimbaud, Cendrars, Céline, and Michaux as being “because of the biographies.” She was “attracted to lifestyles, and there just wasn’t [sic] any great biographies of genius American lifestyles except the cowboys” (quoted in Kane, “From poetry,” 192). As evidenced in “From a Secret Journal,” cowboy metaphors persist throughout Berrigan’s poems. “John Wayne, Count Korzybski, G[eorge] B[ernard] S[haw], and Thomas Wolfe were part of his pantheon,” writes Ron Padgett of the younger Berrigan (24). By modelling the intellectual cowpoke, Berrigan plays on American Romanticism,

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Expressionism, and sentimentality. In “Clear the Range” (1977), he stamps his interest in the phenomenological ambience of Westerns, fetishising the figure of the cowboy while sentimentally owning it at the same time. We might read The Sonnets as proud American expressionism, as an intellectual folk-art which, in its stitching, recognises Emersonian pragmatism and sophisticated play. Patches of this, patches of that, with a pronounced irregularity: this is the form of American Romanticism that wants to read its difference from the traditions of literature as well as take its place among them. Eric Selinger writes of Berrigan’s poetry: the clash between grand allusion and garrulous demotic does not signal a cultural decline. It’s meant, instead, to exorcise the ghosts of aesthetic pretension, as when Sonnet IV begins by quoting Rilke (“Lord, it is time. Summer was very great”) only to turn simply silly: “All sweetly spoke to her of me / about your feet, so delicate, and yet double E!!” I’m no Tulsa intellectual snob, such lines proclaim—but I’m no Tulsa bumpkin, either. (n.pag.)

Although he fashions himself as the provincial roughneck or simply from “outside,” Berrigan is drawn to the idea of a centralised, cosmopolitan but world-weary poet. Like O’Hara, Berrigan territorialises American poetry in order to make a space for himself, yet ensconces himself in the midst of New York poetries and accordingly somewhere near the “heart” of twentieth-century American poetry. Al Filreis speaks of Berrigan’s designs on a “great American symbolic selfhood”: By force of will, by force of personality: he just showed up from Tulsa and said “why not me?” The ego is so huge, but still somehow open; wanting to be this huge presence, and in being this huge presence, you are welcoming, generous. … You have your illusions, your delusions of grandeur: you have Whitman, you have Melville and you have me.9

In “Sonnet XXIII” we read: On the 15th day of November in the year of the motorcar Between Oolagah and Pawnee A hand is writing these lines.               (CP 41) 9  Al Filreis, Randall Couch, Linh Dinh, Erica Kaufman, “doing not enough every day (PoemTalk #5)”. Available at http://media.sas.upenn.edu/Pennsound/podcasts/ PoemTalk/PoemTalk-05-Berrigan-Three_Pages.mp3.

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The poem maps a vague location that is not to be sought but rather thought as a designation of being “in-between.” It offers knowledge through technique: that one is somewhere if one can make of it a mythology. The year of the motorcar is perhaps a spoof on the idea of a zeitgeist. It calls an exact date as a ruse of history, then casts this scenario in the present tense to suggest the constitution of the present as thinking the past, or that the world of the text is always just being written. We could think of this as Berrigan creating and then occupying a position in American mythology. It is about being displaced and disembodied, where the writing becomes a metonym for a whole living practice, but the circumlocution is to base one’s self in, or as, the instance of mythopoetics. This map (Fig.  4.1) stabilises space through legible and empirical “data” conventions. In terms of logos, the map replaces as it represents, offering the possibility of an objective knowledge, by being the proxy object, “knowledge,” itself. Within it lies Enlightenment concepts of civilisation, particularly rational and scientific discourses of truth, naming, and order. As an example of colonial visual rhetoric, it plots the co-ordinates of an exact place to be to an almost absurd degree, having pretensions to infinity in its precision. Against it is Berrigan’s will to indeterminacy, to confuse, to make geographic relation through symbological play. Interested in cut-up techniques and the appropriation and random placement of names, Berrigan has predecessors in the gazetteers of Oklahoma, represented in the table above, whose quantitative framing of territory delineates micrological tensions, regional and colonial assertions of power. Between the name Oologah and the refined co-ordinates of geographical survey, there is a calculus of positioning through naming. Berrigan places the self of the poem “nowhere” through the indigenous American names of Oolagah and Pawnee. There is no escape from the politics of such a manoeuvre: is it redeemable as a postcolonial sensitivity or is it having the aura of connection with indigeneity, selecting and trading in original American languages? The point to take is that “between” is never nowhere. Berrigan is always strategising, whether we take this as a form of generosity or theft. We might note the musicality of these names, the possibility of their placement in a folk-song or ballad, and with the hand that is writing these lines we might perceive the poet’s ear as another organ for the production and consumption of myth. We might also hear a retuning of Whitman’s “discovery” of Mannahatta as a delirium of language:

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Oologah, Oklahoma — Town —

Location of Oologah, Oklahoma

Coordinates:

36°26′36″N95°42′34″W36.44333°N

95.70944°WCoordinates:

36°26′36″N95°42′34″W36.44333°N 95.70944°W

Country State County

United States Oklahoma Rogers

Fig. 4.1  Oolagah, Oklahoma I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city, Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name. Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient, I see that the word of my city is that word from of old.                      (Leaves of Grass 377)

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Whitman locates himself as a cosmos, whereas Berrigan tests the space of that cosmos, searching for his own co-ordinates and a way of travelling within it. Determined to be indeterminate, the grip on words is the only sufficient hold on the phenomenological world, because words suggest their weight and their materiality. The placement of words becomes a work of placement, of symbological planting:               The bodies of my days            open up        in the garden              of             my memory,             America ....................................................         you know        once people paid no attention to me Mayakovsky                in the garden of my memory & now     passion’s flower               wilts               constantly               because                    my lady love is a Holy Roller!                     (CP 123–130)

Plotted as an open field poem, Berrigan imports the trope of memory as garden here in “Tambourine Life.” We might similarly read The Sonnets as semi-regular plots where Berrigan grafts and makes mutant species, seeding his territory within the competitive hothouse of New  York. Berrigan’s typewriter is a twentieth-century equivalent to the scribe’s cuneiform script on a round stone, with The Sonnets less a medium to inform us of an actual world beyond text, than matter which points to itself as material. Berrigan is no pastoralist; his use of the garden is as a trope only. He generates a myth of the folk-industrial sonneteer, through displaying learnt methods of proceduralism and through ideas of the collective guild, the artisan, and works of the hand. While “in favor of one’s time,” Berrigan nevertheless avails himself of techniques both ancient and modern (O’Hara CP 341). He creates temporal presence through tempo, rhythm, and the fatal decision of where to turn or break the line.

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“Sonnet XXIII” is an example of his ear for usages of English and an intuitive investment in Orphic song: In a roomful of smoky man names burnished dull black Southwest, lost doubloons rest, no comforts drift On dream smoke down the sooted fog ravine In a terrible Ozark storm the Tundra vine Blood ran like muddy inspiration: Walks he in around anyway The slight film has gone to grey-green children And seeming wide night. Now night Is a big drink of waterbugs  Then we are so fragile Honey scorched our lips On the 15th day of November in the year of the motorcar Between Oologah and Pawnee.                        (CP 41)

Temporally the poem continually splices “then” and “now.” Each of these lines could and does easily migrate into other sonnets, both before and after in the sequence. For now they work together as itinerants, with memories of other placements and contexts. This play of difference and repetition is echoed through Berrigan’s rhyming and consonance. Images also “rhyme,” with one sign leading to other signs impressionistically. The “roomful of smoky man names,” for instance, moves to the stuff of adventure stories (lost doubloons, terrible Ozark storm, tundra vine, sooted fog ravine) and finally of childhood fits of sensuality and fear “gone to grey-­ green children/ And seeming wide night. Now night/ Is a big drink of waterbugs/ Then we are so fragile.” Whatever is possible for the self in this poem is possible through a scene of writing, a cluster of tropes from which it can only gesture from or try for a mystic interiority of experience, possibly akin to Deleuze’s “trips in intensity while sitting still.”10 The repetition of phrases suggests the plastic operation of form, extending to the nuances, generated the reproduction of selves. Berrigan forces us to read “the same” for variability to refresh one’s attention. While the poem only just gives a sense of narrative continuity, it threatens everywhere to fall off the lyric line. Ending with its beginning, it gives a strobing “duration” of heaviness and lightness, boredom and ecstasy, deliberate dullness and clarity. This “duration” is the illusion of the 10  Deleuze writes “the nomad is not necessarily one who moves: some voyages take place in situ, are trips in intensity” (Nomad Thought 149).

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zoetrope: it models action and sequence without seeming directly mimetic of the progress of lived time and narrative order. It is scarcely a sensible model of experience but instead provides experience’s dimension of “baffling combustions” (“Sonnet LV”). Berrigan was born on the 15th of November, but this note of the personal is smuggled into the scene of the American imaginary and of childhood. The poem opens the scene of biography to an open practice of poiesis. There is a composting of high and low cultures, with the poet working as disembodied hands, “putting together” poem as “trick.” “Sonnet XXIII” demonstrates Berrigan’s obsession with discursive stylistics, his particular interest in numbers and mathematics, and his appropriation of other vocabularies, organisms, and cultures to structure a self. The information in his poem decomposes as much as it composes, making the reader giddy with deceptive ideas of time while its tabloid form asserts it as a clear product of its time. Oologah works as a kind of amulet for Berrigan. Being in and enamoured of New York, Berrigan asserts alterity from the metropolis by representing himself as a hick, as having a foot in America’s mystic interior, being more earthen, more naïve, more Davy Crockett tasselled frontiersman. His myth of self transfuses a greater American mythology that locates stations in Will Rogers, Highway 66, and oil derricks: In this seal (Fig. 4.2) and in Berrigan’s poetry, Oklahoma is both idea and territory. The narrative strands that compose this place are part of the marrow of Berrigan’s personal mythology. The beginning of a hermeneutics here is to follow Paul Ricoeur’s detour of sign, going through the unfamiliar or other to get to the self. Ricoeur sees narrative as having a principal agency in creating and keeping selves. He argues that: the self does not know itself immediately, but only indirectly by the detour of the cultural signs of all sorts which are articulated on the symbolic mediations which always already articulate action and, among them, the narratives of everyday life. Narrative mediation underlines this remarkable characteristic of self-knowledge—that it is self-interpretation. The appropriation of the identity of the fictional character by the reader is one of its forms. What narrative interpretation brings in its own right is precisely the figural nature of the character by which the self, narratively interpreted, turns out to be a figured self—which imagines itself (se figure) in this or that way. (198–199)

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Fig. 4.2  Seal of Rogers county

One can never stand wholly outside and observe this process; as a technic, the poem knows itself to be turning, as “always already articulate action.” The Oklahoma represented above is via props, but without an act of reading it remains blank mythology. Narrative works through activating the various symbols and somehow “taking” them personally. The Rogers county shield is a testament to collective self-invention. Its heraldry encapsulates the drive for mineral and agricultural wealth, of pioneering possibility as symbolised in Route 66. Will Rogers and his wily nature is aligned as local son to the place itself but also of the broader myth industry of the West. As an entertainment celebrity, Rogers is both regional legend and an export commodity of national importance. Oklahoma presents itself through Rogers not as a chapter of the mid-west but as a metonym for the whole of America, an index of a frontier style of being that enables a certain swagger. Its seal is an act of “official” mythopoiesis: it is as much industrial and imperial as it is sentimental in its interpellation. As a kind of branding it relies on the same kind of imaginative relays of ignitions that fires Berrigan’s poem.

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Tom Clark writes of Berrigan as “a collision between the spirit of Will Rogers and modern pharmaceutical consciousness” (16). Immediately we think of “Ted Berrigan” as a synthetic phenomenon: a collision between discursive forces and figures. This is a mythic constellation whose elements are Ted Berrigan, Will Rogers, speed, and Tom Clark. Yet while these “phantom names” offer their own metaphoric associations, they also inform each other. Will Rogers (“I never met a man I didn’t like”) commented disparagingly on many major figures of his age. As a “personality,” he was by turns pugilistic and over-friendly, claimed a “deep American-­ ness” while reinforcing a mystique of Oklahoma. Rogers is Oolagah of the Cherokee Nation and so contains all strains of frontier demons and promises in an American psyche. Berrigan is a connoisseur of such performances of the self, and these folk tones are intuited as a kind of felted or affective garb to please what is American in us. It also makes O’Hara seem far closer to the cosmopolitanism that New  York seems to promise. How do we gauge the gravity of these lines? Berrigan both owns and disowns this identity; his casual tone is simultaneously mortally serious. As with many others, the way this sonnet occupies the page shows how spacious, tenuous, and open its cluster of mythemes is and how slight and maddening “identity” may be. Yet at the same time, we are in an infectious and closed atmosphere of the semiotic that runs definite circuits of repetition. We may well think that America is its mythology and is not outside mythology in its constitution of itself as a revolutionary and democratic nation. Nick Selby traces a mythopoetic tradition of America back to Emerson and Whitman. He recalls Emerson’s “equation between the poetic and the national”: “America is a poem in our eyes. … its ample geography dazzles the imagination” (“Ecstatic” 202). Selby argues that “the mythological frames through which we read America are ones about the conquest of space, about taking on the land, about inhabiting the ground” (202). His interest is in the way poets question “the gap between America and its mythologisation, between the poem and the idea of the poem” (208). Berrigan offers himself as litmus of whether America, or a self, can be anything other than its mythologisation. He is both the extreme fetishisation of symbolic tokens and their opening out into a flare of expressiveness that is the action of metonymy. This is not a heroic pose, but perhaps bardic, as we read in the opening and closure of “Red Shift”:

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… indefinable ample rhythmic frame …………….. The world’s furious song flows through my costume.                          (CP 515–16)

Notley insists that “[I]t is important … that The Sonnets was written in New  York … [they] could reflect no other setting than that city … New  York bricks and human density have become the interior walls of someone always reading and thinking. Outside-in” (“Introduction” 4). To be a New York poet is to exist within the mythical island that is at once margin and centre of activity and to take up a lease on the terrain consecrated by Whitman, Melville, Lorca, and O’Hara. It is a gamble for cult recognition as a tribal leader or soothsayer. As a territory, The Sonnets plots the world of literature on the model of New York’s Lower East side, with hustle and bursts of aggression interspersed with pockets of lyricism, an amalgam of the Beats, and the traditions of modernism concentrated in the New York School. Tom Clarke gives us a vignette of Berrigan on duty in 1967: We strolled back toward Ted’s apartment, delving further into the East Side’s jungle-like ethnic depths. Ted walked with a confident, long-striding swagger, elbows thrown out to command space, head cocked back and swiveling to take everything in: a chief surveying his territory. (26)

In his playing the typewriter, occupying the page, turning the sonnet, even his personal bodily rhetoric on the street, Berrigan physically commandeers space. The Sonnets emblematises American notions of self-­ determination just as Whitman presents a new charter for selfhood in his “constitution of these states.” Undercutting a simplistic belonging through slogan or club song, it offers a highly personalised self-mythology through an enigmatic claiming and compilation of both public material and cultural space.

Affective Currents The sonnet is traditionally a vehicle of tender restraint, with what is and what is not possible shaped by formal constraint. While the lines of The Sonnets need to be set in motion like Cage’s “Music of changes,” they emanate saturnine notes of melancholy and fatigue, as Peter Robinson notes:

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[I]n Berrigan’s very large oeuvre as a whole, there is nevertheless an “arte povera” effect, as if the more possibilities of thieving from everyone and anyone including yourself (thieving from yourself: an innovative concept) produce as its presumably unintended side-effect a desperate shortage of feeling, a snatching at whatever is at hand. Yet this may also be one source of the poetry’s true expressiveness—the experience of an unforeseen poverty at the heart of endless possibility. (n.pag.)

Berrigan is acutely aware of this effect as not only a problem for art but also a problem for selfhood. This is insinuated in “Sonnet XXXIII”:      The shortage of available materials Shatters my zest with festivity, one Trembling afternoon—night—the dark trance Up rainy cobblestones  bottle half empty Full throttle   mired In the petty frustrations of off-white sheets.                     (CP 46)

The “sheets” equate with the poem as a space to be filled. Yet their off-­ whiteness foregrounds them as already having been well used. Nick Selby argues that as a book The Sonnets continually marks its awareness of itself as a textual object … [it] is not grounded in an assumption that the desires it makes articulate precede their expression in the text. … what seems so new about The Sonnets, in its ‘same-­ but-­different’ relationship with the sonnet tradition, is the way in which it continually folds back sexual desire into the textual. (“Textual Promiscuity” 89)

The poems cut and collage the self as a set of abstractions in permanent flux, fixing a wry distance between the forms of that which is thought to persist: the “I” is kept as a possibility through the poem as a space of handling contingent identifications and there is a careful geometry in the interplay of pronouns. This is both gleeful and melancholy, sincere and ironic. What is “marvellous” is the way these registers require each other to produce each other. There is a community of rhetoric in which pathos is central. Robinson’s “experience of an unforeseen poverty at the heart of endless possibility” might well be the crux of the problem of identity, but the work of the poet is to land precisely at this point of dissolution, of immanence to language as experience.

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XXXIV Time flies by like a great whale And I find my hand grows stale at the throttle Of my many faceted and fake appearance Who bucks and spouts by detour under the sheets Hollow portals of solid appearance Movies are poems, a holy bible, the great mother to us ……………………………………………. Padré, Father, or fat old man, as you will, I am afraid to succeed, afraid to fail, Tell me now, again, who I am.               (CP 47)

“Sonnet XXXIV” is specifically about the control of puissance, modulating “poignancy and surliness,”11 the brittle and the languid, the feminine and masculine complex of appearances that make what we think of as a person. The “great mother” and “Padre, father” are points of conception of the self, the poet, and poem. What is driven in the lyric here, or begged for, is a certain relinquishing of control, of wanting to be surprised by the content on every reading: “Tell me now, again, who I am.” Meaning in this poem is produced in community with the other sonnets, yet the poem is also a singular entity. Instead of evolving leisurely as part of a larger whole, the poem is rushed by lines; any ordering of experience gives way to a love of excess which contains certain parts of terror in the dissolution of the self. This “rush,” this fecundity of production, is part of the mythos of The Sonnets; that their arrival is providential, elemental. It is a poem about poetry and the self as a poem; the “great whale” is both Moby Dick and its author. Touching the mythos of Moby Dick opens up a scene of the primordial hunt on a cosmic scale. It is code for the biggest, most extreme, most remote, the riskiest pursuit.12 It is also code for American parochialism, for a desire to conquer the world, of violence and a more violent type of promiscuity. The monomania of hunting for the whale is something we might find allegorically in every Berrigan poem. Melville’s Moby Dick is no longer “just” a whale, he “has been absolved of mortality … Readers of Moby Dick know that he swims the world unconquered, that he is ubiquitous in time and place” (Vincent 177). 11  Review of The Sonnets, Alice Notley ed. Publisher’s Weekly Review, 10/02/2000 http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-14-058927-6. 12  This paraphrases Lisa Norling from an interview for Into the Deep: America, Whaling and the World. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/whaling/player/.

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Berrigan finds that his hand, which elsewhere is the disembodied thing that magically works poems, is here “stale” and “throttling” in its “many faceted and fake appearance.” The tones at the end “Padre, Father …” seem to trail into a softening patter (patois) where the comfort is in the voice as well as the platitudes. It is an “Irish” consolation of simply continuing to speak, something that becomes the ruling mode of Berrigan’s later poetry. Elsewhere, The Sonnets gives us a sense of what is at stake in Moby Dick, of the pursuer and pursued being indistinguishable. “Sonnet XXXV” uses the figure of the matador to stage this: You can make this swooped transition on your lips ............................................................................ Your head spins when the old bull rushes Back in the airy daylight, he was not a midget And preferred to be known as a stunt man. .............................................................................       The black heart beside the 15 pieces of glass Spins when the old bull rushes.   The words say I LOVE YOU …………………………………………………. Glistering, blistering, cozening whatever disguises.                             (CP 47)

Here, Berrigan declares the poet as “stunt man,” as risk-taker. He is one who knowingly dons disguises and performs the little ritualistic death and coming to life of the poem. Yet one who has learnt to spin “when the old bull rushes” is adept at taking calculated risks: the matador, the rodeo clown, who partakes in highly stylized tragedy or comedy. Stunt men are more likely to be cool, invulnerable, well prepared for their trick, flashing themselves in danger so that their remote audience can applaud wildly. The professional myth-maker balances the confession or revelation of the psychological “I” with its guileful manufacture and performance. The pass of the bull is the virtuosic passage of the poem, a seemingly wild but highly contrived “swooped transition.” Charles Bernstein writes that: The Sonnets—with its permutational use of the same phrases in different sequences and its inclusion of external or found language—stands as an explicit rejection of the psychological ‘I’ as the locus of the poem’s meaning.

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This rejection, however, is complicated by the enormous pull The Sonnets exerts on readers to project onto the text a cohering ‘self’ even in the face of overtly incommensurable evidence. (Transference may be a more apt term for this than projection.) This is an enmeshment that not only the reader but the author may fall under the sway of. (154)

Bernstein expertly troubles the conscience of Romantic and “bourgeois” tendencies without destroying them. His incisive critique of readers who want to ride the lyric for the nostalgic comfort of a unified and metaphysically guaranteed subjectivity includes Berrigan himself, and here he touches on a point of thrilling tension. Bernstein does not want Berrigan as a hero of the lyric: language itself is the name of the social-revolutionary effort. Yet Bernstein cannot have Berrigan as a martyr to this, for he slips from the grasp of Bernstein’s preferred myth. The “I” of the poems disappears into paradox by being able to declare simultaneously “I am not here” and also “who could have written this but me.” Notley’s essay, “A Certain Slant of Sunlight,” retrospectively treats The Sonnets in relation to Berrigan’s later work. She suggests that: The Sonnets is not, as is sometimes stated, concerned with the rejection of the “psychological I”; the psychological I is right there in the book in all its life-plots and circumstances and all its emotional field but stretched across time, warped in time, twisting and doubling back and pushing on into the future rather like karma. (11)

According to Berrigan’s scheme, articulated here by Notley, the “I” is alive in its “life-plots” which are various in scale, from genesis towards apocalypse to the banalities of sex, breakfast, movies, jealousies, and headlines. This is related to Aristotle’s idea of the constitutional formula for tragedy: no character without emplotment; the “I” is wholly involved with mythos. Berrigan’s strict innovation is making the unit of mythos the line or the word. He becomes a lover of language, the generative counterpart or other consumed by its mate. “Sonnet XXX” is an index of other Sonnets’ first lines, and while a telling instance of Berrigan’s serial method, it also demonstrates his celebration of contingency. The poem lifts mythemes from other works and reassembles them as a separate organism, as if to suggest through a technique of abstraction that this is what we are. It is a reification of the singular and a mythopoetics of the self line by line, as well as a virtual display of

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risk. The Sonnets are not just an expressivist catalogue, but a space of reader theory and social experiment. They are the poems written by a pathological reader of poetry, and while they may be counted as narcissistic, the narcissism is socialised: this is perhaps the ontological genius of the lyric. Nick Selby describes the “textual promiscuity” of The Sonnets as a desire to proliferate meaning and as a boast of its libidinal quality. Rifkin reads this promiscuity “as an excessive sexuality; his poems engage the fantasy of both being and having the object of desire, in this case, a fully authorized poetic and social identity” (113). In the affective structures of these operations, we can read Berrigan’s indulgences and conceits. In positing himself as always being on the outside (of identity, of community, of warmth, and of ego), he contrarily also situates himself as the curator of an exceptional expressive self, of a poetic community, and of an epoch. He does so by becoming magnetic to those around him. O’Hara is always on excursion; he leaves the house and goes to people. Berrigan holds court at home. Anecdotes abound of people bringing him offerings of Pepsi and money. Not being a Harvard Graduate like Koch, Ashbery, and O’Hara, he embraces being flat-footed, uncouth, and working class, thus enabling a distinction from his poet precursors. The heroic version of Ted Berrigan produced by The Sonnets is of a differential finesse: Berrigan is Vanguard figure, outsider, second-generation New York poet. The Sonnets model a textual attention to the world, a total distraction, within the architectural premise or promise of a highly regulated and traditional form. It is like an artist contracted to build a portico for a cathedral who instead makes patterns of stones on the ground. The Sonnets fold in Berrigan’s America; they enable him to discover the excitement of talking everything at once. LXXXII my dream a drink with Lonnie Johnson we discuss the code of   the west The red block dream of Hans Hofmann keeps going away and    coming back to me my dream a crumpled horn my dream DEAR CHRIS, hello. It is 5:15 a.m. ………………………………………………….. My dream a drink with Richard Gallup we discuss the code of    the west my dream a drink with Henry Miller “The Poems” is not a dream. My dream a drink with Ira Hayes we discuss the code of the west.                               (CP 72–73)

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There is no centre of attention, no original nugget of America. Rather there is a kind of oneiric practice to make all things present as surface, as a collage, and after Brendan Behan as a class of intoxicated expressionism. Present as the co-ordinates of a personal mythology, the coupling of Lonnie Johnson and Hans Hofmann mimics O’Hara’s method of democratising signifiers. Berrigan uses the poem to stake a personal relationship between the gods of antiquity, the gods of celebrity, and the figures of one’s personal love. He practises O’Hara’s method with guile, showing that it is a method, that its calculation is cool, and the tone of intimacy and insouciance is finely sought. Berrigan maps his filiations onto those of O’Hara (Koch, Ashbery, Rimbaud, Miller, Modern Painting) while customising the poem through invoking the names of Lonnie Johnson and Ira Hayes.13 This inclusion of his favourite artists gives the poem a charming stature as fan-art. The Sonnets become a pastiche of the American landscape, and as its striated layers are repeated throughout the sequence, they become compressed into sentimental favourites. Such poems exercise the idea of the American dream, of making the self. Berrigan’s thievery is not so much a professional secret as an inside-out exposition of cultural borrowing, paradoxically preserving a distinguishable me (“my dream,” “my dream,” “my dream,” “my dream”) within it. John Wilkinson argues that Berrigan lacks O’Hara’s “conversational dialectic,” that his poetry is not dynamically social: “Berrigan’s appetites were centred on his receptivity, and he failed to question how far down the social shaping of appetite might go … Ingestion so comprehensive must defeat the specificity of desire, figuring appetite as a void to be serviced but never knowing its objects, so leaving the world waste” (57). This figures a one-way passage of desire in the abyssal gut of the narcissist, yet Berrigan’s perverse generosity is to turn the workings of the cosmophage inside out:

13  Lonnie Johnson (1894–1970) was an Afro-American blues musician. In the future, Lonnie Johnson (1949–) is the inventor of the “Supersoaker” water pistol which was for a time the best-selling toy in North America. Johnson dedicates his capital earnings to research in future energy technologies. Through a gambler’s luck, Berrigan manages to have a drink with both Lonnie Johnsons who could each say quite a lot about “the code of the West.” Berrigan’s discovery and invention of the Lonnie Johnsons tease us with thoughts of what the advent of internet search engines have done and can do to The Sonnets, which are so burdened with reference and, it seems, prophecy.

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in his megalomania we see the relationship between mythologising and accumulated affect and are able to borrow some of it for ourselves.

Approaching Conclusion, or Ted Is Dead Berrigan promotes self-mythologising through complex ignitions of consciousness in a process which is both parodic and plangent, and by turns bathetic and pathetic. The Sonnets might be seen as a charter of self that is exemplary of post-structuralism, developing against the occulted self of the Romantics while still partaking of it. The poems undermine the idea of a narrative self as a teleological process propelled by fate, destiny, or the tropological concerns of a grand recit. Later in his career Berrigan is able to re-conceive The Sonnets as the machine which made him. As a corpus, The Sonnets give Berrigan the totem of the cosmological whale shark; he is a mythical creature who moves through the world ingesting everything. The Sonnets align Ted Berrigan with Keats, John Wayne, Ira Hayes, Alfred Jarry as King Ubu (sovereign of confabulations and comic blasphemer), Henry Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Dick Gallup, and “Chris” who is called to throughout the work. As such, Berrigan makes himself into “the gods,” plural. The poet produced by The Sonnets is not reborn or resurrected but permanently infused in the micrological atmosphere of type. As we see in “Sweet Vocations”14: After the first death there is plenty Of Other but it’s true There is no other, too. One staggers Weakly between the two . What fun is that? It’s no fun, that’s what. After the first Sniff, you notice the typewriter’s been sharpened; you Did it, so; a,s,d,f, space … semi,l,k,j, space 14  Alice Notley remarks on the “graven-ness” of Berrigan’s handwriting: “Ted was a poet of the notebook and typewriter; the medium in which he wrote always permeated a poem.” She elaborates on the difficulty of translating certain of Berrigan’s poems through digital word processing, in that the technological medium somehow bleeds the presence of the poem as an artifact of an occasion: “The pleasurable exigencies of these kinds of translations, from handwriting to typescript and from typescript to print, seem to have disappeared with the advent of the computer” (“Notes” 684).

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…………………………….. You look out the mirror at the self, & you preen, You giggle because that it’s so unlike you.                       (CP 465)

The sonnets establish the rhythms of force that become the affective measure by which we might know the poet Ted Berrigan. It is the frisson between the modes of stagger and swagger. Berrigan literally forges an identity, surging forward and staying counterfeit at the same time, as he writes in “Last Poem”: ……………………………………… But frequent Reification of my own experiences delivered to me Several new vocabularies, I loved that almost most of all.                           (CP 522)

The paradox of this is that much of Berrigan’s experience is through literature as a canny atmosphere of the already figured. While this is a burden in “Sonnet LXVIII” (“I was thinking when I was ahead/ To the big promise of emptiness” (CP 65)), it is converted into the virtue of mythopoetics in “Sonnet LXVI”: “(clarity! clarity!) a semblance of motion, omniscience./There is no such thing as a breakdown” (CP 64). Berrigan marks his difference from the elegance of the first-generation New York School by pushing the figure of the amphetaminised labourer, whose rhythm and cranks can be heard in the rough manipulation of the manual typewriter which is here, hand to tool, the technological extension of self. Yet we should also note he is careful to include the flaws of a “preening,” “giggling” self to offset the hewn glamour of roughness and roguery. This is Berrigan’s finessing of self whom we meet in “Sonnet XXXVI” (coded “after Frank O’Hara”):          I think I was thinking when I was ahead I’d be somewhere like Perry Street erudite dazzling slim and badly-loved contemplating my new book of poetry to be printed in simple type on old brown paper Feminine marvellous and tough.                      (CP 48)

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The poem deliberately looks for self by knotting past and future tenses of desire, locating it nowhere but in the recitation of a fanciful figure whose affective signature—“feminine marvelous and tough” is putatively attributed to O’Hara. It is the one line which attempts to merge the two poet’s ethos through a charmed phrase (Shapiro 226). Rifkin argues that “[t]he humour of Sonnet 36 masks the gravity with which Berrigan approaches this project of self-making” stressing that the anxieties which accompany Berrigan’s wilful manipulations of self are those properly belonging to the charlatan or “ventriloquist” and of a different order from O’Hara’s (125). This critique sheers away from Berrigan as one who enjoins writing and the figure of the writer at the level of mythopoiesis, one who generously turns out the works and workings of a personal mythology. The poem’s intimacy is not feigned or merely staged: Berrigan enjoins O’Hara’s daemon and considers his “I” as the emergent daemon “Ted.” These are all serious games of provenance and posterity. For Berrigan none of it is certain, although it is difficult to disagree with Rifkin’s sense that Berrigan is always covering his bets. In the final Sonnet, Berrigan abjures “rough magic” and buries his “aery charms” by drowning his book, committing the idea of “mastering” the self to oblivion: LXXXVIII A Final Sonnet FOR CHRIS How strange to be gone in a minute!   A man Signs his shovel and so he digs   Everything Turns into writing a name for a day ………………………………………….. But this rough magic I here abjure  and When I have required some heavenly music   which even now I do  to work mine end upon their senses That this aery charm is for   I’ll break My staff    bury it certain fathoms in the earth And deeper than ever did plummet sound I’ll drown my book. It is 5:15 a.m.              Dear Chris, hello.                          (CP 75)      

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We are not out of the labyrinth; only the plane has changed. Rather than view literature, tradition, and experience as aporetic catacombs, Berrigan loves them through an insistence on the sensuous and baffling contact with language. Eric Selinger writes: the “Final Sonnet” mounts an allusive, masterful performance by disowning mastery and turning to the presumably smaller accomplishments of the social. Since even that final gesture is accomplished in words familiar from earlier sonnets, the last line seems as much a da capo as a coda. It foreshadows Berrigan’s later interest in occasional poems, poems on postcards, “personal poems” in the Frank O’Hara style: poems as convivial as they are “constructivist.” (n.pag.)

The poet abandons Prospero’s tools, just as Prospero abandons himself as magus at the end of The Tempest. Berrigan’s gesture is to dispatch myth as archive to foreground myth as process. There is no turn from myth to the “everyday.” Myth is there throughout, compacted both locally and cosmically. The final words are an address to a confidant, a lover, a reader: the poem wants to involve you in its mythos. The Sonnets are never over. They produce the poet and are present in all the poems that follow in the Collected Works, existing as fragments and charging the glamour of “Ted Berrigan.” It is the death of Edmund Berrigan, apprentice, and the beginning of the mythology of Ted Berrigan the poet. Berrigan “Signs his shovel,” his techne, as the magician who renounces magic and signs the myth machine of The Sonnets as Prospero. “Dear Chris, hello” is not a turn to the everyday, but to an eternal return to work: it is not geared to inform you, it is turned out. Though “Chris” plays as a foil of intimacy, an obscured proper name, the gesture is one of friendship, inviting the reader into its mythos, to be simultaneously respondent and compositional principle. This private reference to “Chris” and the public figure of Prospero are on a mythic continuum.15 Rifkin writes that this technique of “writing a name for a day” is

15  Notley’s bio-note on this person as possible referent reads “Christine Murphy (Chris) The muselike ‘Chris’ of The Sonnets, one of Ted’s students in 1958–1959 when he taught eighth grade at Madalene School in Tulsa” (CP 727).

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an effort … to rescue temporarily poem, recipient, and by association, poet, from oblivion. The Sonnets and later work employ different strategies to achieve this aim: epigraphs by O’Hara and Ashbery, or tag lines that position a poem “after” or in “homage to” a relatively well known poet reveal just how public, impersonal, and frankly strategic “personism” could be. Borrowing strategies from first-generation New  York poets, Berrigan explodes the fiction of their naiveté. He recognizes that a poet of experience in the O’Hara mold is first and foremost a Poet; the publicity of that role pervades even the most intimately inter-subjective poetic scenarios. (121)

Once The Sonnets is finished, Berrigan is in danger of becoming a monument, however ingenious his machinations might be. Yet he has the example of O’Hara, who gives permission to make the self variable and to redraft the world through opening up and collaborating with it, the result of which are occasional poems not of “events” but for the moment of one’s being. This is the limit bequest that O’Hara gives and which Berrigan’s poetry strains for. I think of The Sonnets as the machine which creates and continue to create the mythology of Ted Berrigan, a hauntologue. It is also a labyrinthine model of communitarian poetics which contains in its sanctum both a cranky and a cheeky minotaur. In his study of character and desire, Leo Bersani suggests that, “The mythic limit of questions about human identity is a question about the necessity of being human at all” (189). If we say that persons cannot be myths, we nevertheless live constantly with the mythic figures of persons. Bersani explores the dispersion of identity through the trinity of Comte de Lautréamont, Isidore Ducasse, and Maldoror in Les Chants de Maldoror, all of whom are apparently its author, all of whom are the same person. We must at every point ask “who is speaking” or “whose presence is suggested.” Bersani sees a “radical shift” in Lautréamont “from a nom de plume to an identite du plume, and the result is a revolutionary decentralization of self, and an extraordinary psychic mobility” (193). The texture of Berrigan’s mythology does not find relief in a monumental figure of the self or in extended rhapsodising over the city of New  York. It shimmers on the surface of the poems, in the impossible words themselves, as though someone is talking to you, entreating your friendship, asking you to idle with them, and if one chooses to idle, the warmth that is promised is confirmed. The Collected Poems is a salon in this sense, and “Ted” or “Berrigan” is always talking.

CHAPTER 5

Phantasmatic Transmissions: Ted Berrigan’s Vida and Razo

An expert reader of mythologies, Berrigan makes the activity of writing poetry into a practice of self-mythologising. Yet there has been a critical trend that laments the prevalence of myths surrounding a poet’s life, with scholars like Tim Henry suggesting that most critics have focused on “the legend of Ted Berrigan” (n.p.) at the expense of the poems themselves. While I agree with Henry, I nevertheless consider Berrigan’s conceptualisation of the poet and his practice of social poetics absolutely a part of his poetry. One response has been to read the poems beyond the travesty of the “life.” Libbie Rifkin, for instance, writes that: The vast majority of writing on Berrigan takes the form of memoir/homage, and all of it appears in small press publications. More critical engagements include Joel Lewis’ “Everything Turns into Writing’: The Sonnets of Ted Berrigan,” Barrett Watten’s “After Ted,” and Charles Bernstein’s “Writing Against the Body,” all of which frame textual reading in terms of a personal knowledge of the poet. (Career 158)

What is alluded to here is an excess of intimacy with the “touch” of Berrigan. Rifkin proceeds to position herself outside such engagement, noting that criticism to date has largely proceeded with “a personal knowledge of the poet.” Beyond Rifkin’s “career moves” is Charles Bernstein’s approach of a “life appropriated by writing.” Both see the confusion of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Hose, The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94841-2_5

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“the real life Berrigan and the written Berrigan” as problematic, yet, as I argue in this chapter, this is something we should keep as a problem (Hawkins, n.p.). Ted Berrigan is a contradictory and difficult figure in his politics, personal relations, and textual practices. His recorded behaviour and total immersion in literature make trouble for hygienic models of poetry that desire to read it as wholly contained on the page. Rather, I suggest that two subjects co-exist as potentials for study: Ted Berrigan the author who died in 1983 and “Ted Berrigan” the mythology of a twentieth-century American poet, a socially activated phantasm. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panchez, one is staked as a literary fantasy and the other is a bumptious pragmatist, yet they are interminably allied. These two characters are fictional, whereas one of the two Teds is not. The point I want to make is that the historical organism of the author crosses over into myth in a migration that is consciously plotted by the poet. This chapter examines the ways in which this desire to maintain a distinction between the two is permanently thwarted by Berrigan’s approach and to acquire a “personal knowledge” of the poet is a part of the practice of reading his work. Perhaps there is a third subject, devised from the differential action between these two, an even further recursion of the idea of authorisation. This is taken up through the idea of the poet being present as a kind of phantasmagoria, which I view as an apt metaphor for that illusory and private relationship one has with the person of the writer. In his 1923 essay “Literature and Biography,” Boris Tomasevskij reads the professional confusions of the person of the writer and their writing. After historically tracking the revival of interest in the person of the author through Voltaire and Rousseau, his argument alights on a pivotal Romantic figure for the notion of life-as-poiesis: Byron, the poet of sharp-tempered characters, created the canonical biography for a lyrical poet. A biography of a Romantic poet was more than a biography of an author or a public figure. The Romantic poet was his own hero. His life was poetry, and soon there developed a canonical set of actions to be carried out by the poet. (49)

Byron sets up the self as a subject of mythopoiesis that requires no other authority. Yet, as Tomasevskij notes, he is a poet of characters, of masks, and the author of a “canonical set of actions” that becomes an occulted figure through his transgressive and provocative behaviour,

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behaviour that is both gestural and scriptural. Byron performs himself as the poet and there is nothing outside this performance. Byron is not himself: his play of identity, and the social currency of having what Tomasevskij calls a “legendary biography” is a way of proceeding that is already wellread by the time of Berrigan’s arrival. The fact that Byronic posturing can only be played ironically suits how Berrigan understands the function of identity as something to be handled rather than fixed. Byron himself is always coming after the first wave of Romantics; he has available a set of signature moves, particularly via Napoleon.1 As part of his poetics Byron designed a Europe for himself as a picturesque setting for heroic action and structured his life as an epic narrative poem, culminating in the trope of exile, of fever and death in the lap of the (Greek) gods. If Byron was one of the earliest poetic celebrities (a proto-rock star), then Berrigan shows up at a time when rock and roll has for a time been a popular phenomenon, and poetry’s value as social capital is waning. Berrigan’s solution is to blend current cultural modes of the hipster, beat, bohemian, and poet into a nexus of name, place, and space: Berrigan, New York, Lower East Side. This nexus then becomes a complex in his poems and in his claims on the virtual territory of literary history. Berrigan’s method has an immediate predecessor in Frank O’Hara; it might not be an exaggeration to think that Berrigan’s whole mode of being is assumed through the “secret” name of Frank O’Hara and the “genius” of his work is to be found in the felicities of mistranslation. Tomasevskij is fascinated with the notion of “legendary biography” not only as a functional complement to the artistic artifact but also as a phenomenon of literature in its own right and part of an incalculable product of author as producer. Importantly, these legends are collaborative: they are refined, maintained, and reworked by a professional class of readers—literary scholars—and the community that is made by the consumption of poetry. Tomasevskij writes:

1  Judith Pascoe writes that “While Byron was rumbling around [continental Europe] in a replica carriage, he wrote most of his best poems … In July 1818, Byron began ‘virtually at the same time and together’ Don Juan and his Memoirs, … linking these two undertakings to Byron’s ‘hawklike’ following of Napoleon’s fortunes in exile … Byron had accumulated a Napoleonic library of books and journal articles, many of which reported that the emperor had begun his memoirs. Emulating Napoleon’s example as an autobiographer, Byron ‘began his own two-pronged assault on posterity’” (103).

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[t]hese biographical legends are the literary conception of the poet’s life, and this conception was necessary as a perceptible background for the poet’s literary works. The legends are a premise which the author took into account during the creative process …. The question of whether these rumors or legends had any foundation in fact was irrelevant to their function. (52)

Berrigan radicalises the principle of writing to become a total practice, presenting an idea of living-as-writing, consciously manipulating figures, both rhetorical and visceral, as a way of being through the performance of signs. Berrigan signals his awareness of this in interview with Tom Savage: T[om] S[avage]: Are you seriously contemplating an autobiography, Ted? TB: No, Tom, I’m not seriously contemplating one. I’ve used the material extensively in my poetry, and re-used it and re-used it, and used it from other perspectives, and I’m not contemplating one …. I would have to warn the payers for such a book … that it would be full of gross exaggerations… TS: … and fictionalizations to say the least. TB:… Maybe something more like legendizing. Not of myself, necessarily but of others. I’m given to that in my Irish story-telling way. I misjudge myself entirely as an autobiographer, except in poetry where the form-the natural form is dictated by the feelings and the fact that I’m writing a poem constricts me and constrains me to tell the absolute truth as far as I can see it. (169) Wilfully immersed in language and his own occulted figures of its use, Berrigan’s practice of “writing” is both energetically democratic and diabolically personal. He equates the writing of poems with “the absolute truth as far as I can see it,” seeing prose as something available for perversion. He claims his creative licence is in making a myth of the other, but the expressivist act is the act of sincerity—of truth. Here, he inverts the notional value of biography as empiricist truth and poiesis as the work of the liar. A finessed scepticism for Berrigan’s work comes in the form of Rifkin’s idea of “career moves” in her book of the same name, wherein Berrigan is on trial not only as an operator or entrepreneur of poetry, but also as one among many of a particularly masculinist line of American poets’

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self-fashioning. Rifkin argues the centrality of The Sonnets to the Berrigan mythos: In the scores of interviews he gave between the 1967 publication of his debut book, The Sonnets, and his death in 1983, Ted Berrigan recounts the beginnings of his poetic career in this way; he compresses the bindungsroman’s developmental narrative until it yields the immediacy of a “star-isborn” story. (Career110)

Berrigan pastes his star on the horizon of the West with his spangled “legendizing.” Rifkin’s tone suggests that this is a nefarious approach, improper for such a culturally sacrosanct vocation as the poet. But, as I will argue, Berrigan’s creation of Ted Berrigan as a presence of twentieth-century poetics is interested in not only becoming a star but also in helping to produce a confederacy of artists in which the figure of Berrigan can be read as a generous sponsor and ambitious sovereign. Rifkin’s Berrigan is a gifted and sensible pasticheur whose principal work is his career, a product of its time and the exigencies of the cultural field, in Bourdieu’s sense, which Berrigan faces. Her composite myth of Berrigan is as a “pop persona: part ingénue, part impresario” and she explains that her strategy lies in “[g]auging the pressures of the role he lived on the works he made, and showing how the works contributed to fashioning that role” which then enables her to “articulate the intersection of individual ambition and collective production, a space where the chiasmic formulations of literary biography having living, human consequence” (110). It is precisely at this point, the “crux” of literature, biography, anecdote, archived voice, motion pictures, in the collusion of these technologies of presence that I want to check the action of mythos, of how technologies of communication and exchange are manipulated to cultivate a myth of the poet that extends to the work. While Berrigan’s “career” is available for critique in relation to traditional models of “making it” as a poet, the question of whether or not the poems achieve a secure and legitimate canonicity remains unresolved. The nebulous mythology of the figure “Ted Berrigan” exceeds these traditional scholarly discourses to present more sophisticated problems for a contemporary figure of the poet, especially in ways that must make us rethink the function of biography and the possibilities for articulating kinds of extra-textual presences. Berrigan’s work is singularly invested in the idea of his “self” as an

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immortal poet, but the closer we examine the technics of this self the more we begin to read it as a complex community of plural identities. Rifkin’s analysis of The Sonnets as an ingenious if somewhat hobbled strategy to make some space for himself in the world of poetry reads the rest of Berrigan’s career as a kind of entropy: For Berrigan, whose work so assiduously advanced and internalised the social structures that conditioned its reception, collaboration—increasingly with his own alienated self—was addictive. Starting with “Tambourine Life,” the long “open form” poem that Berrigan added to daily, the poetry of experience and the poetry of citation and collage begin to merge in less productive ways. The ­conceptual aggressiveness and personal investment of The Sonnets gives way to what Berrigan calls his “machine ability.” Having produced himself as this “wonderful poet,” “Ted” began to live as the subject of his own gossip column—a condition not conducive to either his life or writing. The post-Sonnets list poems—“Things to Do in New York City,” “Things to Do in Anne’s Room,” “Things to Do on Speed”—manifest the difficulty of living a public persona. In them, the present imperative transforms the private, diaristic mode into a bohemian guide to daily life …. The implied audience of the list poems is doubled. Written for a public, they make a tourist attraction of the poet’s home and an example of his life. Written for Berrigan himself, they stand as, in Charles Bernstein’s words, “not … a document of a life in writing, but, inversely, as an appropriation of a life by writing”. (“Worrying” 669–70)

I would rather think of the rest of Berrigan’s Collected Poems as an attempt to fulfil the charge to find new forms for the self as a matter of survival. Poetry becomes a techne to modulate the self through language, continually drafting new constitutions. In this sense, every Ted Berrigan poem is a “career move.” This is insinuated in Rifkin’s analysis: what we seem to have is someone who becomes a poet because it figures the myth of the myth-maker, and so the question might become: are these poemsas-machines connected to anything? Are they built to drive anything other than themselves? The fact that this is a problematic proposition, and that some of these poems are judged to be “broken,” only increases the risk, and perhaps the value, of this public inquiry into selfhood. It is useful to think, with Rifkin, of Berrigan’s later work as a “gossip column” when we consider that it makes daily maps of the minutiae of a personal mythology; for in this poetry, there is a sophisticated reflection on how exactly we make

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ourselves through the performance of language, both privately and as a citizen of a Western republic, and how fugitive or notional the self may be. The “present imperative” is the continuing injunction to ritualise the everyday, to “do this thing, write this thing.” For Berrigan, this is where the action is, not in arcane symbolism or the metaphysical mapping of an Ideal republic. Through an avid exploitation of all available means of expression, Ted Berrigan is only ever “there” in and through language, Bernstein’s “life appropriated by writing” (153). If we are to dwell on this we would ask in what way is Ted Berrigan still “here,” since he sought his “here” through the production of poems which are readily available to us? To shape the question more intimately: if Berrigan so expertly confused bios and graphos, to what extent is Berrigan’s “there” still “here”? I ask this because Berrigan’s mythology, which he attended to so meticulously, is only ever the work of the present. Getting involved in the mythos of Berrigan means contacting it through these archived traces and reproducing the quarrel of identity through semantic engagement. In this sense the reader becomes another author for the life of the myth. That is to say, it is taken personally and “Ted Berrigan” becomes the name of a present imperative for the turn to poetry, in this extended sense of making the self as a work of art. The poems are expressly an invitation to a “personal knowledge” of the poet. Berrigan writes in “Frank O’Hara”:                   Between friends, nothing would seem stranger to me than true intimacy. what seems genuine, truly real, is thinking of you, how that makes me feel.                 (CP 381)

This brings with it all the problems of a personal relationship: for Berrigan the name “Frank O’Hara” is code for both the celebration and interrogation of friendship: its priority and impossibility, and the life of poems as acts of friendship. The twenty-first century inherits an especially rich archive of graphic traces of the person of Berrigan because he was a poet in a time of proliferating technologies to record traces of being and because he actively inserted himself in the poetry community-as-archive through a cult of personality. Despite this, though, he is still largely a creature of type. Along with the “white whale” of his Collected Poems (which stages itself as an historical community of English users), there is a clutch of memoirs

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written by his friends: Ron Padgett’s Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan, Tom Clark’s Late Returns, and the commemorative pieces in Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan edited by Anne Waldman. He also continues to appear in poems by writers whom he knew as a friend, teacher, or mentor, or who have felt themselves invited, across time, into his coterie. In Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters from Ted to Sandy Berrigan he is a young crusader of love in the series of letters written to his first wife: a Künstlerroman addressed to one person in particular as an ongoing means of seduction. Like The Sonnets, these letters can be read collectively as the autobiography of an obsession with the making of a literary identity. What is curious about these engagements with the Berrigan mythology is that they constitute a response to the person of the poet as being inseparable from the matter of poetry, and they all manage to reproduce some of Berrigan’s favoured self-conceits while mutating or personalising them in their contextual selection. There seems to be a temptation to rewrite the Berrigan myth after his own fashion. Berrigan’s daemon appears to work by reading its audience and re-suiting itself appropriately. I want to analyse how this dynamic has been managed by the poet and how it continues to operate in three distinct textual instances. In each of these Berrigan appears costumed as a cultural sign familiar to the West: the troubadour, the Leprechaun, and Don Quixote. Each has its own historical and occasional singularities, yet in each case we can read something paradigmatic in the way these figurations take place in the social formations of community. The first is the strategic adoption by Berrigan of the figure of the troubadour in a single long poem, where he employs the vida and razo to structure the legend of the poet and the work as a textual charm. The second case is read as a phantasmagorical collaboration of Berrigan and Bill Berkson, both descendants of O’Hara, as a matter of poetics, and the last follows Richard Hell’s reading as both a reification and a ratification of a certain version of Berrigan.

Give Me Vidas and Razos: The Life of Troubadour Technologies Boris Tomasevskij’s “legendary biography” has an ancient precedent in the vida and razo of the troubadour tradition. To take up and archaeologise old critical terms is the kind of eternal return which characterises the delusional charm of the contemporary. To paraphrase Lyn Hejinian: where once we had ideas for which we needed a vocabulary, perhaps now we have

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a vocabulary for which we need ideas.2 The troubadour as a figure of poetry in the West has never really been retired, evidenced most compellingly by Ezra “make it new” Pound’s fascination for the poets of ancient Occitania. In the troubadour tradition, the vida is a “bio-note” and the razo is a commentary on a poem or an account of the circumstances of its composition.3 I argue that these supplementary prose texts, which were highly formalised in the collation of troubadour poems, are traceable in poetic practices today and become both desirable and necessary as a means to bring people closer to their poets, either as good company or as active nemeses. In scholarship we entertain the possibility of critical distance; yet what I want to address here is the kind of fuzzy, radiant, hormonal, or spleenish knowledges we enact when meeting our poets, when we walk through the spun mesh of bios in graphos. One works with what one has as we fold a new figure into our acquaintance or develop an association into kinds of abstract intimacies. Vidas and razos might be expected to be salacious or have the tonal fuss of gossip. They exist as a supplement to the poem to produce something of the presence of the poet in a similar fashion to celebrity culture, where a tracking of career with its accidents or scenes gives them definition as people. However, vidas and razos traditionally come after the death of the poet, mourning the absence of an “original” performer. They are prose pieces which pimp the lyric, lending it the glamour of a living thing. They present the idea of the “personal” and transport the poem to a different or more specialised field of circulation. They do not pretend to be factual but are more mythic configurations. Berrigan assumes troubadour techne in “After Peire Vidal and Myself” which is based on the twelfth-century vida and razo of Peire Vidal: Vida Peire Vidal was from Toulouse, the son of a furrier, and sang better than any man in the world. He was one of the maddest fellows who ever lived, for he believed as truth whatever he wanted or whatever happened to please him. And he succeeded in making his songs lighter than anyone else’s, and made richer tunes and greater follies of arms and love. And he was apt to speak badly of others. 2  As Hejinian wrote in 1978, “we [are] obsessed with our own lives, which lives being now language, the emphasis has moved. The emphasis is persistently centric, so that where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas for vocabularies” (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 29). 3  See Elizabeth Poe, especially pp. 17 and 35.

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He fell in love with all the pretty ladies in sight, and was suitor for all their loves: all told him to do and say whatever he wished, so he believed himself the lover of all of them, and that each was dying for him. All of them deceived him. Razo And he loved besides Loba de Penautier. LaLoba was from Carcassonne. Peire Vidal called himself Lop because of her, and carried the badge of wolf. In the mountains of Cabaret, shepherds hunted him with dogs, greyhounds and great mastiffs, as if the man had been a wolf. In fact he wore a wolfskin, giving that scent to the dogs and their masters and the shepherds hunted him down with the dogs and beat him so badly that he was taken for dead, and carried to the dwelling place of Loba de Penautier. And when she knew that this was Peire Vidal, she was greatly amused at the folly he had committed and began to laugh heartily, and her husband likewise. They accepted him with great joy. (“Peire Vidal” trans. Paul Blackburn. 103–4)

As Tomasevskij suggests, a piquant vida, legend, or anecdote may be vital in producing a semiotic habitat for a poem to exist. If one knows a writer has had an unusual or exceptional life, the work takes on an aura that has ontological punch. Tomasevskij is not interested in “documentary biography” but rather a “literary conception of the author’s life” (53). We are not looking for a determined object of which writing is a symptom, but a “biographical legend” which operates across the text as artifact and has a metamorphic agency between reader and writer because it is created. These legendary biographies are consciously developed by the poet, contingent with the times in which they emerge. They therefore function to deliver both the taste of a zeitgeist and the charge of intimacy. Margareta Egan writes: The charming and anecdotal vidas have lamentably remained on the fringes of scholarly interest ever since they were first perceived to be historically unreliable. Critics long ago dismissed them as fanciful and fictitious…scholars have failed to realize that, though the vidas contain much historically unattestable information, they nonetheless comprise an independent literary genre of some importance. (xiv–xv)

I want to gauge vidas and razos for their charm effects. As functional envoys, vida and razo come after the life of the poet, they work to represent, not the person of the poet, but their daemon, the intangible signature of energy that remotely charges the poetry as it is read contemporarily.

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Berrigan led a life of hedonistic excess, and as part of his poetics, he developed a forceful “personality” that suggested itself as being in total consummation with poetry. It is in the promotion of the “exceptional state” that we can effectively check the voltage of Berrigan’s mythos. Why does Berrigan choose Piere Vidal in particular? In the troubadour tradition, he is the one who fulfils the chivalric code to an excessive degree. Peire Vidal’s vida and razo are exemplary in that they include something of the bestiary or totemic (the wolf), which appeals to pagan instincts of polysubjectivity and also notions of performative identity and fantastic modalities. The vida and razo of other troubadours seem to be the result of distant contemplation or summation, whereas Vidal’s are like being inside a game of self-delusion in a way that is recursively literary. Rather than coming after the poet in the manner of a public commemoration, they seem to effect his preferred version of himself as though he had written them himself. A chronic confabulator, the vida and razo which recall him represent an impossible figure, yet it is in their outrage that these mythemes find their great affect. What seems to madden many troubadour scholars is the way vida and razos seem to literalise the metaphors and fantastic action of poems (Egan xiv). Vidal’s razo of becoming wolf and pursuing (hopelessly) Loba de Pauntier is repeated directly in the troubadour’s song. Scholarship cannot know which came first: which is the original fantasy, the life or the poem? This striving for historicity, for objective biographical fact, is quite beside the point: the stories have charm, they pique our interest in the person of the poet an effect of literature. This is the best kind of spurious information or bastard epistemology: it knows itself as part fact and part fabula without privileging either one as having ontological priority. Berrigan appears as the troubadour in what seems to be an occasional poem: After Peire Vidal, & Myself For Shelley Oh you, the sprightliest and most puggish, the brightest star Of all my lively loves, all ladies, & to whom I once gave up My heart entire, thenceforth yours to keep forever Locked up in your own heart’s tiniest room, my best hope, or To throw away, carelessly, at your leisure, should that prove Yr best pleasure, Who is that dumpy matron, decked out in worn and faded

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Shabby army fatigues which pooch out both before & behind, now screeching Out my small name in a dingy Public Library on the lower East Side? & now Scoring me painfully in philistine Commedie dell’arte farce, low summer fare Across a pedestrian Ferry’s stretch of water in some meshugganah Snug Harbor and once more, even, fiercely pecking at me in the cold drab Parish Hall of Manhattan’s landmark Episcopal Church, where a once avant-garde now Grade                                       School Poetry Project continues to dwell, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bouwerie whose Stones hold in tight grip one wooden leg & all of Peter Stuyvesant’s bones? Who is that midget-witch who preens and prances as she flaunts her lost wares, Otherwise hidden beneath some ancient boy’s flannel-shirt, its tail out & flapping,/& who is shrieking even now these mean words:                   “Hey Ted!” “Hey, you Fat God!” & calling me, “Fickle!”     “Fickle!” & she points a long bony finger At me, and croons, gleefully. “Limbo!”    “That’s where you really live!” & She is claiming to be you               As she whispers, viciously,                          “Alone & In Pain, in Limbo, is where you live in your little cloud-9 home  Ted! Pitiful!”        She has a small purse, & removing it from one of her shopping bags She brings out from inside that small purse, my withered heart; lifting it High into the air with her two hands, she turns it upside down Unzips its fasteners, & shakes it out over the plywood floor, happily. “Empty,” She cries loudly, “just like I always knew it would be!” “Empty!” “Empty” “Empty!” I watch her, and think,           That’s not really you up there, is it,      Rose? Rochelle? Shelley?                O, don’t be sad, little Rose!  It’s still Your ribbon I wear, your favor tied to the grip of my lance, when I ride out to give battle, these golden days.                          (CP 540–1)

Alice Notley gives us a razo for this work: “‘After Peire Vidal, &Myself’ … was written precisely with performance in mind. It was declaimed publicly, in mock-troubadour fashion, to answer his friend

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Rochelle Kraut, who, briefly mad at him, was reading Catullus-like poems ‘against’ him around the Lower East Side” (“Introduction” 12). Notley decides that the performance was mock-troubadour, and in this sense casts the reading as being parodic. Parody allows us to see its iteration and ironise it at the same time. Berrigan’s performance replays and parodies Rochelle’s, braiding her phrases with his own. Raising himself into position by denouncing himself as a “Fat God,” he brands himself with the iron she hands him of being “Fickle,” surely the temperamental signature of the gods. Their dialogue is both general and particular: it partakes of both the classic topoi of the troubadour canso, or love song, while making localised caricatures of place and comportment. Once we are set to read the poem within the troubadour tradition and allow the myth of Berrigan to fit that of Vidal, the confluences multiply headily. Veronica M. Fraser writes that: Peire was part of a fraternity of poets/musicians, both men and women, who quoted each others’ verses, imitated each others’ melodies and sometimes composed songs with another poet. This was the case of the tenso, the debate poem, which was the work of two authors. Intertextual references are frequent in the songs of the troubadours. The concept of plagiarism did not exist; it was considered a compliment to incorporate another poet’s work into one’s own composition. (20)

Berrigan’s response is a campaign. Rochelle Kraut has been fashioning a bad mythology of him and his quick ally is once again an assured figure of Western literature, specifically one with enough in-built irony (Vidal) so that the poet does not seem too invested or vulnerable. Within the wit or cleverness of the response, we might read a degree of anxiety. Although the poet enjoins this exchange as sport he is serious about his legend. Berrigan, with his grip on his lance, exercises his personal grace both in making love and in viciousness. Meant to be performed, the poem is an amative skirmish where Berrigan delivers a blow while performing an apology or promise of sorts. It is a public performance of a “private” sentiment in the troubadour tradition, self-reflexively aware that one’s mythology is constantly being worked, that this is in fact a scene of literature. So Berrigan, in his warrior bearing (the other face of the chivalrous lover), dispatches this threat of a female figure who is disturbingly caricatured as a crone or witch.

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Frederick Goldin writes of the rhetorical techniques of Peire Vidal as being unique among troubadours, mixing discourses of love and the political, and being constantly willing to play with his identity, to make a myth of himself as part of his poetry: It is the triumph of a person who takes the stand as one character and speaks the words of another—in other words, of a performer who does not limit himself to the traditional rules but mixes them up and so surprises his audience. This same sense of the immediate personal presence of a named individual who speaks directly and not in roles is conveyed by his boasts … which also rely for their effect on an audience that knows this man through and through. This intimacy with the audience and his performer’s attitude of self-esteem and self-­mockery are characteristic of his songs. (248)

Berrigan appears as both a “named individual” and in a “role.” The poem is “After Peire Vidal” but also after “Myself.” The style of the poem is following the typical mode of oneself as a blended signature that borrows (affectionately, aggressively) the glamour of the other (Vidal). To be most himself, Berrigan must perform in borrowed costume (sonneteer, troubadour), and he can only perform himself ironically, coming after himself, writing in his own name as one potential style sifted through others. The cheek of posing as the troubadour is ballasted by the fact that all styles, postures, modes, and intonations are performances and all avail themselves of this mysterious thing “sincerity” while still being pranks. One of the authors of this poem, the title suggests, is the myth “Ted Berrigan”: it represents a moment of the poetry being amused and sly about its own methods. This is the marrow of Berrigan’s self-mythology, always inoculated in advance with irony. As well as differentiating himself from other troubadours, Berrigan moves to merge himself with this beguiling historical figure that partakes of both Romantic problems of origin and authenticity and poststructuralist notions of the self finding (trobar/trouver) its composition through a mastery of rhetoric, styles, and conventions. The persona of “Peire Vidal” is still warm in twentieth-century poetry from hosting the spiced tongue of Ezra Pound in his “Peire Vidal Old,” where Pound demonstrates the fascination of a gifted confabulator’s autoluminescence: the ability to invent a phantasm, then turn to love the

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phantasm with an unrivalled fury, especially in a condition of withering potency, through a kind of demonic carburetion. Pound’s Vidal permits his love for the hills of Cabaret, the skies over Cabaret, Penautier the shewolf, and his own miserable self in wolf-disguise shredded by hounds, to be experienced again through the incantation of the song. The charm comes through the weariness of the “Old” scarred combatant going in for stylish skirmish one more time: O age gone lax! O stunted followers, That mask at passions and desire desires, Behold me shrivelled, and your mock of mocks; And yet I mock you by the mighty fires That burnt me to this ash. Ah! Cabaret! Ah Cabaret, thy hills again! Take your hands off me! … [Sniffing the air.]           Ha! this scent is hot! (23)

This mock-struggle at the end brings the action to the present where the “scent is hot,” precisely where Berrigan bends over to pick up the mask of Vidal as a technic of myth-­making, responding to the taunt of being a “stunted follower” in an “age gone lax,” one can almost feel Berrigan’s mirth and delight in turning this whole complex war machine of poetry around in his saddle, with this borrowed aura of weariness and swagger, ready to give charge. The troubadour stands as one of the most mythologised figures in Western literature. Giorgio Agamben sees in the development of the razo the origin of the modern lyric tradition or the lyric as the supreme techne to think through language and being. He argues that the troubadours radicalised for themselves the reason of invention to incite a “new experience of speech”: the troubadours want not to recall arguments consigned to a topos but instead to experience the very event of language as original topos, which takes place in an absolute proximity of love, speech, and knowledge. The razo, which lies at the foundation of poetry … is neither a biographical or a linguistic event. It is instead a zone of indifference, so to speak, between lived experience and what is poeticized … an ‘experience of speech’ as an inexhaustible experience of love. Amor is the name given by the troubadours to this experience of the dwelling of speech in the beginning; and for them, love is the razo de trobar par excellence. (End of the Poem 79)

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Thinking through the troubadour’s poetic experience as “[a] reversal of the poetry-life relation” Agamben takes an interest in texts where “the indeterminateness of what is lived and what is poeticised is absolute…life is truly only what is made in speech” (End of the Poem 81). This, I would argue, is the kernel of mythos, of making life itself the sport of figures, in the style that Berrigan both enjoins and parodies here. Troubadour poetries are carnal poetries which use the armature of a love dialectic to comment on everything and everyone around, while seeming direct and spontaneous (an early version of Castiglione’s sprezzatura) in what is a highly conventional and artificial address.4 Within this atmosphere of nonchalance, Berrigan reproduces the bad myths of himself that Shelley is spreading through the community. Yet by doing so, he owns it. Even if you mock Berrigan, you still work for him in the business of self-mythologising. As Goldin suggests, troubadour poems rely on intimacy and promise their audience will be made privy to personal matters through an investment in the currency of gossip and secrecy. Through the act of reading or re-performing the poem, we are taken into the fold of intimacy and estrangement that structures the love relationship. We become involved in the poem’s razo de trobar, its reason for composition, through Agamben’s sense of this “absolute proximity of love, speech, and knowledge.” “After Peire Vidal and Myself” blends the troubadour genres of canso (love song) and sirventes (satirical song), a technique that marks Vidal’s style. Like Vidal, Berrigan “moves agilely between the two modes of discourse, display and concealment, both in the canso and the sirventes …. Many of his songs are of mixed genre, combining themes of the courtly love song and those of the more didactic sirventes” (Fraser 17–18). Fraser writes that a sirventes might: include […] a discussion of political events, moral and religious matters, humorous and satirical attacks on personal or public enemies …. Sometimes the tone of the sirventes is light and humorous, using irony and parody to mock an adversary, often with the use of elaborate word-games and puns. The purpose is didactic and evaluative, aimed at criticising or correcting a social or personal vice.

4  Sprezzatura: “a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance.” Harry Berger Jr. p. 297.

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Peire Vidal often addresses a jongleur or a fellow poet in his sirventes usually at the end of a song in the tornada. He uses the rhetorical topoi of praise and blame to avenge himself on an enemy or to show his admiration for a friend or patron. He moves rapidly from sacred to secular themes, dealing with war, religion and other contemporary issues. The sirventes give us a fascinating insight into the social and political milieu in which he lived. (131–2)

Part of the action of the poem is Berrigan reading the intricacies of troubadour techniques. It is an exposition of poetic knowledge as well as poetic instinct. Coming after Peire Vidal we know the mode is of one who is a libertine with the truth, preferring wilful poeticisms. The irony is closely plaid with sincerity, they work in strict intimacy. Taking up the lyric, posing as the “I” is a sheer performance, and the event of the poem is the drama of its composition. The “I” is promoted as a brilliant reader of troubadour poetries and a connoisseur of an excruciating set of circumstances, of gestures and feints, that can be exploited for poetry and produce the curdled desires of the poem. The retreating horizon which enables the spacing of desire is the idea of poetry itself. “After Peire Vidal” rides against what we might think of as troubadour conventions by ridiculing the woman; it does not praise fair qualities but makes grotesque her appearance and behaviour.5 Yet as the poem closes with the image of Berrigan with a lance in hand “going to do battle,” it is explicitly a retaliation, but with the beloved’s “favour” bound in with the grip of his fighting gear. He mocks Rose’s poetry as “Commedia dell’arte farce, low summer fare” and her sexual appeal annihilated through being described consecutively as a “dumpy matron” “fiercely pecking at me,” and “midget-witch who preens and prances as she flaunts her lost wares.” This instinct to twist troubadour poetry alerts us to the potential for mocking the tradition. Yet the warp of sarcasm or black caricature is not Berrigan’s invention and we are provided with the ancient sport of troubadours attacking each other through song. Berrigan is here trying to mar the mythology of the beloved and the blight of his epithets cannot be underestimated: these pithy figures are the kinds of psycho-symbolic currency that stick. Yet he entreats her kindness as well, asking “who is this,” suggesting that all performances are done 5  We might also not be surprised to find that the practices of irony and parody are there at the historical origins of the troubadour songs. Perhaps like any cultural form, the amorous song, as a performance of sincerity, is virally informed with its potential parody.

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with masks. In this quarrelling what are we really attacking? Is one wholly identified with one’s attributes? Can one really be hurt by these words: “that’s not really you, up there, is it, Rose? Rochelle? Shelley?” By using three lovers’ names, the poet demonstrates his familiarity with her person but also the fractures inherent in these versions of people, as if to say, “we are not ourselves,” as well as indexing metamorphosis and the ranging degrees of intimacy of a relationship over time. Seizing on the name “Rose,” Berrigan is also probably referencing the prototypical poem of courtly love, Roman de la Rose, which manages to be both instructive in the ways of love and eventually quite bawdy, even misogynistic. This medieval text contacts ancient texts of its own, making extensive reference to the myths of Narcissus and Pygmalion. We are always within the labyrinth of intertextuality, but the name of Berrigan always announces its immanence, and all archaeological readings are already authorised. Identities are public works and collaborations, and while Berrigan might be saying “don’t be precious over it” he defends his own image quite cunningly, in the manner of having one’s cake and eating it. We might begin to see the real excitement in Berrigan’s glee in the fracas, his chance to show off, to flex the mettle of the Ted Berrigan myth and give it a virtuoso performance. Berrigan skewers Rose with his lance and makes a caricature of her. Though there is life in his sketch, it is not murder but a form of tearing apart. We might think of Hélène Cixous’s description of a writing which could “touch lightly”—a touch which preserves and honours difference— which she calls “effleurer”: the caress, as defined against the masculine “deflore,” to deflower (Conley 115). Berrigan means to pitch darts, but while this is a skirmish, there is also a counterpoint of sensitivity to these caricatures, the teasing perhaps more about the flourish of style than an actual assault.6 Once someone takes a bad opinion of us, or circulates a bad mythology, it takes on a life of its own. The salacious travels. Gossip, innuendo—these missives or mutant anecdotes can become public works. If someone forwards a savoury story about a poet or their work, the writer may encounter this bad mythology as something which one is made (perversely) to own. Here, Berrigan is taking action to counter this myth, as well as pointing out the antiquity of this kind of drama and the way poetry can provide 6  Berrigan also uses the opportunity to smite the “once avant-garde now Grade/School/ Poetry Project” in a more general combustion of spleen.

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an exquisitely structured response. I would ask if Berrigan’s viciousness might be a spur to further play, to competition: the poem might constitute part of a joke. What is impressive is the wilful play of identity as rhetorical performance, using a stock figure of Western culture and demonstrating one’s arête in its occasional customisation, knowing that this game of quotations is right within the troubadour tradition. In his appropriation of the sonnet we read Berrigan the bricoleur. Here, Berrigan burlesques the idea of the troubadour. He does not pick it up without guile. Yet while he modifies it in performance, he also subscribes to it being a game of manners, mores, and technique for a cognoscenti. The poem is carefully located at St. Marks Church, home of the Poetry Project, which Berrigan has established as the public locus for the production of his legend. It is a known and zoned area of performance which can command a certain kind of attention. In contrast, the private version of this space is his apartment at 101 St. Marks Place. Where the former is a pastiche of a medieval court or forum for a bardic poet, the latter is a pastiche of Bohemia. These spatial quotations are full of the ambience of a guaranteed social architecture; like the figure of the troubadour, they are traditional constructs that are saturated with mythos. In Berrigan’s usage, the argument of exhaustion that “this has been done before” is somewhat stymied by the knowledge that its suggestive power is precisely why it is taken up and worked. The simulacra is not heresy for Berrigan: ready to hand here is a multidimensional set of performative moves of complex quotation, a chance to rub up against ideas of Romantic originality. Peire Vidal in America is already presaged by the work of Paul Blackburn and Ezra Pound, and Berrigan once again both celebrates and is anxious about his belatedness. Being highly formalised, troubadour poetry comes across as a game of connoisseurship, not only of language but also of identities. The Poetry Project at St Marks Church is something like a court for Berrigan and at court all identities are in the process of being known and operate in relation to others.7 In making a suit to a lady, the troubadour flaunts his skill with the techniques of song, yet while the “personal” or cloaked nuances of meaning will only be known to a very few, its fascination as a court intrigue will hold. The ­ troubadour is a charmer, a performer, and is 7  Nick Selby observes that Berrigan’s New York “literary scene” is “not dissimilar … in its in-­jokes, gossipy sexuality and promiscuous inter-personal relations to that of the Elizabethan court in which the English sonnet sequence flourished” (84–5).

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perhaps not making an actual suit, but participates in an elaborate game of elegance, wit, manners, and cheek, as well as promenading his visceral attributes: fine voice, fine shank, fine posture. Berrigan of course would like to be king of this court and a principal author of its mythologies. This poem in particular “fleshes out” the court as having a lot more action going on than just the reproduction of the Petrarchan/Shakespearean tradition that The Sonnets promote, or the idea of the poet as a Romantic, solitary producer. Writing on this poetry scene as a type of twentieth-­century “court,” Daniel Kane notes the tension between the “individualist paradigm associated with the poetry reading” (where the aura of the performer confirms the work as romantic product) and the poetry reading as a community-­making ritual: “Many people in the audience at lower East Side readings knew one another and commented on one another’s work during the readings themselves…. The poetry reading itself became not so much a space for the performance of an individual genius or windbag as a site for the ongoing fulfilment of a poem actualised in its aural/oral form as it was performed and received in communal territory” (All Poets Welcome 30–1). The troubadour poem not only is written for the body and the voice, but also requires an involved audience to complete it. As such, the poem is a collective techne that guards certain of its mysteries, but which can be read as a site of mythic contestation. Marcella Durand notes that Rochelle Kraut was involved with the production of Caveman magazine at the Poetry Project in conjunction with Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Susie Timmons, Barbara Barg, Jonny Stanton, Elinor Nauen, Bob Rosenthal, Maggie Dubris, and Ted Berrigan (66).8 Berrigan’s 1975 Poetry Project chapbook A Feeling for Leaving was designed and illustrated by Kraut, in a more traditional cross-media collaboration. Whatever the nature of the spat between Berrigan and Kraut in the poem, they are collaborators in the production of poetic identities in a particular time at a particular place. The poem is a receipt of a community that is perhaps close or intimate on many different levels. It is a closed address to another but also part of a social poetics. It helps generate a 8  Durand writes: “The ethos of poetry centered around the Project—the everyday, the humorous, the high and low-combined with the strong sense of community, led to a certain culmination in small publishing: the mimeographed in-house lampoon Caveman” (76). Berrigan and Kraut were also contributors to other magazines, appearing in Mag 8, The World 35, The World 39, and the Poetry Project Newsletter.

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counter-community or subculture of poetry, producing fugitive identities and literature. Durand’s article demonstrates that Berrigan’s relations with female poets go beyond the distinctions of romantic or rival, while exaggerating both for their pyrotechnic effects in “After Piere Vidal.” Rochelle is both herself and the Ideal woman of Le Roman de la Rose. Berrigan chooses as his nom de guerre Peire Vidal: the cheeky confabulator of worlds and identities. He piles all their razos into an indiscrete nebula, so that Vidal and the figure of the troubadour become thinkable through Berrigan, while the Ideal woman of the Le Roman is viscerally quoted through the figure of Rochelle Kraut.9 We read in a compressed set of figures that there is no end to the line of imitation: the poem is a staged reference to past poetic heroes attenuated through the personal. This is a charmed game of names: Peire Vidal’s awareness of his will to delusion is undecided, and so Berrigan’s coming after Peire Vidal suggests a revolutionary hinge of reflexivity. In a war of mythologies he suits himself as the greatest self-mythologiser. Saturated intertextually, Berrigan works the mythos of Vidal and the Rose to legitimate the affair in literature, with the New  York audience as his immediate community as well as the coming community of poetry readers. In the public spacing of poetry, vidas and razos structure community relations, not only describing but also constituting filiations for dispersed communities. Poetry is full of in-between spaces that flag bodies and rumours, rendering poetry not only a highly social medium but also a medium of contagion. Between the publicity of literature and the privacy of gossip, we are continually forced to assess what is scurrilous and what is the proper object for scholarship. Patricia Meyer Spacks observes that gossip as a mode of talk has become the lower class in the binary of discourse which “privilege[s] the abstract, general, and theoretical over the concrete, specific, and personal,” remarking upon its typical association with the feminine through a similar hierarchy (23). We have read in an earlier chapter the ways in which Frank O’Hara interrogates “the jealous spiritualities of the abstract” and favours the “bravely specific,” especially in considering the formation of the self within and against nationalist mythologies. The daily stuff of gossip is made mythos in a way that both “owns” it and holds it open for speculation on the nature of experience, friendship, and subject formation. Gossip here is worked for its scandalous aura and its 9  We should also note Berrigan’s invocation of John Keats and Fanny Brawne as he addresses Rochelle as “my brightest star.”

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abrasive qualities work both ways: it is both “[s]coring me painfully” while texturing the mythology with a sense of the rogue. Is the poem troubled, capable of trouble, in trouble? It is a pointed attempt of the poet to control their mythology; the mixture of aggression and vulnerability is seductive. Judith Peraino writes that “the lyrics of medieval love songs are notoriously moody—stanzas of praise follow those of blame, self-­deprecation alternates with boasting” (3). Berrigan allows Kraut’s attempted assassination but reports it in a tonal braggadocio. Berrigan’s Collected Poems contains a biographical “chronology,” an index of identities alluded to in the poems, and extensive “notes on the poems,” which can all be read as formal substitutes for vidas and razos, peritexts that are part of the work of the poet and their community. Biographical information is transformed by the present imperative of the poetry to make myth of one’s self and one’s friends as a peculiar response to life. Poems fester with the germs of their producer; it is an essential part of Berrigan’s poems to be “grubbed” with the local, the personal, the contemporary, as part of making the self as a mythos that is both communally strained and personally crafted. Moreover, this is done in a way that manages both presentation and evasion, a practice he carefully observes in the work of Frank O’Hara. We still desire something of an authorial pathology. Vida and razo, gossip and anecdote: these complicit texts that are part of the extravagant folds of intrigue are not only contained within the work; through a conception of social and relational architectures, they are the work. They demonstrate a social poetry and model a poetics of identity. The fact of inclusivity and exclusivity of the names in the poems models a social dialectic that might be anyone’s experience of degrees of intimacy, abstraction, and attraction. Again this plays the “phantom immanence of the name” (Shaw 233). Who is Rochelle Kraut? It is part of the troubadour’s ancient intent to occult the poem’s addressee, the beloved, to make the name a metonym for love itself. This works in a peculiar way since “love” as a desired object is always deferred, but the name of the beloved, or the loathed ex-love, hangs in the flesh like a fish-hook and might easily cause fresh grievances. What is staged here is a skirmish between legislators of mythos: the poem is a constitutional event where both perspectives are strategically presented. Berrigan ironically spreads his own bad mythology in an effort to crush, or press, and so collect, the figure of Rose in an ambivalent mix of affection and aggression. Sarah Kay writes of troubadour poets that

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they “legislat[e] about possible erotic/poetic configurations, rather than commenting upon alleged experience” (31). Perhaps the true beloved or occulted addressee of the poem is not Rose at all but the mythic troubadour Ted Berrigan. Rifkin writes that, “Berrigan’s vocational self-fashioning often takes the form of an excessive sexuality: his poems engage the fantasy of both being and having the object of desire, in this case, a fully authorised poetic and social identity” (113). Berrigan knows that a skunked myth, one that has a black streak or malodorous aura, can be perversely attractive. Rifkin’s narcissistic formulation is apposite, but we might recall that the object of Narcissus’s cursed love is an image, a representation, and a phantasm. It is a socialised configuration of an obsession with the other as self, where the whole phenomenal world becomes a sign of the self. The troubadour, like the sonneteer, addresses the phantasmagoria of the beloved, a confected Ideal image, but the troubadour makes a public sport of making love and is promiscuous in their appetites for affection and recognition. What Tomasevskij asks for is not a science of objective biography, with poems read as a set of symptoms which require psychological diagnosis. Rather, he demands a “legend” of the author that can be a public work. The structuralist critical fetish of “close reading” is only reluctantly extended to the author; bios is commonly viewed by critics as something that compromises the value or significance of the literary artefact. Charles Bernstein begins his essay “Writing Against the Body” by holding out both the attraction to and suspicion of the operation of vida and razo: Contradictory impulses characterize my approach to Ted Berrigan’s work. It seems easy to become caught up in the circumstances and style of his life, to portray the man in terms of his personality, his influence, his often extravagant behaviour. Such a perspective, however, whether the response is positive or negative, not only deters from Berrigan’s writing but also tends to misconstrue the nature of his significance. For Berrigan’s work—less interrupted than completed by his recent death at forty-eight—can most usefully be read not as a document of a life in writing but, inversely, as an appropriation of a life by writing. (154)

While warning against it, Bernstein admits to being charmed by Berrigan’s life, by the teasing vida and razo that accompanies his poems. In doing so he implicitly proposes an immanent and transcendent critique: playing down the seductions of Berrigan’s mythos he attests to its pull. Bernstein refrains from saying “poems” preferring “writing” which brings

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with it the glamour of structuralist thought, working to undermine the lyrical I as the “cursed pronoun” of the ideologically suspect bourgeoisie (Wilkinson 187). Bernstein’s insistence on keeping bios and graphos (the life and its graphic trace) apart collapses when he observes that the end of Berrigan’s life was the end of his work. It perversely admits the dissolute spectre of Berrigan as being as part of the work, even as it argues against its incursions into criticism. Bernstein gives us the mythology of Berrigan as the sacrificial worker and cites a nostalgia for writing as a revolutionary praxis. “The appropriation of a life by writing” is advanced as a strategy to fashion Berrigan as a proto-language poet but ends up being an appropriately Romantic formulation. The “nature” of Berrigan as a “signifier” is to feed on itself and propagate as mythos. Bernstein agrees that within “Ted Berrigan” there are “good” and “bad” strains to the mythology. Rather than “misconstrue” the work as though it were something apart, I have been arguing that whether one either approves or disapproves of Berrigan’s performance of himself as a poet, all critical engagement must at some stage deal with the mesh of mythos. Having himself been affected by the charm of poetic vidas and razos, Berrigan appreciates not only that they work but also how they work. His process as a poet is carefully informed by this, as many of his poems could be read as extended vidas, just as many poems are reflexively an account of their composition and could be consulted as razo.

“There Is Always a Phantasmagoria” In Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, Bill Berkson begins his contribution with what seems to be a memorable Berrigan quip: “There is always a phantasmagoria” (“Ted Berrigan” 209). For Berkson, this phrase might trigger the presence of the poet: his tenor, his comic dilation, and his posture. He presents it as telegrammatic shorthand to contact the proximate spectre of the dead Berrigan: the phrase works for him as a powerful talisman. In 2006, Berkson and George Schneeman decided to pay homage to their mutual friend in an inter-artistic collaboration involving word and image. At the close of this short work, Berkson glosses the project with a sketch of Berrigan’s “style of being”:

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“Leprechaun” was one aspect of Ted I glimpsed on New Years Eve 1969–1970. We were in Gordon Baldwin’s kitchen in Bolinas, Ted backed against a counter, holding forth, and as I looked and listened, the head-totoes frame he normally held quite deliberately wide and erect began to shorten and laterally expand, somewhat in the mold of one of those gingerbread Santas, but different. Put together with Ted’s high-riding tenor— more tremulous than usual at that moment—there emerged this temporarily unrecognizable elf. The delay of course had to do with the LSD that everyone that evening had imbibed and was either enjoying or not. For Ted, taking psychedelics generally seemed to be a way of testing one’s will to stay in character no matter how buffeted by doubts to the contrary. He had invented a remarkable character for himself apparently from scratch; the idea, a matter of life and death as one got closer to knowing it, was that the character was fixed but its components were in constant motion, so the man’s consciousness remained fluent, receptive to an extraordinary degree. “My movie,” Ted would say, with that implied separatism in his evolved scheme of (like cellular) pronoun divisions (yours being you). He kept his responses open and found new combinations within what he sometimes let on was a very old self. (Maybe that ancient one was a leprechaun talking.) It’s a mindful fluency that brought on the recombinant strains of The Sonnets and much else in his work. (“Note on Ted Berrigan” n.p.)

Could this passage be apprehended as a vida or razo? What kind of problems does this make for the separation between life and writing? Berkson sees Berrigan improvising poetic composition in his everyday bearing. He is explicit about topos, the place from which to speak, and about the fact that Berrigan’s bios and graphos are part of his machine of presence. Yet Berkson notes the action of a “delay” between what is happening and what is figurally perceived, perhaps due to the aggravation of LSD. This passage attests to the corporeality of mythopoiesis, the way Berrigan as a creature of myth self-consciously presents his physical form in the act of “holding forth.” Berkson describes Berrigan as a manipulated medial phenomenon that takes in the phantasmatic, the biotechnological, and the altered chemical. While reading Berrigan as modulating his own presence, he acknowledges his own role in co-producing this particular version, both in its apperception and his desire to capture it as a configuration of mythos and relay it as a vida. Presenting himself as a connoisseur of the Ted Berrigan myth, Berkson puts his finger on the point that this explication is itself a performance, an “evolved scheme.”

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Berrigan is viewed by Berkson as being possessed of a sentimentalised uncanny, but one that changes from the gift-giving altruistic Santa to the pot-­of-­gold denial of the Leprechaun. It is a doubling between two quite traditional myths, yet the jolly aura of “homily” that Berkson seeks becomes strained with a more arcane wickedness. In discussing movies, Berrigan is himself spooling a self as media. Berkson’s story is exemplary of Adorno’s dialectic of “immanent and transcendent critique”: it knows it is not separate from its object of study and is culturally and perceptually complicit in producing this phenomenon, yet one can intellectually effect a transcendent remove and observe the machinations of this immanent production (Prisms 33). The critical distance is fluttering; Berkson is inside Berrigan’s mythopoiesis, and he sees the truth of Berrigan’s untruth, or the morphology of “truth,” the figuration of “essences.” Adorno writes: Dialectics is the quest to see the new in the old instead of just the old in the new. As it mediates the new, so it also preserves the old as the mediated. If it were to proceed according to the schema of sheer flow and indiscriminate vitality (Lebendigkeit), then it would degrade itself to a replica of the amorphous structure of nature, which it should not sanction through mimicry, but surpass through cognition. (Against Epistemology 38–9)

Dialectics is for Adorno this mode of immanent criticism. It involves the consciousness of an active historicity, the manipulation of forms through time, and the resulting spree of irony. Berkson positions himself to see in Berrigan mediate old and new and to recognise the “Berriganisation” of this sentimentalised uncanny as a signature event. Berkson does not simply enjoy his hallucination as a consumer but recognises the moment as a dialectical sublation with acute reflexivity. We might say that Berkson is collecting Berrigan as a model of the community of mythopoiesis and mythography, the formal instant and the archive. One of the four Berkson/Schneeman collaborations appears thus (see Fig. 5.1): We might compare this clover collaboration to the home-made heraldry examined in the last chapter, which was composed of a slightly different tropological fan of “Oklahoma-isms.” What is attractive about this version is that the authors have been charmed. The four-leaf clover design is the seat of Irishness, with each leaf relaying some identification Berrigan himself cherished or promoted. The motifs run to belligerence and pratfalling, macho fantasies of power and recognition, and an ancient lineage of magic, of access to or knowledge of “aery charms.” What is also hinted

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Fig. 5.1  “Leprachaun” (© Estate of Bill Berkson and Estate of George Schneeman)

at in Berkson and Schneeman’s “charm” is an accompanying darkness of violence. However, the threat of “fisticuffs” is mixed with the “Clown,” and so what is presented is a layered sense of the imp with a rotten temper. It is a cartoon of identity, an economical index of portraying legend as both an affective and a cognitive mapping of poetics. This clover is the stamp of a push-pull dialectic: an open florette that is a mandala of love, attraction, “come hither” that has as its centre button the seal of propriety, possession, jealous repulsion: the copyright symbol ©. What is Berrigan’s is everyone’s and what is everyone’s is Berrigan’s. Each designation imports its silent other, or the yin to its yang: “fisticuffs” and one shy of fighting, “cowboy” and city-slicker, “senator” and proletarian, “clown” and priest or Pope. Edward Docx writes that:

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Clowns, of course, are very serious and important people. At their simplest, they remind us of the silliness of things: that the world we have created is ridiculous. They reassure us in this observation by appealing to our innate understanding of the absurd. They relieve the endless tension and trauma of reality … At a deeper level, the clown is the mirror image of the priest. Both represent two ancient sides of our nature. Both elucidate what it means to be human. The priest summons, celebrates and interrogates the sacred; the clown does the same with the profane. The one is concerned with the eschatological, the other with the ­scatological. The priest propounds abstinence and fasting; the clown gluttony and indulgence. The one solemnifies sex, the other carnalises.10

Far from being a “cute” caricature, Schneeman and Berkson’s survey of Berrigan’s mythological costumes puts pressure on the seriousness of being an alchemist of the sacred profane. Vocationally, the clown is a hero of culture through stumble-bumming, through falling over, through voluntarily stepping in shit, following the Buster Keaton design of raising one’s hopes just high enough to crush oneself, yet performing this Sisyphean round as a consoling spectacle, as Berrigan writes in “Clown”: Today woke up bright & early, no mail, life Is horrible, & I am stupid, & I think …. Nothing. “Have faith, old brother. You are a myth in my heart. (CP 383)

How does the clown console themselves? Whose is this soothing voice that interrupts the poet to remind them of the spirit’s greater construction as a “myth” in the “heart”? Berrigan is here turning the power of poetry to charm on himself, to ward off the humours of a dark day. The dense buzz of the beloved as myth is kept as charmed particles in the reliquary of the heart, and the poem can summon these as an act of faith, to “Turn. Turn around. Turn” away from a black spiral of the desire to be annihilated or disappear (CP 383). Berrigan is addicted to the continuation of myth-making by any means: “no mail” signifies a lull in physical correspondence, so the poet turns to the other physical resources of the blood and the body: the heart, which like the clover diagram is dialectical, full of chatter. Berrigan’s solution is “just talk,” as the next poem in his Collected 10  https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/mar/18/all-hail-the-clown-king-howboris-­johnson-­made-it-by-playing-the-fool?fbclid=IwAR2x8HjrCLoLZDPthD08ss2esy6AV RICAWQm5NrTpoP5Ssf4LkfBQDNUKG0, accessed 21/03/21.

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suggests: “Do I need to be/On my human feet, straight, talking, free…?” (383). Eileen Myles testifies that “Ted talking of course was a great work…he was full of a wide charm that just resonated and still does.”11 Berrigan’s performance of himself is always already a part of his poetics. Berkson’s “Leprechaun” anecdote is part razo, part vida, an account of the composition and performance of the life of a poet who is always on the job, so to speak. As Renny Pritkin suggests of Berrigan’s appearance as poet in residence at 80 Langton St, San Francisco: “it became apparent that Ted Berrigan didn’t care to articulate his poetic so much as embody it” (19). With a limited facsimile print run, what is being proffered through this book as material sign is a kind of literary communion, a means of accessing the poet through a transmission that Whitman boasts in “O Long: …. This is no book/whoever touches this book touches a man” (Leaves of Grass 182). Spatial distinctions collapse. The sketch works as an open dialectic, inviting one to share in the plural postures of Berrigan. Crucially, it is the work of others: Ted Berrigan was always a communal work of literature. Berkson explicitly frames the first pages as a conversation, mixing “various typifications, perceived by me and others, of Ted’s unique persona, together with a cover-all response from Ted or me or both in unison: ‘Shut yr trap’”(n.p.). He calls the sequence a “call-and-response,” and this dialogic mode is expressive of the desires, not just of the collaborators, but also of a broader community. In this conjuring of Ted Berrigan, Berkson and Schneeman perform a secular rite that is as satiric as it is serious. This charming nimbus of Berrigan’s selves acts an icon to call up the presence of the poet; it graphically instates, in effect, a séance.12 Berkson argues that the book’s assemblage of text, instances of speech and drawings, “opens the likelihood of resumed conversation in what Ted liked to think of as, in any case, a continuous situation, the Afterlife…” (n.p.). Berrigan as a hauntologue is unusually active. As we saw in the preceding chapter he was careful to put 11  Eileen Myles interview with Paul Nelson. http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/ files/eileenmyles-ontedberrigan.mp3. 12  The publisher’s note reads “Ted Berrigan, a collaboration between Bill Berkson and George Schneeman … is an homage to the poet and painter’s mutual friend produced as a one off unique book in real-time at George’s studio on St. Marks Place on March 5, 2006. The book is comprised of eight spreads where image and text fuse, bleed off the page and cross the gutter…Handsewn, the dimensions are true to the original. Edition limited to 500 copies.” http://cuneiformpress.blogspot.com/2009/11/quick-reminder.html.

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in a post-mortem voice right from the beginning of The Sonnets. In “Red Shift” we are addressed by the author of the Berrigan mythology:      …When will I die?  I will never die, I will live To be 110, & I will never go away, & you will never escape from me    Who am always & only a ghost, despite this frame, Spirit Who lives only to nag.                              (CP 515–6)

The ghost of Berrigan insists. Berkson writes: At the time, Ted had been—and still is—much on my mind, especially in the form of auditory hallucinations, i.e., my hearing him say certain things he once said, in person and/or in letters, over time. (A little later I said to Harris Schiff, “Ted has been very present lately,” which occasioned his positing, as he has since, “Ted is everywhere!” (“Note on Ted Berrigan” n.p.)

Criticism of the mythic figure of Ted Berrigan is problematised, within and without the poetry, by the living person “Ted Berrigan.” Attempting an immanent myth criticism would rhetorically involve “falling for” or being charmed by Berrigan’s self-as-mythology. For in a transcendent position, the clutch is disengaged; the object of study is not activated and the motor ceases to work. It is the active fluencies or transmission fluid of the charmed and charming self that requires further analysis. There is a strange process of initiation into Berrigan’s poetry: one has to suffer the fool to get to the genius. Berkson writes that: When The Sonnets began appearing they seemed to violate a local propriety (other poets, other scenes). They flew over all that admitting in no secret terms their original smittenness. I felt they were in questionable taste. In 1967 though I got another initiation and the correction thereupon became a permanent pleasure. Ted read those and other poems in the Parish Hall at St. Mark’s and our friendship took off then and there. (209)

An exchange of Berrigan’s poetry requires the performance of supplementary vida and razo as stimulants. The tradition of relating “what Berrigan said” or Berrigan’s “takes” might be problematic yet it is operative. Berkson testifies to a conversion to Berrigan’s personal charm, and since this can no longer be enjoined, there is an urgency in the production and relay of vida and razo. Once the reader is inside a charmed circle, one can read a terrifying and exultant critique of selfhood. Darkness and light,

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pleasure and horror, are shirred in measure throughout. This is the complex surrounding the work that is deliberately generated by the author. The guile of Berrigan’s way of self-­mythologising is not only indexed in the necessity but the pleasures of this readerly partage among the “lovers of Berrigan.” This anecdotal handling makes “Ted Berrigan” a character of literature in the manner of Ahab, or Don Quixote or Walt Whitman, a continuum of shuffling fictionality.

Charmed Articles In Ghostlier Demarcations, Michael Davidson urges us to “recognize the dangers of fetishizing original documents for their own sake in the place of critical assessment of what those documents mean” (xiii). I would acknowledge these dangers for the critic but how might these dangers be recognised: how do we know when we are inside or outside the operation of irradiating charm? The clover motif is precisely a charm in the kitsch sense, but it also has an occult purpose as a casual portal through which the spirit of Berrigan might loom. There is within criticism a tradition of channelling affect through the material, of keeping objects that we view as invested with the charm or memory of the other: gifts, locks of hair, jewels, dedications, and lines of poems. All these things become charged relics. Maryanne Dever writes of the erotic charge in discovering “unusual” texts in the archive, which seem to offer contact with the origin or the body of an artist. Her own example is a tracing of Greta Garbo’s foot as graphic fetish and provocative signature (163). Judith Peraino argues for an erotics of transcription in the first recording of troubadour songs by scribes, describing their efforts as “labors of love”: Scribes … interpreted and preserved the songs, expressing a cultural (if not also personal) desire for the distant Other, removed in space … and time … With pen on parchment, the “touch” between scribes is actual as well as metaphorical: the scribe embodies the words and music with his gestures on the page. (8)

The same might be said of Berkson and Schneeman’s “illuminated” manuscript. While not preserving whole discrete works like poems, they sample Berrigan’s squibs and self-conceits which act metonymically to hail the presence of the poet, allotting a space for the formal indiscretion of

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this “nagging spirit.” Berkson and Schneeman combine the lyric lines of pen and brush to constitute Berrigan as a social configuration, binding themselves to him through this transubstantial article—Berrigan is the book sticky with homosocial bonds. There is a sense in which Berrigan experienced himself as a phantasm. In his moving spectrally across texts, the work enters into an elaboration of this: it merges with him in his razo as the reason for and subject of composition. In The Signature of All Things, Giorgio Agamben writes that “the signature is the place where the gesture of reading and that of writing invert their relation and enter into a zone of undecidability” (56). Schneeman and Berkson sign themselves as Berrigan, just as Berrigan was apt at signing himself as everyone and no one. On the cover they literally re-trace Berrigan’s signature, Berkson in pencil from memory, Schneeman follows with a brush. The homage comes precisely through this gesture, the occulting of the person and the invitation to community are the same act. They literally rewrite the myth of Berrigan after his fashion (see Fig. 5.2):

Fig. 5.2  “Ted Berrigan” (© Estate of Bill Berkson and Estate of George Schneeman)

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In this way Berrigan becomes a hero for the problem of identity. His name comes to signify a blank mythology, the white space that exists for the purpose of the continuing graphic exploit. It is then no accident that the penultimate spread of their book is left blank. Berkson and Schneeman’s collaboration achieves its aura through quotation and appeals to the fetishistic logic of personal appropriation. Through its first editions, limited runs, plates, typesets, foxed, soiled, and otherwise fine, signed copies, one can be read the materiality of the article and the fetish of the collectable. From a collector’s catalogue of a New York-based rare book seller we read for sale the following item: 70. Berrigan, Ted. In The Nam What can Happen? illustrated by George Schneeman. Limited to 70 copies printed letterpress from magnesium plates on Rives 300 gm paper … signed by the artist, of which 50 copies were for sale … A beautiful “simulation” of a one-of-a-kind collaborative book made By Berrigan and Schneeman in 1967–1968. “the original was passed back and forth for about a year, remaining in the hands of one or the other for weeks or even months at a time—poet and artist each adding, subtracting, working over words and images … the work was made primarily for the amusement of the collaborators.” As new. $1000.013

Art as a material commodity comes with its own vida and razo, and the tale of its composition is soaked in mythos. Each detail of distinction attests to the fine and finer contingency of the article, here again suggesting touch “from hand to hand.” An earnest irony is employed to increase its glamour: “A beautiful ‘simulation’ of a one-of-a-kind collaborative book.” Berrigan/Schneeman/Berkson are linked synchronically and diachronically by a razo, and the clover comes to represent both a solipsistic self-obsession and the poet as a social configuration. In article 48 of the same catalogue “Berrigan, Ted. Train Ride (February 18th, 1971) for Joe” we read “it should be noted that the facsimile signature on the last page of the poem is frequently mistaken for a real one” (19). In the context of the collector’s market the seal of ink becomes sacred because it constitutes a trace of the actual writer’s hand, thus

13  p. 23. www.jamesjaffe.com/pdf/Many%20Happy%20Returns.pdf, Catalogue for www. jamesjaffe.com/.

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providing a form of presence and a guarantee of the mythology.14 A signed book is proxy to a drop of the writer’s blood, the touch which gives transfusion: with the signature, the book becomes a relic. In the Collected Poems, this signature is reproduced at the end of the poem (285), is plainly counterfeit, and cute for being so. Berrigan has made his signature available as an obvious simulacrum: the counterfeit signature is the real one, the signature of a phantasm. Berrigan’s signature as a poet is always in crisis; he embraces its dubiousness. He signs a book of O’Hara’s poems.15 He interviews himself as John Cage.16 He loves the prank of the counterfeit. This is the quality of the Irish blaguer, the charming raconteur, of Peire Vidal who prefers life as fable. There is no false Berrigan signature: his is the signature of a network of signs that is always over and underwritten. Thinking after Derrida’s “Declarations of Independence,” the signature is a “differantial” mark. It is both constative and performative, the sign of authority and once again, interminably, its original declaration (49). The razo nebula is the topos of exchange. All along what is Berrigan’s is the razo, the place from which to speak, where the life and its poeticisation, even commodification, are one. The re-circulation of the myth is where he and his counterfeit become one. They are indiscernible from one another. All is blackmarket. His ability to write poems without penning a single word of them, his experiments with the genius of plagiarism, of stealing lines and identities, means that Berrigan is already in circulation. He floats himself as the desirable literary identity. All his relics are facsimiles. What is actually invested is his charm, the Romantic idea of a life turned to poetry. The real economy is found in parlance, in sharing poems and stories about the poet, in the work’s ephemeral sociality, allowing the passage of the phantasm. The reproduction of Berrigan’s charm, or Berrigan as charm, raises questions of how charm might be operating through the poems and through a conception of the poet as a kind of phantasmagoria. The phrase which ignites Berkson, which he sees as being typically Berrigan, is lifted 14  As an occasional purveyor of second-hand books, Berrigan himself worked the cache of the signature, the increased cash value of the signed copy. It has been suggested that he often sought signatures for this very pragmatic purpose. 15  Reported by Stephen Rodefer. “Strange to Be Gone in a Minute.” Waldman 145. 16  ‘AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN CAGE by Ted Berrigan’ http://epc.buffalo.edu/ authors/berrigan/cage.html, accessed 10/06/2011.

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from Yeats’s A General Introduction for My Work (1937), published after the poet’s death. Once again Berrigan’s signature is someone else’s, happily occupying Agamben’s “zone of undecidability” between acts of reading and writing. Yeats supposed that “[a] poet writes always of his personal life in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it may be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria” (509). For Yeats the phantasmatic is his own imaginary territory of the Celtic twilight and his own symbolic obsessions. The poet is operating on an ancient and eternal return of scenes or figures. The making of the self is a fashioning of the soul that will last forever: even when the poet seems most himself … he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete … He is more type than man, more passion than type. He is Lear, Romeo, Oedipus, Tiresias; he has stepped out of a play, and even the woman he loves is Rosalind, Cleopatra, never The Dark Lady. He is part of his own phantasmagoria and we adore him because nature has grown intelligible, and by so doing a part of our creative power. (509)

He cultivates a personal definition of the phantasmagoric, and it is this liberty that Berrigan borrows for himself. Yeats claims the power to be his own creator. Both Berrigan and Yeats are attracted to myth’s dynamic spaces where one can enter and manipulate a changed relationship of figures from within existing figural vocabularies as a means of personalising them. For Yeats this underpins the beams of identity as Irish but beyond nation, but Berrigan wants to make myth of the contemporary as well as mess about with Valhalla’s stage lintels. In his poetry Berrigan does “speak directly as to someone over the breakfast table”: he throws the phantasmagoric out to the whole of experience, radicalising it as an especially literary metaphor, taking it to a comic extreme, yet in this jest there is a serious suggestion of the biotechnics of experience and the desire for the reproducibility of himself as phantasm. Michael Davidson is intrigued by the materiality of “phantasmagoria” in terms of the “social and aesthetic,” how poems and text as machines of presence produce spectral effects in the private realms of their public. He argues that:

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modernist literature is founded on the possibility of release from the limits of time and space—through myth, image, stream of consciousness, spatial form—in order to transcend the materialism that infects every aspect of urban life. Phantasmagoria as a master trope for modernism, represents an amalgam of two temporalities: an apparatus that projects private images and a public space in which they may be experienced collectively. It also joins two spheres of materiality: modes of mechanical reproduction (film, photography, sound recording) in which new subjectivities are produced and new public spaces in which these subjectivities are translated into social and ultimately political relations. (4)

Davidson describes a technological labyrinth which confuses the public and the private in the distribution of cultural artefacts. This is echoed in Berrigan’s conception of his subjective experience as being “my movie.” Ted Berrigan is archived for us in the present through sound recording, film, and text, as the trace of an historical organism, but the Ted Berrigan that slips in and out of the phrases of The Sonnets, who pervasively and evasively slips in and out of the consciousness of his readers, who uses poetry as a techne to complicate the idea of presence, where can this entity be said to exist? I propose that mythic configurations live and move in us through the concept of the phantasm. The phantasm is intimately allied to the virtual, the spectral, and the simulacral: A thing or being which apparently exists but is not real; a hallucination or vision; a figment of the imagination; an illusion … A person who is not what he or she appears or claims to be; an impostor … An illusory likeness of an abstract concept; a counterfeit; a sham; an inferior or false copy or semblance. (“Phantasm” OED)

Berrigan’s slogan, “there is always a phantasmagoria!” indicates his appreciation of the role of imagination in composing the real as a technological production, and his connoisseurship of Yeats’s mythopoetic method. He seizes it as a phrase that describes the action of “occultation,” putting his stamp on the metaphor, owning it in a local poetry community and tying himself to the mysticisms of Yeats. Berrigan’s “phantasmagoria!” is a perversion: the superadded exclamation mark is the effect of the poet’s gusto reported by Berkson as the insistence of the ghost. It also speaks of Berrigan’s love of cant, literary slang, and vernacular terms like “terrific!” which transmits the smirk of the prankster. After Dada, tonal

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irony becomes an improved sincerity. To be aware of the phantasmagorical in the presentation of the self is to be able to manipulate it as part of a poetics of the self. Tricks of presence are produced synchronically as we read Berkson reading Berrigan the phantasm, and diachronically, as in the Collected Poems where we are invited to possess and be possessed by the plural Ted Berrigan. For Berrigan the practice of the phantasmatic is the question of materiality and identity, the gambit of a cellular trick of organic unity in time and space. Alphonso Lingis gives a theoretical account of the person working their myth as part of a total process of communication, but he takes as his type the pedagogue rather than the poet: It is by presenting ourselves, exposed visibly and palpably in the light, that we engender the monstrous shadow that precedes us and soaks into the ground under our feet. The professor who enters the classroom the first day has been preceded by the legend or myth of himself which the students now see materializing before their eyes. They adjust practically to the level of his voice and to the arena of his movements; he knows they are looking at the personage and fits his person into it as he enters the room. (42–3)

Lingis’s conception of the phantasm is something like a lyrical phenomenology: The essences of things are not core appearances: it belongs to the essences of sensible things that they appear only in profiles and their characteristics caricaturize themselves. A thing is by engendering images of itself, reflections, shadows, and halos. These cannot be separated from the core appearance which would make them possible, for they make what one takes to be the core appearance visible. The surfaces of things are not more real than their facades; the reality that engenders the phantasm is engendered by it. (41)

What Berkson reports is Berrigan working this principle as part of his presentation of the poet, suggesting a collusion, an effort of poiesis from both subject and object. Lingis points to a cunning artifice of “things themselves,” suggesting that the demand for caricature and typology might be coming from the material world “it” self. He talks of the face as an idol and uses metaphors of planes, hulls, and carpentry and of the exchange of ritual masks (41). Moreover, Lingis argues for the phantasm

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as the veil of exchange, a negotiated and affective limn, an obscure aesthetic consensus. Berrigan’s engaged sense of the presentation of self is fluid, protean, and collaborative, which, as we read in his “becoming leprechaun,” does not preclude caricature. Berkson’s tricked biotechnics allow him to read this dynamic action, and through his own morphing iconography, join Berrigan in a “zone of undecidability” about who is reading and who is writing. In a sense, then, Schneeman and Berkson’s book as razo is about Berrigan’s skill in making razo, in an infinite circularity. In his “Theatrum Philosophicum” Michel Foucault argues that: Phantasms must be allowed to function at the limit of bodies; against bodies, because they stick to bodies and protrude from them, but also because they touch them, cut them, break them into sections, regionalize them, and multiply their surfaces; and equally, outside of bodies, because they function between bodies according to laws of proximity, torsion, and variable distance—laws of which they remain ignorant. Phantasms do not extend organisms into the imaginary; they topologize the materiality of the body. They should consequently be freed from the restrictions we impose upon them, freed from the dilemmas of truth and falsehood and of being and nonbeing (the essential difference between simulacrum and copy carried to its logical conclusion); they must be allowed to conduct their dance, to act out their mime, as “extrabeings.” (169–70)

It is this “extrabeing” that I have been characterising as the poet’s daemon, a figure for the “materiality for incorporeal things,” a figure that resolves presence and non-presence, the mortal and the immortal (Foucault 170). The fashion of the daemon is determined by its reader. It has no archetype, is fundamentally personal, and processed as a private animation through a confluence of impressions. The image consortium of the Berrigan clover is an uncannily clear signal of the poet’s projected idea of himself which others are happy to reproduce. It not only functions as an ensign for Ted Berrigan, but also flags the success of Berrigan’s ability to charm, to have the other accept and propagate his version of himself. This might be read against the versions of O’Hara that are developed in his Homage, which, as I have demonstrated in Chap. 2, function more as incomplete or errant in their desire to capture the person of O’Hara. Indeed, they find the most apt success in their own failure. John Wilkinson writes that:

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To be oneself is a great temptation for the post-Romantic artist. It may be true, as de Man puts it, that “any reading is a monumentalization of sorts,” but O’Hara was as determined a disfigurer as Shelley, and resists with ceaseless perspicacity the ingenious plots that contrive erection of the self as phallic monument; he dismembers, corrupts, covers with graffiti. Reading O’Hara must honour the ceaselessly active intelligence of a poetry always alert to its own temptations. (116–7)

Elaine de Kooning’s satisfaction in defacing her portrait of O’Hara to find him “more there” is perhaps the most suggestive example, but Joe Brainard’s confusion of lyric lines does the same job. O’Hara is sought not just as a work of art but as a continuing goad to the possibilities of art and representation; of the maintenance of the desire for formal possibilities which mark O’Hara’s poetics.17 Berrigan is a different business. In Waldman’s Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, the satisfaction seems to come from replaying Berrigan’s own mythemes which he himself has set to circulate, pushing fatefully a bricolage of literary identity. In Berkson’s diagnosis, Berrigan makes the atmosphere and flux of identifications the business of poiesis which he holds open as a gamble. This sense of Berrigan is perhaps a system of postures, not really a persona; let’s call it a mythology. Berrigan is at once more dispersed in the ironic play of quotations in his poetry and more enthroned at the centre of poetic activity or as a proclaimed poet than O’Hara. As Berkson reports or “sees,” Berrigan has a refined understanding of glamour, of a promoted presence: he is able to make Berkson sensually conceive both a Myth of Ted Berrigan and the cataloguing system of mutability which produces it.

Works Like a Charm Frank O’Hara is perhaps Berrigan’s greatest “lucky charm.” Berkson quotes Berrigan as saying, “I read F[rank] as a manual of How to Live” and then adds, “So he took on the plane of the life-language process. He took the whole Fish” (“Ted Berrigan” 209). Berrigan is not likely to take just a morsel, but acts as the cosmophage, the one who eats everything. This is a total confusion of the body of the text and the body of the poet 17  See E. deKooning (97) and Brainard (167) in Berkson and LeSueur Homage to Frank O’Hara.

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which troubles the distinctions of organic and inorganic techne: what is living and what is not. The reification of language as a living thing and as the possibility of community through poiesis is here built in microcosm. Berrigan and Berkson embody the twin modes of transmission of a filial relationship: Berrigan comes to O’Hara absolutely through poems, taking up what he perceives as a style of being through language. Berkson, as a close personal friend of O’Hara’s and a collaborator, virtually a lover, receives the transmission through physical touch, yet both of these poets get the “touch.” In “Personal Poem” O’Hara writes: Now when I walk around at lunchtime I have only two charms in my pocket an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case when I was in Madrid the others never brought me too much luck though they did help keep me in New York against coercion but now I’m happy for a time and interested. (CP 335)

What makes something charmed? For O’Hara it is the contingency of its providence: the gift from a friend, an accident deliberately turned into good fortune. The turning of article to relic is a personal distinction, one croups these “ordinary” articles into one’s personal reliquary because they present themselves as being charmed. Berrigan finds O’Hara’s line “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible” and responds “OK. I’ll buy that” (“Memorial Day” CP 303).18 Berrigan fully apprehends O’Hara as part of his self. O’Hara’s self-mythologising is adopted as his own. David Shapiro writes that, “When I think of Ted, I think of the fact that one of my favorite putative lines of O’Hara was written by him (‘feminine marvelous and tough’)” (226). It is these transactions that compose a personal mythos and it is always an exchange of the public and the private. But presented in poems, this distinction is held open; one’s mythos is never wholly subsumed into the “private.” We know that on another lunchtime jaunt O’Hara’s heart is in his pocket, “it is poems by Pierre Reverdy” (CP 258). O’Hara keeps the lyric line as a charm. Lines of poems become 18  “OK. I’ll buy that” is a definitional “flatfooted” dance-move for Berrigan. It presents itself as allied with but in contradistinction to O’Hara’s “Grace…” with its own “awkward grace.” This is the energetic signature.

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apotropaic, able to ward off ill-humours, if only briefly. Stoneley writes of O’Hara: The particular tokens within the poetry serve local recuperative ends: they help him through a lunch-hour, or around the violent contempt of commuters and cops. But they also allegorize the process of poetry, which is that of creating a momentary holding place, of making a “little object” that will stand in for and evoke all that will and must escape him. (139)

This exchange, of the public architectures and artefacts of a culture, and their private customisations by the subject, is performed by the poets of this book. Self-mythologising is not only the business of poets, but also the business of poets to “turn it out.” Berrigan strays from the myth of Santa to that of the leprechaun, the one that gives and the one that covets and hordes language. Having read some of the ways in which Berrigan is taken up as a lucky charm by Berkson, I turn lastly to a further charmed relay with Richard Hell. In his review of Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters from Ted to Sandy Berrigan, Hell gives us a vida that concentrates on Berrigan’s early career, but which also allows its author to sketch his own ethos of artistic production. He relates a story of Berrigan going on a road-trip “from New York to New Orleans” and on the way dropping by the Library of Congress to steal and destroy “his first, self-published collection, A Lily for My Love (1959).” He then offers this: Berrigan, though almost always broke, lived large poetically. Hardly anyone was there to notice when he made the above-noted legend-worthy gestures. He was the fully self-aware Quixote of poets: a funky god, the Quixote who was his own author, inventing himself out of what was lying around. The value of human gods is the inspiration they provide. Berrigan’s time on earth (he died in 1983) gave us proof that it’s possible to live full time solely as a poet, suffer all the horrible material consequences of that commitment, and remain (mostly) lovely, largehearted, and sane. This while contributing great beauty and wit to the reservoir of poetry. If only he’d lived longer, been a bit healthier. Do the human gods have to die young? More often than not, it appears. Still, their inspiration is real and important. (n.p.)

The rhetorical purpose of this is to incite interest in the poet as having an exceptional status that lays a significant claim on romanticisms, on critiques of capitalism and the institutional production of knowledge and art,

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and on being stylish. Berrigan here is the incarnation of a certain idea of poetry and Hell does a sacrificial ritual to satisfy Berrigan’s mythopoiesis, reciting through an anecdotal line, the profile or articulated aura of the mythology. The emerging poet “kills” the juvenile poet to save the poet in posterity. This is the calculated production of “Ted Berrigan: poet” and would be counted as part of his poetics. This passage bears the impression of Berrigan’s self-mythology. It is the reproduction of a projection, a fantasy of outlawry, indexing Berrigan for a type of poetry reading public. It is arguably a vida, a biography of the poet, but it is also a razo, the account of the composition of a certain work, namely, the myth of Ted Berrigan. The choice of “fully self-aware Quixote of poets” is a strange and delightful phrase, in the sense of being affectively illuminating: Quixote is overly affected by literature and codes of chivalry, becomes delusional to wit, and comically makes his life as a series of fabulous tropes. Yet he remains beguiling because of his attempt to live a picaresque romance to the letter, evoking in the reader a certain wistfulness, or sentimentality, for the hopeless. Quixote is a complex signature of literary saturation, of perpetual reflexivity, and it is one that Berrigan readily owns because of this. There is no one official vida for Berrigan, as there is not one for O’Hara. Both poets are the subject of highly personalised vidas made by enthusiasts of their work and artist friends. Those who knew Berrigan seem to respond to a demand for vida and razo, to fill in the project of poetics that was this person in the manner of Tomasevskij’s “legendizing” that is put in place to remotely charge the work. Berrigan is an insistence on poetry and the poeticisation of experience. One gets the sense from these vidas that Berrigan makes a cult of poetry and that the community that forms around him is attracted to an occulting of the poet. Here the mythology of the self as writer works through the figures of Richard Hell—New York Punk-Rocker, Quixote, Ted Berrigan, and Miguel de Cervantes, demonstrating the formal promiscuity of mythic thinking. In The Flesh of Words Jacques Rancière describes the “catastrophic ‘excursions’” of Don Quixote: “the man who wants to complete the book and believes that this consists of finding resemblances to the book in reality” (4). Quixote is the one who is completely at home in mythologies, who is heroically delusional, and who is thoroughly literary. This is the heroic that is both swallowed by and eludes the simulacral in its willing involvement. The confusion of Berrigan and Quixote might make

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us think of Lacan’s “definition we once gave in passing of the modern hero, ‘whom ludicrous exploits exalt in circumstances of utter confusion’” (36). Berrigan always has it both ways: he suggests that he does not try to master truth or have a will to truth beyond his capacities. His conspiracy is directly with poiesis as access to a stumblebum sublime, as the texture of being. Rancière’s fascination is with transubstantiation, with “truth made flesh” or the word as incarnation, and in many accounts of Berrigan’s presence as a poet, his beastliness intrudes. In his review, Hell manages a mimesis or conjuring of Ted Berrigan that is a literary effect, and he does it by operating both vida and razo and by exampling the bodies of poems as criticism must. Berrigan is the figure of one who makes the word flesh, his own flesh, and who cannibalises the other in love and in homage. The sacerdotal process for Berrigan is in the actual telling of it, the actual working-of-it-out. “Don Quixote & Sancho Panza,” one of Berrigan’s last poems, is a melancholic mixture of the comic and the desperate. The diarising mode and the address to the other has become a plea for money that is itself ironic, since the poet knows he is dying: “Don Quixote & Sancho Panza” It is 1934. Edmund Wilson is going to Russia Next year. There’s a brunette Dwarf asleep in his bed. Scarlatina. Bedbugs. Dear Henry Allen Moe:    Can you wire me a $100 loan, to Paris? I have learned everything I can here 253 lbs later, it is May, 1983. Did Henry Allen Moe get burned? Tomorrow I will need $50, Summer Camp For Sonny, & supper. I can hear My own voice on the telephone: hello, Ed? (Edward Halsey Foster) Hi, Ed. Got any dollars? Today I am 48 years, 5 months and 16 days old, In perfect health. May Day.                   (CP 644)

The poem records his exact mortal measure, with the exquisite loading of “In perfect health” at a time when, as Alice Notley notes, he was

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counting his days.19 May Day is the pagan marking of spring and its eternal return, the day to celebrate working-class revolution, and the code for a sinking ship. Berrigan makes a modest (and sarcastic) Quixote in his demands for money. But rather than venturing out on excursion, to make the real match the literary fantasy, Berrigan remains at home with his bedroom as the bestiary. The “this is what is going on here” mode has become a classical one for Berrigan, a writer who, by now, consumes his own tradition. This poem condenses the body of Ted Berrigan, its speaking style, its rhetorical duende, its lo-fi awkward grace. The poem gives the “exact time,” weight and age of the beast, the seismographic tremor of the voice, its fluctuation marks. This is Berrigan performing his mythos in all its dimensions, and the final line, “May Day,” suggests that myth requires a constant archaeology, that the poem is the speaking of each new beginning, even at the end. This is the mixed codex of Berrigan’s “heroism.” Charles Bernstein writes: Berrigan’s commitment to writing “over and against”—that the body might be destroyed for the truth to be told—did not preclude comedy. The humor in this work is related, in part, to a disequilibrium of scale—the (f)utility of individual rejectionism against the backdrop of Multinational Steel and Glass, circa 1961—as if meaning could be produced by sheer force of will, charging at windmills. (156)

This leaves us with the idea of being a full-time poet as a fantasy position, or rather a comically reckless one, like Quixote “charging at windmills.” Hell subscribes to the pathos of a “fully self-aware Quixote” as a heroic mode. Quixote remains the problem of self-awareness and Cervantes’s creation gets no final synthesis. Berrigan’s sacrificing of the body for literature as an Orphic gesture is here scourged by this final notion that the ethos should be to “get the money.” Indignation is tempered with its deflationary pressure. It is a blend of pathetic lament for the déclassé troubadour in the twentieth century and the easy wit or grace of its cheeky demands. Berrigan signs off on his mythos as both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as a dialogic complex of figures which complete each other. We might read this as Berrigan acknowledging and riding with 19  Notley, Alice. “Notes”: “One cannot help but have the feeling he is counting down to his final moments.” CP 717.

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“Ted Berrigan,” his phantasmatic creation. The poem’s place at the end of the Collected Works indicates the dimensions of the epic for what has come before. It makes us think of the mythic patterning of serialised exploits of the tragicomic “knight errant” with lance in hand and his robust ally. It suggests that perhaps one should always be in company and that the Berrigan phantasm doubles the company by being both Quixote and Panza. We might also think that the Beloved which structures the desires of Berrigan’s “chivalric code,” and which is the goad for his exploits, is poetry itself. Like Don Quixote, the Collected Works of Ted Berrigan is an episode of literature consuming itself. Berrigan’s art is in making the occasion one’s own suit, and doing so consciously, playing identity through a tradition of literature. Ernst Bloch writes that “Existence is full of figures, but not organized figures, with each and every one in its fixed place. Instead an echo of allegorical meaning will still resound everywhere, instructively relaying back and forth, ambiguously reflective, before a form will stand there” (Traces 130). This idea of the figure is structurally different from the neo-platonic idea of archetypes because of its horizontal movement and charged sociability, recalling the stuttering rhythm of Adorno’s immanent critique. This kind of mythic reading is a tuning between forms. The movement is not that of an allegory between two terminal texts, but between one mythic form and another that suggests an equivalence. Bloch’s idea of stasis is constantly pestered by the slipperiness of images. We read Quixote in Berrigan, as well as Berrigan in Quixote; we read New York’s Lower East Side in the courts of ancient Occitania. Berrigan’s poetics represents a personal and constant archaeology of forms. There is more at stake in a poem than the achievement of a work of art or the consolation of being an artist. Berrigan as Quixote is one complex dialogic rhyme among many which he claims. In the longer open-form poems which come after The Sonnets, “Tambourine Life” and “Bean Spasms,” Eric Selinger reads a stretched desire to find a new form and an “increasing facility with poems that make themselves up as they go along, enacting the discoveries and shifting moods (often the growing relief) of their composition” (n.p.). This “relief” of the poem’s having begun and being able to continue communicates that for Berrigan the poem is literally the means to continue; the reproduction of self as well as the sacrifice of self, of turning the self out.

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Berrigan’s “Don Quixote and Sancho Panza” is curled with questions, wanting to be lazily provocative and humorous. We might read an implicit critique of confessional poetry here as being a false posturing; since confessional poetry will often only strive for sincerity, its risks are limited. Berrigan tests the deadpan lyric that is full of frivolity, gossip, begging, and stupidity, as well as sentimentality and the excesses of lyrical pretension. He uses the poem to open the road between the self and other, to risk turning the self out to have express exposure. This is where the boundaries of selfhood, of touch, of transmission and exchange thoroughly confuse notions of the public and the private. The experience of reading a lot of Berrigan is to become a friend of the Collected Poems, as Berrigan may have thought of his being, physical and metaphysical, as a collected work. This project of exposure is also about control: the poet says “you are totally welcome in” but also “once you are here I am in charge of what you will see.” It is powered by Berrigan’s notion of “the Irish speaking life,” of not being reticent in talk, and of testing one’s private phantasmagoria in public. Joel Lewis suggests that, “Ted allowed his life and feelings into his public self more than any poet of his time” (6). This is debatable given the extreme proximity of Frank O’Hara’s poetry and example as a poet of complex sociality, but as a poetical truth and rhetorical turn, it has its own truth as mythos. This chapter has examined Ted Berrigan as the signature of dynamic textual negotiations. The Berrigan myth is a brilliantly trained species for a study of self-mythologising, for it is the myth of one who is an expert reader and writer (performer) of mythic shapes in a pattern of endless recursion. Structuralism’s dream of a dead author is both ratified and denied in the Berrigan case. He is a cosmos of migrating and intercoursing textures, a terrible idol, an affixed human shape. In Berrigan we read a genealogy of heroes: Berrigan loves O’Hara, one of O’Hara’s heroes is Byron, Byron styled himself on Napoleon, even having a carriage made to resemble the Emperor’s, Napoleon was a careful reader of Frederick the Great.20 This is a serried line of figures whose primitive forms are the gods of Greek and Hebraic mythology. Such a conception has telos. We can read a causal chain, but in Berrigan we see all of these operating simultaneously as a chorus of archetypes. Perhaps the metaphor could be the concertina: a machine of layered texts and complex folds, whose singularities 20  See Judith Pascoe. The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. pp. 85–109.

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can be played as tones, and contains all potential modulations of voice and identity. Berrigan is the archive’s self-appointed Irish player, allowing for both the fool and the virtuoso. Where once vida and razo were techniques for establishing the prestige of the poet at court and were collated, they are now on the fly, dispersed as buzzing fragments on the World Wide Web and distributed among poetry communities as part of gossip and personal relay. The space of the troubadour, the audience for the poet, has in a measure become virtual: one “courts” privately, accumulating intimacies at a distance. Berrigan deals in myth and it works. Outside his mythology, a good deal of the poetry might threaten to fall into the banal and ridiculous, but if one breathes in the mythology of Ted Berrigan, his use of the English language becomes baffling and sublime in its ritual and wilful problematising of reading and writing the self.

CHAPTER 6

The Textural Shimmer of John Forbes’s Dead Reckoning

John Forbes was raving, as usual, about poetry when he keeled over at a kitchen table in Melbourne Australia, 1998. Only 47 at the time, poetry had consumed his life, literally and figuratively. Having an instinctive distaste for being labelled as a “generation of ‘68” or New Australian poet, Forbes preferred to fashion a personal mythopoeisis in alignment with the spurious methods of Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan. Embracing a recreational praxis that overtly imitated Berrigan, he proscribed for himself a steady diet of stimulants that favoured codeine-based cough syrup which he called “glug,” filterless Camel cigarettes, and whiskey or red Italian table wine. Like Berrigan’s, Forbes’s life didn’t hold to the heroic structure of the epic. His Act III became his Act V as his addictions quietly and diligently aged his major organs. It was a case of burning the human tallow to perfect the art, extracting a strict tincture of pathos from one’s living days through a conflagration of brain cells, crossing ludic states and accelerating towards self-immolation. This over-commitment or sacrifice of one’s life to poetry was twinned with a belief that the poem itself was an inherited but expansive technology through which to create versions of the self. Whereas O’Hara and Berrigan wrote during the Cold War and in a pre-­ digital era, Forbes witnessed the explosion of the information age and the collapse of the Soviet empire, followed by the evacuation of ideology and its reterritorialisation as a possible space of entertainment, that is, culture © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Hose, The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94841-2_6

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occurring at the speed of capital. Moreover, he was familiar with the poststructuralist revolution of the late twentieth century as it guided a cultural turn towards the textual possibilities of being. Forbes enveloped into his poetic praxis the shock of Derrida’s On Grammatology, Foucault’s notions of the archaeology of social practices, and Deleuze’s fascination with indiscrete and autonomous energies that are micro-figurations of the Nietzschean will. He took on the idea of the subject as contingent rather than necessary, as created rather than essential. He also embraced the idea of the subject constituted in and through language with the fervour of a faith, Mark O’Connor observing that his poems sometimes sound “strangely like sermons” (Anderson 20). Forbes believed in poetry as a shimmering portal of agency, where working on the edge of language is working on the ontological frontier of what can be known. For Forbes, it is the glyphic nature of language that makes it the techne of choice for both creating and critiquing forms of identity. In this chapter, I examine Forbes’s mapping of O’Hara and Berrigan in the making of himself as poet, his being “on edge” about America’s cultural imports but loving them all the same, and his appreciation for Australia’s mix of what could be called incorporative difference. I then move to a consideration of Forbes’s poetry as a kind of instructive standard of symbolic and linguistic citizenship, looking at the ways his poetry both practices and interrogates the constituting of selves and nation as a dynamic economy of myth. Finally, I explore how Forbes reworks traditions of love and writing, particularly through the figure of the troubadour, and how he investigates the material texture of self-in-world by launching off from O’Hara and Berrigan and plotting quite different coordinates. A key part of Forbes’s mythology is the figure of the inveterate reader. To ask after his precedents is to ask after the history of poetry in the West. In terms of an occultation of the figure of the poet, we see a particularly careful but self-­consciously spectral reading of Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan that reveals an enthusiasm towards their handling of American culture and literary provenance, but also an intense desire to understand their forms of love: “To the Bobbydazzlers” American poets! you have saved America from its reputation

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if not its fate & you saved me too, in 1970 when I first breathed freely in Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets, escaping the talented earache of Modern Poetry.         Sitting on the beach I look towards you but the curve of the Pacific gets in the way & I see stars instead knocked out by your poems American poets, the Great Dead are smiling in your faces. I salute their luminous hum!            (CP 69)

Here, Forbes pays homage in his own fashion. The poem’s appropriateness is in its gesture to a poetic community, both living and dead, and in its taking up the tradition of putting the self into play through the constitutional act of the poem. There is also homage in his splicing and complicating of its objects: “America” is a problem, but American poets have made America fecund again as mythological territory of the New World. America as a behemoth of political power has always closely controlled its official mythologies, of origin, of divine right, and of the blood satisfaction of its Revolutionary War for self-sovereignty. Forbes alludes to something apocalyptic and necessary in the “fate” of an empire, but salutes what American poets of the twentieth century will always have done for its reputation. Noting how these figures throw the mythic but game-like nature of poetry as a hemispheric curve-ball to Australia, he reads America’s experiment in political and social freedoms, and the will to self-determination as possibly succeeding in its poets.

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“To the Bobbydazzlers” zeroes in on Berrigan’s speculative “machines of presence” as generating an atmosphere of euphoria. This liberation is visceral; we hear the pulmonary relief in the vowels of “breathed freely” and an adrenalised truancy from the drone of “the talented earache of Modern/ Poetry.” Forbes abandons himself to the turning of the resorted lyric and the possibility of the poem (and the self) as a collage of styles and an active courting of disjunction that The Sonnets present. He desires to lose himself in the maze of The Sonnets, finds pleasure in the selfconscious but naïve “loveliness” of their language, and is attracted to their reflexive suggestiveness concerning the poem as constitutional act. Indeed, he finds Berrigan’s roving, multifarious, trickster poems as useful artefacts from an American Revolution that cut across problems of identity, originality, and an authenticity of presence. Yet as this poem involves itself with what it loves, it also keeps a subtle, even blasphemous distance. It does not stand to give its salute, it is “Sitting/ on the beach …” in a style of casual insurrection. The title dedication is the kind of absurd slang that Forbes revels in: “Bobbydazzlers” connotes excess or “flashness” in the way someone is turned out. The “bb”s and “zz”s lend a bubble and fizz of enthusiasm to the expression, but it can also be read as a cute provincialism; Forbes is marking himself as Australian in saying “this is what we call you here.”1 The poet is seduced by the glamour and confidence of American cultural products, even as they obscured by the Pacific rim. He yearns to see the aesthetics of popular culture overtake what he sees as traditional, rarefied models of poetry being written in Australia, summing up his poetic epiphany through a Warner Brothers gesture of “seeing stars” and being “knocked/ out.” This gesture also allows him to slide on the base of counter-cultural slang while putting a subtle pressure on the ease of its assumption, parodying an appetite for American mannerisms and markings. Struck by the “star system” of poets as candescent cultural presences, Forbes reads O’Hara and Berrigan as stellar points in mapping a position line for his own dead reckoning. What is transmitted is the practice of mythopoiesis in the act of the poem, combining the contingent details of one’s life and the broader economies of national mythologies, while being reflexively aware of language as the continuing institution of the social. Being elegiac, the poem joins the tradition of addressing the dead while constellating one’s personal hauntologue. It shows that every elegiac poem joins in a  Bobby Dazzler as slang can be traced to Lancashire and Yorkshire from the C19th.

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recombinant song of the dead.2 “To the Bobbydazzlers” addresses directly the presence of a batting line of poets: “American poets,/ the Great Dead/ are smiling/ in your faces.” You cannot see the faces of the “Great Dead” except as endless phantasmagoria: we “see” in Berrigan’s face Peire Vidal, Quixote, O’Hara, Shakespeare, Keats, as we “see” in O’Hara Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Reverdy, Byron, and Rimbaud. Forbes’s salute is unreservedly for the flickering daemon of poets or what is phenomenally produced as ethos on the surface of the page as a “luminous hum.” The identity of the individual poet is in elected concertina with others, Forbes compacting the faces of his heroes as a way of facing up to lumen, to light. “To the Bobbydazzlers” reports the charms of Berrigan and O’Hara as it signals at the same time Forbes’s intention to charm through a personal transmission: it is exemplary of the poet lending savour to the practice of self-making. Forbes explicitly names Berrigan’s Sonnets as the machinery that energises modern poetry, as a ludic science of joy as well as epistemological inquiry. As democracy must be refreshed and the bowels sweetened, the various constitution of selves must be continually written. This is a Whitmanian ideal of poiesis to which O’Hara and Berrigan subscribe and which Forbes adopts and then adapts. This chapter is not a forensic examination of Forbes’s work for the signature of the American poets. Rather, it tracks a method of transposition, involving poetry as a means to configure selves to another continent, another country, and another generation. It also brings the study of self-mythologising from the mid-twentieth century closer to the present. Forbes’s attention to the formation of subjects in different kinds of spaces, abstract structures, and discursive measures shows us the self as the most highly contested thing of all. Forbes’s early poems might be viewed as the work of an ontological humourist, in which the performance of language and intellect turn from one aporia to another. They become funnels to direct the abyssal vertigo of being until one comes to sense that these oscillations between sense and nonsense, the rhetorical flourishes that deliquesce into doubt, are all that is possible in the life of the mind. So the question of style as a set of figurative moves one can make within the limits of the episteme becomes all important. It is the provisional reification of style as substance which is the late style of decadent capitalism. This is not simply a cynical collapse into hedonistic consumption, where the poet peddles his trinkets in the marketplace. It is the liberation of the 2  This final phrase is drawn from Corey Wakeling’s Goad Omen. Sydney: Giramondo, 2013. p.16.

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everyday, despite or because of its aesthetic pick-pocketing, as the proper material for poetry; a poetics of dialectical critique in Adorno’s sense that must permanently forgo the varied seductions of both immanent and transcendent critique and remain mobile, fractious, and heartily disconsolate (Prisms). Forbes wants poems that, as he puts it, “draw their energy from a resistance to the inevitability of culture and its deceleration into meaning” and that move beyond either myths of “individual sensibility” or “religious transcendence” (“Accelerating Subject” 251).

Technics of Self: Surface Technics This is a slice of an early Forbes poem entitled “Admonition”: I’m a migrating worker I love a celestial fridge            Will apples happen?           Will glycerine flow like blood?                     What’s the typical daze?                Is this the average spelling?                         Not if we can help it, stumblebum. 2 When you’re raining in my heart it’s gorillas. When pennies fall from heaven make sure you’re not the village idiot       Memories of Cocaine catch me in a clefted stick, for you’ll never catch me rubbed bronzes of my poverty salting your mind with a paydirt ellipse               ‘a tiny rock is a spiritual hit’ is it? ……………………………………… Let me disappear, let me go to the spontaneous bullfight!                          (CP 42)

It is worth asking straight away, how is this poem admonitory? The line, “When you’re raining in my heart,” might be a barb for neo-romantics, but is certainly a signal of anti-gravity and a taunt to readers who expect poetry to do metaphysical or revelatory work.

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The idea of striking “rubbed bronzes of my poverty” mocks the idea of celebrating the artists’ penury or casting periods of one’s life as a generic mythology to be admired in the salon of one’s home. “[A] tiny rock is a spiritual hit” is either a rock of Cocaine or Blake’s “world in a grain of sand,” or both, or neither. The poem is a collage of mutant clichés that sound like a handful of nifty catchphrases for the would-be existentialist, except in each case the trope is bent or has been disfigured with some deliberate kink. The admixing of pronouns (me, you, I, we) scatters the idea of a stable voice controlling the poem and the lyrical “I” is allowed to emerge only to be ridiculed as an exploited vagabond (migrant worker) or a machine of celestial preservation (the fridge). The “controlling intelligence” of the poem might best be appreciated as acting in the manner of the toreador, where we make passes at the poem to gather “meaning” but are given the rhetorical flick. There seems to be no “person of the poet” to sink your horns into.3 The poem seems to enjoy the vertiginous pull of the page, coherence being in its flow or energy conduction. It demands a customised engagement, inviting to be read across, to be read backwards, providing a labyrinthine system of tracks desiring rich but baffling points of intersection. The voice switches its accent from moment to moment, from the thin lyrical, to the vulgar, to the snide, and just as frequently changes its aesthetic production values (Mead 2). Tonally, the poem zig-zags through different registers. There are so many voices, inflections, and distractions operating on the same plane that are part action, part diorama, and part discount special effects that it almost begins to sound like a form of Cubism. What the poem offers is not the myth of a transcendental perspective, but a hedonistic engagement with the world of language. It is not an exercise in finding delicate correspondences or hierarchising experience but represents an aesthetic of speed and a love of plasticity or the perverse honesty of consumerist culture. It seems that any attempt to reconstruct meaning here will likely make a fool of an earnest critic. The poem’s effect, then, is through a kind of chromaticity, where the language is so vital and glistening, yet seems to promise nothing beneath it. One is left with a pure, ironic reflective surface which might show that one is loaded with all kinds of cultural baggage or at least a set of intellectual keys which have no application here. Angus Nichols writes of the early Forbes poem: “The author attempts to communicate ‘something’ which, far from representing an ‘essential 3  This figure of the toreador may have been selected from O’Hara’s vocabulary of poetic posturing, Forbes quoting an admired figure of stylistic engagement that always presupposes irony.

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self’, can at best be a kind of artefact attesting to the interaction between different, discontinuous moments of consciousness and the aesthetic/ cultural stimuli which surround them” (86). For Forbes, poems as artefacts ought to be signs of life, not the ruins of a civilisation or a sensibility or an ideology. There may be no escape from the theological and the eschatological, for we are living in a civilisation whose invisible architecture could be conceived of as a matrix of promises. It is a “promised land,” promising consumer ecstasies or, alternatively, social justice in the fleshing out of Marx and Engels’s “das gespenst des Kommunismus,” the Spectre of Communism. As the poet writes in his “Ode to Karl Marx”: Old father of the horrible bride whose wedding cake has finally collapsed, you spoke the truth that doesn’t set us free— it’s like a lever made of words no one’s learnt to operate.               (CP 169)

We inhabit the hiatus of the already, the parentheses of the promise, and the not yet, since we may consider, with Ernst Bloch, that “Our Here and Now … could be so superb, and isn’t” (76). The action of Forbes’s anti-narrative poetics is to disrupt the telos, the intentionality of a traditional narratology which reflexively sculpts experience into archetypal stories or postures. The idea is to produce a state of lively neurosis and a vigilance for the candied self-­mythologies that make for a decorous psychic interior that is no longer renovated by the strangeness of the world. Ivor Indyk points out that Forbes’s poems contain many confected products like “frocks and frigidaires, Alka Seltzer … lollies, bin liners, suntan lotion, TV, venetian blinds, Spakfilla, toffee apples, the rumpus room, lamb and two veg—the stuff of suburban Australian life, though not, usually, of its poetry” (139). Brian Henry accounts for this quotidian aspect when he argues that “Forbes’s self-appointed challenge is to employ these objects in an attempt to make them worthy of poetry” (120). This question of what is worthy of poetry is really a question of metaphysical value. Forbes’s poetry is not trying to elevate the status of the mundane. He has, I think, a real ardour for these things—sunscreen, pills, goggles—that they are what we are. For Forbes, an honest poetry will bathe in the absurdity of these manufactured effects that also seem to offer by the magnitude and strangeness of their presence a profound critique of things human. Forbes’s poetics works then towards a metaphysical etiquette of transductivism,

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which is the formal desire not simply for an ontology of substances but also for an ontology of relations. One of the principles of contingency is that “things are thus, but could easily have been otherwise.” For instance, what kind of building gets built on a certain piece of land, where a bullet might be delivered, who our prime minister is, and how, as a marvellous hybrid of the gods and the animals, we have ended up with neck-ties, Canberra, Blondie, and the H-Bomb. Forbes’s poetry refuses to hierarchise between dull commercial phenomena, magazines, cultural theory, physical effects, the wonder of the body, “feelings,” placing all possible human experience on a continuum or a plane of immanence. Poetry is still conceived by some as a technology of haute culture, having for its territory the sublime, the eternal, and the unique, qualities that would make poetry into a surrogate theology. It is precisely against this attitude that Forbes wants to practise his exquisite heresy, by courting the contingent and turning his poems over to the ephemeral. Meaghan Morris writes of the anxiety over cultural studies in the early nineties of “extending ‘high’ critical methods—in particular, the luxuriant ‘close reading’ of literary texts to the study of popular cultural forms, and rapid-­turnover image economies; to intensely political struggles over multiculturalism; to the practice of everyday life” (10). This is the fear that the paradigms of the study of literature aestheticise and depoliticise social conflict. There was a similar anxiety by Australian critics towards Forbes’s application of a high formal art to the tidal wrack of popular culture and, as Martin Duwell has noted, his art was dismissed as trivial (257). Forbes’s is a political poetry precisely because it flattens the distinction between high and low cultures, between worthy objects of Great Art and Morris’s “rapid turnover image economies.” It seems that for Forbes this is the proper role of poetry. It is not to mediate but to interrogate, not to be used as a frame for a privileged or normalising view of one’s culture and oneself, but should be a fierce specular technology that aligns cultural with self-critique. The poems are never far away from a consideration of their means of production. Nothing phenomenal is shut out of the poem to keep it beautiful, or to maintain a fidelity to a territory of “the poetic,” and the inconvenient processes or anaesthetic structures of human life are wilfully included. Forbes said in an interview: we’re massively deluded about ourselves most of the time and I don’t just mean about things like nationalism, I mean about how we see ourselves. My

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poetry points out that there are no free spaces—there is no unoccupied territory. Les Murray talks about Australians living in one quarter of Australia and keeping the rest empty for poetry, which is an example of how people like to see things. Actually, what the three quarters is kept empty for is mineral exploration. My poetry doesn’t pretend. It is demythologising rather than mythologising. (quoted in Redford, 40)

Forbes is interested in the self, or a model of the subject, ideally as a transductive surface.4 There can be no interiority without an exteriority; as we observe the world, so we are made through a rhetoric of reading. If in a poem we have a joke about Communism, or “beetles that thump against my brothers’ kitchen window,” or a half-full bottle of Tanqueray, or a “cute ashtray packed with butts,” they are not there to do allegorical or symbolic work necessarily, but the poet seems to be saying “I am these things and you are too.” So for Forbes, language may not innocently represent the world but it is the protean technology, something we either handle wilfully or are handled by. Poetry is our dirty ontology. It is complicit with the materiality of the world, opening the territory of the poetic to the world as it presents itself to us in its contingency. In his unfinished Master’s Thesis on Frank O’Hara, Forbes writes: O’Hara wanted to get rid of the illusion of depth in the language of the self—to bring it all to the surface … He recognised that our cultural identity was a function of language, and that any freedom from this must begin with bringing all the “meaning” to the surface—both the surface of our understanding and the surface of the poem … If one realises the emotions, the “heart” are culturally structured responses, then there is no way of escaping from this situation that takes one “inward,” because there is nothing “inside” the personality that is not a function of its external relationships. The only chance for change takes the heart to the surface, shedding the “self” for the relationships and events the “self” is meant to define. (Masters 113)

4  This concept is adapted from Simondon and his elaboration of the individual based on “two connected dialectics, one that interiorizes the exterior, and another that exteriorizes the interior” (quoted in Barthélémy, 225). I take it to be both a figure for the spatio-temporal dynamics of subject formation and a reflexive signature of speculative philosophy. Such an apprehension is exampled in Deleuze and Guattari’s elaboration of the transductive in their discussion of “Milieus and Rhythms” in Thousand Plateaus, p. 345.

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There is no transcendence, no redemption in this metaphysics. Instead, it preaches immanence or a kind of integrity of attention. The myths we live by ought not to be monumental figures or narratives that template our responses to experience, but we ought to recognise the action of mythopoiesis in its ubiquity within “ordinary” perceptual events. An example is watching TV: “Ode: inspired by ‘The Last Outlaw’ a TV mini-series ‘brought to you by the Australian Mining Industry’” I saw the Kelly brothers riding across an untapped mineral bonanza on their way to rob a small bank it was raining and a small group of Victorians, loyal to their folk songs, were cheering. &, a nice point, the rifles were Sniders & not Martini-Henrys; weapons matter in          Australian history / remember how Peter Graves had the only gun-fighter’s holstered Colt in Cobb and Co? Bushrangers had flintlock horse pistols, & zero style, in the early 1860’s.         But this re-creation doesn’t focus on technology, it’s more a human, or costume drama: will the warm hearted young horse flesh enthusiasts       ‘face the decade of the 1880s with enormous confidence’? or can you imagine Ned Kelly as he rides through the bush             Gillian Armstrong inherited from Dame Mary Gilmore                  / the rain has stopped & he sings of how blood will stain the wattle if aluminium dust spoils the Bill Hayden shiraz?              (CP 228-9)

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As a speculative technology, this poem is quite different from some of Forbes’s early “vitalist” or hedonistic image poems. It similarly advances by clutching onto contingent detail, moving from one motif to another. But here each detail is a sink hole, its connotative draw into historiographic, sociological, or economic discourses being powerful and complex. If one feels suitably buttonholed and exerts oneself intellectually in tracing these various allusions and their interconnectedness, one soon finds that instead of a smooth surface, this poem is a “holey” plain in the style of Coober Pedy, where one might easily disappear. The poem lingers over inheritances and the transfer of the power to create a national Zeitgeist, leaning on the conception of history as the history of representations. It addresses the shift from English technologies of conquest (Snider, Martini-Henrys) to those of the Americans: the televisual and the fetishised item of “the only /gun-fighter’s holstered Colt.” While the Americans had the poise and auto-chambered repetition of the Colt, the Australian myth is stuck with the essential dagginess of “flintlock horse pistols/ & zero style.” Cobb and Co. alludes to the TV series Whiplash, a so-called Australianised Western which translated the mythical terms of conquest and imported the vocabulary of a more glamourously produced frontier elsewhere. Forbes rehearses the “Western” as a dominant mode for an existential vocabulary of action, gesture and posture, but makes sure we taste the grit of its ideological pollution. There is a soft self-mocking tone in there, suggesting that “our” real-­ historical actions are permanently preceded by the British (dyed in their standard, Indigo and Vermilion) and contemporarily reproduced in an American model, as we are likely to get carried away with the “warmhearted horse-flesh enthusiasts,” or in the twee of another pattern, stay “loyal to our folk songs.” Beyond pastiche, or a “catalogue of styles,” Forbes inserts his own calibration of “zero style” which evacuates the romantic myth for a quietly brutal estimation of “Bushranger’s…in the 1860’s.” There is a pride in this laconic quip; there was nothing “flashy” about these characters and this might be what is “superior” about an Australian style: its tonal deadpan. So while the poem satirises Australia, there are versions of Australia (unamused, unimpressed) that are set up for tacit approval. The exchange value of myth is constantly changing, with “the bush” in Australia being one of the most hotly contested commodities. Can we “imagine Ned Kelly/ as he rides through the bush/ Gillian Armstrong/ inherited from Dame Mary Gilmore…”? The poem exhorts us not to

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behave as “common readers” and suspend disbelief or merely absorb the spectacle, but to be acutely aware of its economic determination, of what underpins it or how we might appreciate its invisible architecture as a shadow play of Capital. “The bush” for Forbes is as natural as chewing gum, and there is always wilful persuasion or a rhetorical purpose in its representation. We might know Mary Gilmore as a writer for the Bulletin, a rampaging socialist, nationalist poet, and arch mythologiser of literary Australia in the 1890s, and the first female member of the Australian Worker’s Union, who later found it acceptable, within her own myth of herself, to ascend to the title of Dame of the Order of the British Empire. Gillian Armstrong stands in for a generation with shinier technologies and a genius for costume drama, literally inheriting the mythical space of the bush. Again, the idea of a more honest representation is to be found in the material and the contingent detail, suggesting that the aesthetic and the political, the moral and the ethical can be isolated as abstracts only and that the surface aesthetic is the real frontier of ideologies and philosophy. Meaghan Morris says that Forbes’s poems “nag about class…argue that aesthetic critics should engage more seriously with the cultural forms in which economic understandings of society have been disseminated…explore the complex role of stereotypes and ‘portraiture’ in mediated popular culture…[and] consider what it means to speak and write as an Australian in a ‘globalizing’ cultural economy” (8). All of these aspects of Forbes’s works are evident here. The poem models the struggle between radical socialism or revolt in Australia and the co-option of these forces by comfort, entertainment, and enfranchisement. Human history is not other than its props and effects, especially in re-creations which are made on a budget, and rely on the lateral reach and chain reactions of the metonymic for their full connotative or mythic effect. Of course, Forbes is making his own corrective representation, engaging with while critiquing the methods of Australia’s culture industries. A humorous piece, the poem’s efficacy is as a mode of entertainment, taking an ironic place in the tradition of bush “ballades” or “odes.” In its original broadcast on Australian television, The Last Outlaw, “brought to you by the Australian Mining Industry,” was punctuated by long propaganda pieces advertising mining in Australia as a patriotic duty and an essentially sentimental pursuit. Mining as a mythical scene gives us both our archetypal “scallywag” socioeconomic revolt in the Eureka stockade and the chandeliers and promenades of Melbourne. All of this

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historical intrigue was once more correctly held in the tableau, recorded in paint and archived in the National Gallery, but we have now moved through the spectral modes of the cathode ray tube to arrive at the private digital cosmorama of the hand-held speculum (iphone) which is now a part of the human body. Just as much as the Kellys or social justice, the poem is about being a spectator and the sly pleasure in becoming complicit in the production of corruption and the perverse consumption of ideology, knowing that—like junk food—it is bad for you. The poem is structured as an armchair for the common reader, laying out popular culture signals like cheese, crackers, and cabanossi (bung). But the cushions are full of needles and one is quickly pricked into position as a cultural critic. Where the show pretends to be a kind of “horse opera” with the sound of ringing bullets as an affirmation of “action,” Forbes’s little aside becomes a moment of real assassination, the deadpan “weapons matter in/ Australian history” zeroes in on the brutality of a convict nation and years of internecine warfare with Indigenous peoples. The piece suggests a bleeding of the quality or guts of political commitment in Australia. It implies that while Dame Mary Gilmore was politically engaged with her mythopoetics, Gillian Armstrong prefers a sentimental ambience suited to couch entertainment and that Lawson was a bloodier type of insurrectionist than Bill Hayden, who would prefer a spot in the VIP tent. Having Ned Kelly and Peter Graves in the same breath, or Gillian Armstrong and Dame Mary Gilmore, or Bill Hayden and Henry Lawson (“blood will stain the wattle”), period dramas and weapons of empire, dismantles the hierarchy between deep and ephemeral cultural studs. It puts them all in circulation on an even plane, brings them all to the surface, holding up the implicit connections for interrogation. It is topical and democratising in its effects and cynicism, but also charming in its insistency on a critical consciousness, saying “this interests me and it should interest you too.” The art that Forbes is offering is that of being involved in the occasion of culture and of the chronic importance of being an accomplished reader. To be so constitutes effective citizenship, an application of energy to a charge that is not necessarily a state or a right. We cannot ignore these things. Representation is our very being, not a second-order effect or an expressive trace of our essence. For Forbes the materialist, everything is at stake in the struggle for control of the symbolic economy. By applying ourselves rigorously to time-bound representation—the tone and techne of our civilisation—we approach a superior metaphysical etiquette and have a greater stake in and quality of our presence. This is a poetics that prefers and practises a mode of self-regard

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whose banner is “faites attention!” It isn’t seduced by pleasing myths-ofthe-self but constantly interrogates the myth-making process while acknowledging that we cannot live outside of myth. Forbes’s poems are exemplary occasions of a reader of culture reading themselves through both existential philosophies of the atomised subject and the action of interpellation through national or religious mythologies. A particularly pointed instance is Forbes’s “Anzac Day”: A certain cast to their features marked the English going into battle, & then, that glint in the Frenchman’s eye meant ‘Folks clear the room!’ The Turks knew death would take them to a paradise of sex Islam reserves for its warrior dead & the Scots had their music. The Germans worshipped the State & Death, so for them the Maximschlacht was almost a sacrament. Recruiting posters made the Irish soldier look like a saint on a holy card, soppy & pious, the way the Yanks go on about their dead. Not so the Australians, unamused, unimpressed they went over the top like men clocking on, in this first full-scale industrial war. Which is why Anzac Day continues to move us, & grow, despite attempts to make it a media event (left to them we’d attend ‘The Foxtel Dawn Service’). But The March is proof we got at least one thing right, informal, straggling & more cheerful than not, it’s like a huge works or 8 Hour Day picnic— if we still had works, or unions, that is.                      (CP 201)

The poem is a neat demonstration of how we self-mythologise by mythologising the other. Here, the process is treated as a tribal mechanism of negative ontology: we know who we are by knowing who we are not. Each figure is a caricature of such thrilling economy that an Australian reader might recognise the kind of laconic quip that is credited as a national

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stylistics. In the understated tone is the myth of an Australian kind of intelligence: self-deprecating and cynical. The work of caricature is to appeal to perceptual salience and the mind’s delight in pithy figuration and concision. It draws on nebulous impressions whose sudden deep correspondence to the sign is almost erotic. Caricature is a specular technology which sutures the subject into position by fixing the profile of the other. It can have the effect of a psychic tattoo, with the brand of its wit giving permanence to static perceptions (like the cartoon). The charm of a well-chosen epithet erases the self-determination of the other and confers power on the speaker, is even definitional for the speaker. There is something arch about encapsulating whole complex historical bodies of people in these witticisms. It is clearly absurd, yet the absurdity is extended to this process of mythologising itself. As the overall rhetorical strategy leads to a strophic move calculated to give Australians goosebumps (“not so the Australians…”), the poem indulges in both a critique of mythologising and a reiteration of Australian jingoistic mythologies. It presents the ritual of Anzac day as a popular democratic and peculiar expression of an “Australian Style” (informal, straggling, and more cheerful than not) forged antithetically against an absurdist taxonomy of the “others.” Yet the class concerns in the last line undercuts the whole and backlights the poem to appear to be a caricature in itself, an episode of nostalgia for a superior or somehow more honest orientation of the Australian perspective. This final undermining move is typical of Forbes with its necessity as the signature of some kind of ontological honesty. It leaves the ending of a poem untied and open to the risk of thought. Probing the mechanics of nationalist mythopoetics is one of Forbes’s obsessions. We can think of “territory” as what is mapped, known, marked, colonised, stylised, and settled through all the tropological tools we have to manufacture for ourselves the feeling of das heimlich, the homely. All psycho-­symbolic production can be thought of as the action of poiesis. Forbes’s poetry gives us a model of this process as a self-reflexive practice of an Ideal mode of citizenship, for it looks at poetics as symbolic territorialising of the phenomenal world, creating (in a Deleuzean vocabulary) the intensities or complex folds in the world’s surface that are human beings. A person’s heart is still part of the earth’s surface; it is simply one of the innermost layers of tissue. But the heart as a trope of abstraction, or the idolisation of certain states of feeling, seems in Forbes not only in to be in bad taste (cliché) but in bad faith, since one’s actual (baffling) emotional states are ventriloquised through language as a given function of a

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culture. This is a lesson Forbes takes from O’Hara: without being a poet to some degree, one is cheated of the experience of one’s experiences. The (modernist) technique of combining high and low registers is coopted by Forbes, having allusions in the same poem to Richard Rorty and Rod Marsh, or Dante and the Ramones. Where Eliot and Pound meant to exasperate their readers to learning, or simply exclude them altogether, in Forbes this hybridising of cultural effects is meant to produce a self-spurring mode in which the common reader wants to think further, relishes doubt, and is sceptical of the easily achieved aperçu. The poems give a certain amount in the way of homilies, souvenirs, or gags, and if these hooks work, one is then yanked along into much more difficult territory. These are hand-made machines for thinking but they don’t function as static objects. Rather, they are models of deliria or seismographic records of the comic efforts of the West to build ontologies on shifting sands, of which Forbes might say we should move right in and don’t forget your cannon. Forbes’s poems are heady with glee in what he sees as the absurdity of the amorous techniques of anthropomorphism that want to translate the cosmos onto the human scale of inch/foot/pound terrestrial logic. Instead of satirising the epistemology of the West in its own terms or trying to isolate exhibits of irony or hypocrisy, the torsional syntactic moves of the poems undertake the process of a symbolically motivated intellect at work on itself. It can be difficult to tell at any moment whether the tone is one of prayer or the burlesque, and the poems are like a battery test; you have to put your tongue on both terminals to get the shock of the current. The poet preaches a kind of radical engagement with the world through the slogan “look out not in.” He insists that we are the things in the world, that we are not subject to mythologies from our culture but create them dialectically and that the hinge of “interiority” and “exteriority” is a false dichotomy (Lewis 159). It is a strategy for behaviour. To simply stay home, or look inwards, and perfect a set of reliable responses is, for Forbes, an improper attitude to life. Instead, one must struggle to maintain oneself as a surface among surfaces, as a constantly enlivened threshold, where acts of mythopoiesis are not sacred events, but are as regular and consequential as breathing. For Forbes, the poem is this ideal transductive surface, a living tissue, a plane of immanence. Keeping your myths at the surface positions them to be oxidised and highly mutable. So it is with the surface of the poem as techne.

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Australian culture is a superb example of what pastiche might be (Davila 3). The idea of surface is a metaphysical abstract in itself. But in a land whose original inhabitants have experienced chronic cultural disruption and which has been peopled by successive waves of immigrants, the admonition to pay attention to surfaces is an important one, since it means paying attention to each other, paying attention to a fragile country where the topsoil that would sustain us does not really have a lot of depth either. The surface is the liminal zone, the nervous frontier of sensation, and this is where attention should be concentrated: constantly re-synthesising differentiated signals rather than occupying the driving seat of the self. Forbes’s metaphysical etiquette instructs us to keep our myths close to the surface where they can be interrogated and repeatedly altered through the providence of experience and that metaphysics is after all a textual, textural affair.

Anti-Romantic: John Forbes in Love In the West, the “poet in love” is bound to a tradition that is traceable to the “invention” of courtly love by the troubadours and beyond this to the Greek concept of Eros as both a force and a figure. The figure of the poet itself is always an involved erotic configuration: poets become themselves through loving language and through loving the work of others. While these precedents may not be addressed as a “beloved” exactly, how else shall we think of the incorporative, close, and evolving relationships between writers who partake of each other’s trace with a certain amorous fanaticism? In the work of O’Hara, Berrigan, and Forbes, there is an obsession with working the self as texture through composition, a continuing skirmish between composure and discomposure. In the writing of selves, we enact the transformation of impression to expression, where the trace of another’s exemplarity is crucially read by being rewritten, and another’s “style of being” is “modified in the guts of the living” as W.H. Auden has it. As with the discursive notions of “nation” and “citizen,” Forbes makes a problem of the subject in love as being always already fetishised and commodified. The “poet in love” is both a subject of language and a supersaturated literary standard. Like Berrigan before him, Forbes alights on the figure of the troubadour to check how the relational structure of this love-struck subject is allied to the dynamic structures of language itself. The troubadour radicalises amor as a defining instance of love and

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speech which serves to both occult the speaking individual and have him dissolve in carefully attended games of connoisseurship. In Berrigan, troubadour praxis is to make love (matched with war) through song as a public event, and in doing so, it presents the metaphysics of language and presence as a dynamic but fickle performance of the poet. Forbes is more interested in disengaging with the personal forms of love that were first instituted in troubadour poetry but which continue to influence notions of individualised romantic love. By perverting the troubadour as gallant lover, singer, and warrior, Forbes explores the complexities of what he calls the Anti-Romantic. In Forbes’s phenomenology, there is an exquisite feeling for the finitude and fragility of human perception, how it regulates the world-as-sign, how it directs messages down the avenues of the familiar, and how the gears of this turnstile operate in a tension between control and terror. For the saturnine temperament, death is always “over one’s shoulder,” and this is what propels one to life and makes the graphic trace of the lyric graven. Having examined the poet’s mapping of the self as virtual and actual terrains through the structuring abstract of citizenship within “nation” and “state,” I want to turn now to the poem “Phaenomena” which places the subject on a cosmic scale. Indeed, it can be read allegorically for the structuring forces of Eros, another dynamic figure for reading the possible vocabularies of social and relational poetics: Pellucid stars chart my direction, you who never hear our intent or voices, polish these manoeuvres that, by instants, resemble you. I sketch a course among attractions only to invent you as a shining vehicle, yet as you are, I am.  Not aridity but removal steers me, opening each degree of arc to pressure what fluency beyond you can make exchange for.  It touches your motion as you turn in varied impressive order, revolving above a space that closed, still contains you; you create the elements which we are, the glittering that responds to you.  Your indifference is our best idea of it.  Let me allow its complete joy to burn in me, as from the grief we blame you for, may it replace behaviour, the sky over this catalogue where I trace you out, your

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Fig. 6.1  Boötes constellation

ARCTURUS

BOΩTHΣ BOÖTES

voyages subverted into feeling, as though just waiting for this did not avoid/ what your gravity will shape in me too slowly & I must change.                      (CP 99)

Like Berrigan’s legend-making through Oklahoma, Forbes’s “Phaenomena” relies on a visual schema for positioning the self. “Phaenomena” is an echo of a long poem by the ancient Greek poet Aratus, which is a poetic interpretation of the constellations of the northern sky and their portent as omens. Aratus’s Phaenomena is an encyclopaedia of the exploits of the Gods to explain rhythms of harvest, lust, loss, violence; all scenes which pertain to the human. The cosmos then can be read as the anatomy of human mythemes. Here is a sample of the text (Fig. 6.1): Beneath both feet of Boötes mark the Maiden, who in her hands bears the gleaming Ear of Corn. Whether she be daughter of Astraeus, who, men say, was of old the father of the stars, or child of other sire, untroubled be her course! But another tale is current among men, how of old she dwelt on earth and met men face to face, nor ever disdained in olden time the tribes of men and women, but mingling with them took her seat, immortal though she was.5 5

 http://www.aratus.com.mx/Phaenomena/Pheaenomena.html

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The anthropomorphic impulse is to conquer the unknown through mythic shapes, that is, to trace a line from point to point, to divine a telos and etch instinctively the rudiment of the narrative. It is the folding in of perception through the sign. This is the mythic impulse as Levi-Strauss figures it, the technics of overcoming and subsuming contradictions: self and other, human and inhuman, nature and culture. We are not other than our constructed universe, and to the extent that it is navigable through signs, so are we. Aratus is careful to suggest that the tale of the Maiden is undecided, or rather that more than one “tale is current.” The astral body is made to bear the intrigue and be the object of gossip for those on earth, with speculation on her uncertain parentage and enjoyment of her impropriety in socialising with mortals. Aratus’s version makes the cosmic configuration polysemic and the squabble of meaning part of the story, while mixing the business of gods and mortals or the sacred and profane. Agamben writes of astrology as being “a privileged site of signatures,” a reading that involves an inscription of what is not already there. It is a transposition of signs or a will to allegory. He writes of constellations of being: not properly a matter of signs (what would they be signs of?) but a matter of signatures expressing a relation of efficacious likeness between the constellation and those who are born under its sign, or more generally, between the macrocosm and the microcosm … the signature is the place where the gesture of reading and writing invert their relation and enter into a zone of undecidability. Here reading becomes writing, and writing is wholly resolved into reading. (54-6)

This understanding of signature suggests that the sign is always already activated and motivated. Our complicity in this is readable as being complicit with the world as a continuing act of poiesis. This troubles the distinction between mortals and immortals over who is the “original” manipulator of the code that becomes the world. The signature of the ineffable, or “what is not written,” is imaginative and wilful as well as sensitive and mimetic (Agamben 56). The stars are made to stand as signs of the sublime, the cynosure for the dialectic of the soul and its measure, yet the awful expanse of the sky puts dialectics in its place, or moves onto a new plane, the galactic dialectic. Katharina Volk argues that Aratus’s “Phaenomena” reads the “letteredness” of the cosmos, and as his poem reads the stars as a script intended by Zeus, so one poet follows another.

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She writes: “A learned product of Hellenistic poetry, the Phaenomena is the work of an author who was, our sources tell us, not an astronomer, but rather a reader of astronomical texts, someone whose … ‘sleeplessness’ … did not consist in gazing at the stars but in reading Eudoxus” (225). Volk’s interest in Aratus’s poem is in its early metaphorising of writing itself as the generative act of the cosmos. Forbes loves the hard up immanence of the linguistic sign and the comedy produced in trying to trick it. He creates a gap which might allow us to glimpse what is essential in linguistic experience, knowing with a recursive irony that this is impossible. The diction of Forbes’s “Phaenomena” glides between the lyric and the para-scientific, recalling the ancient function of the poet to be magus, priest, and cypher (a secret message/the key to a secret message). Ken Bolton writes of the poem: It is deliberately beautiful in its treatment of the stars and astrology, fate and determinism—but I can never nail down satisfactorily the (grammatical) subjects and objects exactly—or how certainly, and when, the stars are in charge of the life or the individual is. But I love its sound and measuredness—like looking at the machinery behind a planetarium, gears steadily and certainly moving the planets and stars. (n.pag.)

Bolton gives us the notion of the poem as a machine, turning out the hidden mechanics of perception, suggesting that this show is a projection of personal spectral figures into public space in the manner of phantasmagoria. The poem cannot be “pinned down” and Bolton attests to being effected by the poem as charm, in Valery’s sense of the sensual “sound and measuredness.” “Phaenomena” treats self-making as a signature event, looking for oneself in the other: the sign, the star, the beloved. Yet the object of the apostrophic address shifts imperceptibly from the stars to an erotic other and back again describing the waltz of a kind of amorous astral physics. The “you” of the poem is at once the stars and a lover, though the metaphor is not promising, making the beloved cold and distant. The erotic tension is immaculately mixed with disappointment. There is the flight of Eros and his repulsion but there is also the bending of the episteme, reaching ardently for an impossible position of self-knowledge. All that is attainable is constellations of emotive affect, a “course among attractions” or “manoeuvres,” disappearing traces of an authentic presence. Just as the poet is distracted by “the grief we blame you for,” we note a strange lucidity for the perceptual processes of the mind. There is a sense of the marbling of flesh, of solid, definitional figures carving through

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Fig. 6.2  Draco constellation

ETAMIN NORTH POLE 280 B.C.

POLARIS

∆PAKΩN DRACO

space through “steers,” “degree,” “arc,” “pressure,” “exchange.” That is, there is something proportional and fleshy as well as ethereal. It is not only a metaphysics and mystification of love, but an interplay of phenomenal surfaces that create each other, and a figuring of the felt perceptions of what one is: “your indifference is our/ best idea of it. Let me allow its complete joy/ to burn in me, as from the grief we blame, you for/ may it replace behaviour.” The process of experience is drawn towards the hypostasis of prefabricated cultural myths of a “spurned lover.” But by getting into position to try to see the structure of the amorous event and how it seeks its double in cultural forms, the poem wants to keep something of the incandescence of the exchange without the experience being chartered into narrative. This is analogous to the ancient technology of Aratus’s Phaenomena which is characterised by narrative dynamism, but also by discontinuity and the chaotic syntax of the irregular cosmos, both of which invite and repel formal mastery (Fig. 6.2): Between them, as it were the branch of a river, circles in wondrous way the Dragon, winding infinite around and about; on either side of his coil are borne along the Bears, that shun evermore the blue sea. Now towards the one he stretches the end of his tail, but with the coil he intercepts the Lesser Bear. The tip of his tail ends by the head of Helice, but in the coil Cynosura

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has her head. For his coil circles past her very head and comes near her feet, but again, turning back, runs upward.6

The Greek poem obsesses over the timelessness of time, a returning formal rhythm of “circles,” “coil[s],” “winding infinite,” where the “tip of his tail ends by the head of Helice.” Yet it speaks for a culture that finds stasis intolerable, preferring the dynamism of mythos. Things are always just about to intersect or fall apart, the moment of perception and discrimination has a dramatic structure, and above all the world is continually troping and must be continually troped. The motive of this is Eros, which functions through the negative capability of its other: death, disappearance, destruction, or Thanatos. Forbes’s poem mimics this drama of spatial relations; it is a performance of knowledge that can be replayed indefinitely through repeated telling. It affectionately enjoins the work of Aratus and joins him in cheekily assuming the role of Zeus the creator as a means of commenting upon the hubris and the folly of the devotee of language. David Fite writes that “all our human knowing and naming is a telling, and that this telling is a telling together whose genesis is the ineluctably mediated ground of our sharings as language users cannot and need not ever be denied” (152). This is an affirmation of the triumphant metaphoricity of knowledge systems and a vaunting of the figure of the writer as a principal manipulator of human being. Part of the action of “Phaenomena” is reading what was never written there. In its structural and rhythmical homology with the poem of Aratus, Forbes’s “Phaenomena” demonstrates that we are immanent in the structure of mythical thinking, that is, “we think with myths” (Scarborough 46). We are complicit in the authorisation of the cosmos. Aratus creates his human subject as a reader who is developed dialectically in a cosmos of signs. He puts his reader in position not as a centred subject but as a dynamic cypher, whose being is not other than the pursuit and apprehension of a revolving complex of signs. Aratus’s poem is a versification of a lost work of the same name by Eudoxus of Cnidus (Volk 225). Forbes’s poem is laid over the galactic territorialising of its more ancient counterpart in the virtual space of literature. This poiesis of self as a constellation or set of rhizomatic spatial relations is shown here to be coeval with the beginnings of Western ontology.  http://www.aratus.com.mx/Phaenomena/Pheaenomena.html

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The poem seems to address these astral bodies and their relation to the speaker in ways that are also structurally homologous to the courtly love lyric, by examining minutely an engagement with a definitive other in a series of pronounced abstractions transacted within the lyric. I want to say then that Forbes’s “Phaenomena” is a love poem. In the act of poiesis the poem, poet, the beloved, and the stars are all confused, all “invent[ed] … as a shining vehicle.” This “shining vehicle” could be the space of poetry itself, and we might have to accept that the subject of this poem is once again poetry, or the action of poiesis in constituting the phenomenal. Agamben offers the stanza as this space for poetry and speaks of “dense textual entrebescamen (interlacing, interweaving) of phantasm, desire and word” by which “poetry constructed its own authority by becoming, itself, the stanza offered to the endless joy … of erotic experience” (Stanzas xviii). This is amore (love) as razo (the reason for composition), inventing a beloved so that one may begin to speak. Forbes picks up the practice of writing a “phaenomena” as a way of plotting the self as the moment of mythos that is at once immediate and formulaic. His poem transmits an ancient technique of articulating the relational being of things in a way that is both personal and singular, but which necessarily avails itself of literary commonplaces. Forbes’s “Phaenomena” joins Aratus in a tradition of imitation of always more ancient poets whose original is the negatively capable and nebulous figure of Zeus. It an argument for the primacy of poiesis in folding in the noumenal, that the Western tradition insists is traceable to a (male) God-Scribe. At the beginning of his poem, Aratus invokes Zeus as the signature of the primary poet. By doing so is slyly asking for a comparison and Forbes fits himself into this game of literary authorship. For Forbes, language itself is the charmed activity, and its mechanics, as much as we can observe them, do not express so much as perform questions of being. The poem is a testing of language to find the limits of self, but in a way that comes to serve the poem rather than the poet, and this is perhaps the article of Forbes’s faith in the lyric. Rather than poetry being a specular tool of the self we should say here that the self becomes a specular tool of the poem to investigate its own possibilities of being. While formally proceeding as an assured course of ritual steps, Forbes’s poem is actually a concatenation of fleeting effects and correspondences, declaring itself as “these/ manoeuvres that, by instants, resemble you” and “this catalogue where I trace you out, your/ voyages subverted into

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feeling.” Forbes’s grace in movement is somehow not other than the astral ballet that it would describe. The poem addresses the stars as remote signature, but it also proposes itself as a reflection of our spatial syntactics and love of the sign. This is to consider self-making as fundamentally erotic, the poem being the place of erotic mechanics. It is a contemporary plotting of self and place as a calculus of the social, in terms of intimate and variable distances. But it is an absolute sociability postulated through the idea of love. Here we might begin to see its relation to the figure of the troubadour, where the beloved is established to create the radicalising gap of desire so that the poet might get to the poem or cause an occasion for the demonstration of virtuosity. It is by virtue of their distance that the stars make themselves available for such complex plotting, for bearing mythologies. In this poem, it is this distance from the other that allows a construction of a template of the female; an unsatisfying projection which torments the poet. The projection is useful because it can be manipulated, and one can chart one’s position through and navigate along the constellations of symbols and figures and the phantasmal illuminations of the intellect. Yet here both the Romantic and Metaphysical poet is lonely, since no living example can conform to these artificial catalogues, and the desire becomes more primary and elemental, wanting something “to burn in me.” In this dialectic of intimacy and anxiety, the Romantic trope of the “attraction of heavenly bodies” is rendered in a suitably complex fashion. Georges Bataille writes in Inner Experience: “we can in no way avoid this path which we must follow from attraction to attraction in search of ‘being’. Solitude, in which we attempt to seek refuge, is a new attraction. No one escapes the constitution of society” (86). Even solitude as a state of Romantic exception is given meaning grammatically, in its differentiation from and definitive proximity to what is other. It seems that the poet wants to, but does not quite, believe in the transforming powers of love as a synthesising force that could magically unite the subject and fulfil the desire of nostos, of the nostalgia for returning home to the infinite. The figure of the lover finds no continuity in the erotic object, but rather is fashioned by “manoeuvres,” “instances,” and “resemblances.” Forbes’s “Phaenomena” performs the resolutely dialectical model of a decentred and socially constructed subject, and while we fancy this as the clever signature of the postmodern, Forbes places it among ancient (classical) epistemological habits. Forbes’s poem reads the mixed signs of the mortal and immortal and knows itself as yet another formal iteration of the energetic signature of flux.

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The archetype of the celestial body only functions if it cannot be reached. This is the spacing of desire that motivates knowledge, sexual obsession, and perhaps language as well: the inability of the signifier to resemble the signified is the sign of a lover’s melancholy. “Phaenomena” performs these desires in space, and what is achievable is a certain grace in a poetics of intelligence. As an act of language, it paradoxically maintains its lack and is its own consummation. The figure of the self, such as it is, and the figure of the other are made in mythos, in the instance of speech. The poem takes place in the virtual court of ontological discourse. The “subtle justice” is in the pride of the poem itself, but it is a sensibility of sacrifice, of the self-occulting poète maudit (Lewis 155). Forbes pursues these notions of how the myths of the self are altered by erotic mechanics, while effecting a more localised portraiture, in “Europe, endless”: fair hair & driving for hours along a freezing highway ‘it’s true’ she said ‘our rock music’s shit but we invented sexual attraction didn’t you know? In the 12th Century— I mean they had it before but not as a central, defining principle in the Subject’s relation to the Other’ I looked across at herher fined boned face & deep, serious eyes           Thanks, I said Thanks a lot.                   (CP 174)

The poet sets up the loop of reading in the myth of the other the disappointing myth of himself. The intensive gaze which grazes upon the contours of the other seem to pattern his self-regard. One senses in this poem the impress of the scene, composed of little mythemes that have constellated to form a cameo of the unattainable other which is alluring precisely because it figures something elusive. Roland Barthes writes of this conjunction of love and personal myth-making: “Enamoration is a drama … the amorous ‘event’ is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my

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little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover’s discourse” (Lover’s 94). The poem is like a key-ring holding a set of cut metonyms that open up connotative theatres of feeling in all directions. “[F]air hair” is the erotically tense encounter that may have ended in frustrated possession. The rhyme, in its simplicity, seems ironic, saying “you must be pleased to be so beautiful,” and “how dare you.” “[F]air hair” is also the well-worn signature of the idolised and fetishised beloved in Western poetry. “[D]riving for hours/ Along a freezing highway” is a myth of the twentieth century, conquering time and space through technology, yet being attended by an uncanny feeling of being displaced. While suggesting movement, the exchange is fixed as a short play to be acted over and over again in a circuit of obsession: the poet has been “Medusa’d”—struck dumb—and seems to be aware of this, but any pathos is strained because it seems to be a preferred position. The poem has always seemed to me to be foreboding, even faintly apocalyptic, with the same kind of galloping eschatology found in “the four horsemen” and “freezing skies” from the poem of the same time, “Warm Snipers” (CP 180). The remoteness of love’s invention promises the foreclosure of history itself. These constellated effects are handed over, becoming our situation: we enter into the nuances of a personal mythopoiesis. What buckles the poem is the fatal comment that seems to have stuck with the poet like a curse. The female voice points out that the European tradition of the romantic lyric has not translated well into modernity or pop culture (“our rock music’s shit”) but is able to claim a whole genealogy with the idea that “we invented sexual attraction/ didn’t you know.” In the person of this woman is the myth of Europe, the atomic reach of European theory, and finally, the realisation of a sculptural, ineffable gaze bound in “her fine boned face/ & deep serious eyes.” Love as a stylised cultural rite of identity is definitional, yet it is also thoroughly literary. Barthes notes the lettered saturation of love in Goethe’s Werther, who identifies himself with every lost lover: he is the madman who loved Charlotte and goes out picking flowers in midwinter; he is the young footman in love with a widow, who has just killed his rival. Identification is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have. (Lover’s 129)

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As Barthes suggests, we identify not just with the place of Werther but with the style of his delusions, just as Werther takes on the narratives of others and becomes them through “hallucinatory seizure[s]” (Lover’s 130). It is through the phantasm of the fictional character that we get in position to see ourselves. In “Europe, endless,” we are following the fortunes of this figure of the poet who in love must fail and who is an invention. The scene is a “pure structural operation” and what it turns out is how well the lyric of the other fits, how prone we are to being territorialised by literary figures and moments. The poem is a recitation of a dialogue and a setting, a private “play” of experience made public. It does not leave behind the exchange of bodies, the aura of the woman’s presence, and the nervous pressure of the poet’s dread. It is a visceral intellectual event. What remains is speech as small talk, traces that are set here as affective glyphs that work because they are consonant with our own experiences, and if charming enough, might partially displace our own or meld with them. The poem argues that theory has not just become part of the “lover’s discourse,” it has always been a part of it. Even the charged erotic moment of repartee in the poem is prefigured in typological constructs and cultural products: from the deflating idea of the invention of sexual attraction, with the twelfth century as the historical signature of the troubadours and conventions of courtly love, to postmodern theories of the semiotic processes of identification. In a similar fashion to Barthes, Forbes “demonstrates that the most private and inviolate of emotions—love—follows certain codes and conventions; it is as carefully structured as language itself” (Kauffman 82-3). The shape of the beloved’s uniqueness (“fine-boned face/ & deep, serious eyes”) skates the line of cliché, but this is perfect for his sardonic purpose. Forbes is testing a cocky Australian sensibility against the European and finds the ground taken away beneath him as she conducts an archaeology of love and claims ownership of it. Having heard his argument for the quality of their Rock and Roll as a case for the cultural decline of Europe (and perhaps the superiority of Australian Rock and Roll), she casually obliterates him with this gesture to the ancient and artificial structure of courtly love. It is the moment of touché which completes the duel, with the poet’s misery at being foiled matched by the maudlin joy of being gracefully skewered. Again though, the subtle justice is to frame it within a poem: it is the troubadour’s response. She remains a myth, and Forbes is

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readjusting his myth of himself through the quality of the gulf between them. The final lines shut the conversation down with a deadpan comedic stroke (he saves himself with his wit), which Gig Ryan suggests is “intended as a parody of intensity” (13), yet there remains something plangent about it. The influence of Europe, itself a metonym for Western metaphysics, is “endless.” As the perpetual source of the culturally determined, the poem is a compressed teleology of its sophistication and finesse becoming boredom and nihilism. Forbes has mythicised the encounter because of its dread definitional qualities. The poem deftly shows how a few collusive elements that compose a scene (“fair hair,” “freezing highway”) construct the ruins of a crucial moment, that one is compelled to visit again and again in order to work on the myths of the self. It is crucial as a critical loop of obsessive thought. The poet has made a personal topos which stages the structure of desire, a gap that needs to be both crossed and maintained as an abyss. The female character is in control and aloof, and one senses the absent warmth that is craved will remain out of reach. Forbes reworks these obsessions in the late poem “troubadour”: where the heart burns like an old tyre filling the air with flecks of carbon & a terrible stink               (CP 165)

The burning heart as a trope of love poetry is savaged by the simile and is metonymically flipped into another context to recover further connotative possibilities. The heart as a piece of burning flesh has its sacrificial or mystical aura displaced by a symbol of industrial modernity. There is nothing more cumbersome and useless than an old tyre, and there is no more noxious way of disposing of it than to burn it. So it’s a neat conceit to frame the speaker’s disgust with failed love, yet the surprise coupling of a tyre and a heart has a comic spark that fires within the dialectic of immanent pain and a bemused transcendent critique. There is no sentimental rhetoric of “being beyond the border of love,” there is only smouldering toxicity. The irony of the title stands over the whole poem, with the romantic figure of the troubadour as the courtly lyricist of love being subsumed by the desperately anti-romantic tone. There is a synthesis between the poet’s vocation, his pain, and the more inclusive apocalypse of the future:

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that’s where I set up my altars not realizing my personal pain was a vision of the future where fun will consist of smoking crack on the edge of a garbage dump you’ve just spent   15 hours rooting in because you’re in debt for the price of a bed                     (CP 165)

This is a black comedy of dystopia, with the worst-case scenario shot through with an idea of lumpen proletarian hedonism. It is part farce and part Marx, a blend of bravado and acute self-pity. This is where Forbes sets up his altar, locating the muse in refuse and being energised by the melancholy and the abject. It is done in a spirit of clowning and contempt, and though it is a site of resistance to material relations and to fate, the suffering is not redemptive. The poem continues: & the suburbs have disappeared           Into the huge, ecologically sustainable estates of the rich where Love has retreated like it did before, only to re-appear after a couple of centuries when its owners had got utterly bored, hacking each other   —& us—to bits                  (CP 165)

This is love as a commodity, a pleasance for earthly comfort that, like material security, is unavailable to the poet. Self-critique rewrites itself as cultural critique, with a confluence of the personal and the public. Forbes is not outside the love dialectic but he positions his troubadour on its furthest periphery. This idea of being beyond the border of love is economical as well as sexual and affective. Forbes the troubadour moored on rubbish outside the city gates pronounces a curse on love, saying that love

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like capitalist civilisation is built up to collapse and that a surfeit of satisfaction breeds boredom, violence, and cannibalism. Poetry in its history knows this, and we might think of O’Hara thinking of Villon, “his life, so dark” (CP 340). The poet as outcast is already written, and so as a piece of self-mythologising, this is an ironic manoeuvre for Forbes. In the compression of its clauses and its wickedness as a satire, the poem is conceivably “after” one of the severe graffito pieces of Catullus, written with a terrific latinate economy. The proper place of the poem is for it to be scrawled on the city wall as an inscription on the public archive. It is eschatological, but rather than a final reckoning there is a sense of eternal return of the same. In the dialectic of civilisation and barbarism, there is more of a sense of the banality of evil than a full-scale Götterdämmerung. The poem badges the present as the reinvention of feudal material relations and the poet takes up the posture of extreme alienation and the evasion of a false reconciliation, with love and manners retreating behind walled city gates, while everyone else is left to procreate and smoke crack in their rubbish. In this late poem the light step is gone, and in the spleen and bile, there is bitter grapeshot at a civilisation and its sexual prizes that have eluded the poet. Ted Berrigan assumes the figure of the troubadour in a game of literary one-upmanship and as a way of handling bad mythologies of him being circulated by another poet. Charging the myth of himself as a poet in the Western tradition, he uses this assumption as an occasion to critique the culture around the St Mark’s Poetry Project. Forbes uses the figure of the troubadour as one of being in exile from even basic pleasures and assurances of his culture. His version is damning, there now seems to be no point maintaining nostalgia for the troubadour as a charmed feature of courtly life and love. He takes up troubadour games of the performance of manners and making public love as being also suited to dealing with bad mythologies, and here creates his own wicked self-caricature by commenting upon the poet as a déclassé figure. The title might be asking after the possibility of the troubadour. Its diminished cultural centrality is without doubt, yet Forbes does not merely mock himself and damn his culture. He suggests that this state of affairs is ancient: the poet’s art offers amorous methods and décor to be consumed by the rich. The poem is vengeful, but again it has its own “subtle justice” by being a virtuosic display (CP 38). The poet’s bravura is that though the troubadour gets no other prize than this poem, it might be just enough. This is the signature of Forbes’s self-mythology: he conflates the poet-speaker’s own misery and

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melancholy with the failure of Western ontology and a civilisation. Yet he also takes glee in deflating these things. The poem democratises connoisseurship and the linguistic savour one might take in the “rant,” a connoisseurship of high and low culture, mixing crack, garbage, vulgar sex (rooting), and pathos. We read a melding of personal and historical conceits, with the processes of gentrification dealing poetry out of the glamour of being at court altogether. We see the superficial modulation of irony and sincerity: Forbes is the troubadour and the parody of the troubadour. Poet of Provence, libertine, and suburban ratbag: all of these are partial figurines for the reflexive play of a self-mythology. The poet presents his vituperations against his culture as a match for its destructive tendencies. The faith in poetry as a revolutionary practice persists. The poem first appeared in his posthumous collection Damaged Glamour (1998), and so is in this sense, a poem by a dead poet. He is literally in company with Villon, Catullus, Berrigan, and O’Hara. He has passed into the hauntologue. Yet the work remains, like Villon’s Testament, to try on. It is not prophetic but seems to fulfil a prophecy. It is written for the future, especially for young poets as a warning of vocational hazards. We read in part 6 of his “Lessons for Young Poets”: (love) Continually disappoint The expectations of others This way you will come to hate yourself & they will be charmed by your distress                   (CP 167)

This charmed figure of the melancholy lover is compounded in a vida of the poet sketched by Forbes’s friend and fellow poet Ken Bolton: “He was endlessly rivalrous, generous, and unlucky in love—and routinely amused and appalled at his own behaviour” (n.pag.). Forbes as daemon becomes an ally to shape an ethos in the living, and this daemon is infused in the poetry. Bolton again: “John has gone, but the poems remain—often dazzling, nearly always light and serious at the same time, and they help you feel smarter and more alive yourself” (n.pag.). This is the buckle of Forbes’s charm, where the “seriousness is in the play,” something he notes in both O’Hara and Berrigan. What charms Forbes is converted into his own charms, which those who come after intuit to be transmissible as a compulsion to poetry.

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In Forbes’s “Love Poem” we read a further pronouncement of the postmodern troubadour placed in a hotel with a television. Being at “court” has become virtual, but the plaiting of love and war in a chivalric braggadocio remains the same: Spent tracer flecks Baghdad’s bright video game sky as I curl up with the war in lieu of you, whose letter lets me know my poems show how unhappy I can be. Perhaps. But what they don’t show, until now, is how at ease I can be with military technology: eg. matching their feu d’esprit I classify the sounds of the Iraqi AA—the thump of the 85 mil, the throaty chatter of the quad ZSU 23. Our precision guided weapons make the horizon flash & glow but nothing I can do makes you want me. Instead I watch the west do what the west does best & know, obscurely, as I go to bed all this is being staged for me.                  (CP 158)

The composition of “Love Poem” coincides with the opening of the first Gulf War at which the poet, like the rest of us in the West, is both a spectator and a participant. The war is a paradoxical phenomenon that is both proximate and distant, an elaborate and technological game of appearances. Yet the spasms of power that make “the horizon flash and glow” offer themselves to the viewing subject as their own. Being “at ease” with “precision guided weapons” is quite sinister, but here manages to be quite charming also, emulating the slick and assured discursive modes the West employs to mollify its citizens as it goes about doing “what it does best.” These propaganda bulls-eyes and spectacular excesses of potency do not quite distract from the dull impotency that pervades the

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poem. Baudrillard’s statement that “the Gulf War never happened”— offered as an ecstatic proof of the evacuation of the real—is itself a shock tactic within an ideological skirmish. Forbes eschews anything like a calculated blasphemy for an ironic ease with hypocrisy and a hedonistic engagement with total mediation. The televisual spectator is put in place of the Crusader and the troubadours have always availed themselves of spectacular fictions as part of the performance of themselves. Peire Vidal’s feats of arms are the imaginative works of a self-conscious confabulator, while Quixote’s bouts of violence are balanced and structured by the exquisite ironies of his delusions. Forbes bathes in the simulacral glow of the war as phantasmatic event, tasting the perversion of these globalised war games and their representations, but his love is also a figment of the imagination; a phantasm. This troubadour’s feats of arms are decided through the typewriter, and the rejoinder to both the war and his unrequited love is a literary performance. The subject of feu d’esprit is deliberately ambiguous: is it the discharge of military hardware, the fiery spirit of the beloved, or is it poetry itself? Perhaps we should say it is all of these worked into a dialectic of aggression and submission. “Matching” the technological ploys of war and poetry, the poem ends with the postmodern troubadour going to bed with the West. Love, war, and poetry are all games of taste for the afficionado, and the fetishising of the beloved (“fair hair”), military hardware and language is here, all of a piece. The venom is coiled in the casual nature of these observations, and the sting of unrequited love flows through the spectacle of imperial adventure and posturing self-pity. Forbes once again casts his personal misery as the malady of a civilisation: the reader put in place as the subject in the poem, the subject of love. Part of the troubadour tradition has always been a turn to the vernacular: to sauce, to slang, and to heresies of desire beyond the decorum of marriage as the covenant with God. It is committed to the things of the earth, to desire personal beauty or physical grace, to a glee in a fracas or melee, in a way that shirrs together the personal and the public, the abstract notion of a self in love and the pêle-mêle of feelings that constitute experience. Yet it also elevates the beloved as a thing of worship, venerable and necessarily unattainable, and Forbes’s habit of doing just this in his love poetry is probably akin to Marion worship which takes in its other: lust for and aversion to the strumpet. H.J. Chaytor writes that: troubadour love was constituted upon the analogy of feudal relationship. If chivalry was the outcome of the Germanic theory of knighthood as modi-

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fied by the influence of Christianity, it may be said that troubadour love is the outcome of the same theory under the influence of mariolatry. In the eleventh century the worship of the Virgin Mary became widely popular; the reverence bestowed upon the Virgin was extended to the female sex in general, and as a vassal owed obedience to his feudal overlord, so did he owe service and devotion to his lady. (15)

Forbes is alive to and ambivalent towards these various codes of conduct: the structuring discourses of the church, Capitalism as democratised feudalism, and Romantic love as an historical invention, yet he is still prone to these things. There is no outside the dynamic symbolic conventions of a dominant culture, one must breathe in and be composed of this pollute. Being a canny reader of these things, however, gives the space for rewriting. The reader does not know how the poet feels about the war. The poem is more interested in locating love and conflict as structuring events for the self, which remains “obscurely” sensible, and is prepared to rest on the bearing of the undecidable, the “perhaps.” The poem’s repetition (“How unhappy I can be” … “How at ease I can be”) is careful to build and hold a set of contradictions. The speaker is aware of the romantic fashion of his unrequited love and aware of himself as delusional just as he is aware of the “video game” war as simulacrum. Moreover, he is aware of the material reality of munitions, destruction, and death. The poem operates the contradictions without spelling them out, yet the poet remains culpable, through the almost sexual fetishisation of military tricks and the flawed bravado of being a connoisseur of one’s own misery, critiquing the self and its structural alibis almost out of existence. And yet how does the West know itself outside of millennial accretions of the subject in love and the subject at war? The configuration of love and war, or love as war, is an ancient knot which binds even the Christian God of the old and new testaments, the one who smites his own creations, visiting on them an untimely personal apocalypse. It is historically compelling that the eleventh century sees the invention of the troubadour as the exemplary lover in the person of William IX, Duke of Aquitane, and the advent of the Crusades in 1098; a physical and metaphysical flaring of feu d’esprit that leads to a new intensity and scope of territorialising, both literal space and an enlarged sense of the subject that will come to seek its equal in the whole of the cosmos through the catapult of the Romantic sublime. Bridie McCarthy reads Forbes’s analogy of war and romantic desire in “Love Poem” by thinking through “the West’s lust for domination of the

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Middle East” (118). She writes that for Forbes “war is understood discursively as a struggle for supremacy within the realm of representation” and that the West’s possession of the Middle East is as much phantasmatic or virtual as it is actual (118). Forbes poises this struggle for supremacy in the posturing of love without hope, one foot in a solution of pathos and the other in bathos. The troubadour struggles for supremacy as lover and poet by repute, and this has been inherited as an extension of warriorhood. But by the end of the poem, this figure is in a state of total collapse. McCarthy writes that, “It is almost as if Forbes waves his love/war conjunction at us in a gesture near defeat, which signifies the futility of the West to resist its own desires” (124). She concludes that the poem is activated despite, or perhaps because of this, that it “retaliates by brandishing an elegant mastery of discursive manipulation of its own”: Forbes parodied this lust —this excess of desire for domination that is almost carnal in nature—by enveloping his “Love Poem” in an acutely sardonic register. As such, “Love Poem” functions as an ironic objection to the Gulf War, and, as it documents the scale of these events, flirts dangerously with the magnetism of their execution (120-21).

There seems to be operative here a faith in the poem as social technic rather than a faith in the figure of the poet. The poem is its own razo de trobar, its reason for composition. It is yet another poem about his poetry and the poiesis of the self as a revolving system of specular enchantments. There is an absence in the “heart” of Forbes as troubadour, the evacuation of love and plunder. His boast is for the sinuousness of his “immortal lyric” and his work remains as a scourge for the idea of there being any subject outside of language and cultural artifice at all. Again, everything is at stake in the symbolic economy. McCarthy writes that, “In the relentless exchange of simulations in ‘Love Poem,’ the only thing left to believe in is the simulacrum and Forbes’ narrator is a conscious citizen of this territory relying on it for identity” (224). Poetry knows itself as the simulacral, as the manipulated and ludic play of signs, and this is what qualifies it as technology of resistance in the continuing mythopoiesis of selves, nation states, and hemispheres of power. In the troubadour song one promotes one’s sexual and literary prowess in a performance of braggadaccio, but Forbes’s braggadaccio is deliberately broken. His troubadour is an ironic figure and a cipher of pathos. The movement between honour and shame, both “between the sheets or

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on the battlefield,” is a matter of indifference: both experiences are phantasmatic (Harvey 345). Again the poem might say “perhaps” to this: it is an act of war as well as an act of love, we cannot decide. Like Berrigan’s “Peire Vidal,” Forbes’s poem mixes the canso and the sirventes, the love song and social commentary, but where the troubadour might take the opportunity to mock other troubadours, Forbes’s most tenacious adversary seems to be himself.

The Viral Survival of Romanticism Forbes enjoys the line—wavering to a variance of one degree—between pathos and bathos, and any distance at all from the surface of the poem ruins the ability to discern which side of the line he is on. Yet one senses the recursive effect of an arch kind of posturing behind this and the selfironising or self-satirising effects that Forbes folds into the poems. Forbes’s mastery of the Toreador style when charged with the various myths of himself is meant to be exemplary in its vigilance for nostalgia and in its skewering of preferred images of the self, but what kind of new myth of the poet does this create? Forbes is keen to dispose of the figure of the Romantic poet as hero to valorise the poem itself, but I wonder if this is possible. Auto-annihilation and faith in poetry as a techne of the sublime is there in the English tradition of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats, and this is what sanctifies the figure of the poet. In 1991, Forbes wrote “Anti-Romantic”: You meet your daemon & respond with contempt for all depth & poetry driven by love and breath self-conscious bitterness is best, besides lust or a detached disgust—as long as there’s nothing hysterical about it Art & life both require this but your attitude like inspiration disappears, leaves you ugly & stranded, the moment you admire it              (CP 162)

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The “Anti-Romantic” contains that which it wants to oppose. It is not outside the Romantic, but it is plagued by it. Rather than letting the poet off the hook, the hyphen that would serve as a handle on the Romantic becomes a tethering chain. The only possibility for Romantic identification is “self-conscious bitterness”: the crackling sibilance of the line consumes in turn “love,” “breath,” “poetry,” “depth.” Forbes makes claims for the poem as an autonomous event of unruly code or rhetoric and remains absolutely sceptical of the figure of the “Poet” as a function of “Literature.” This is a poetry that constantly questions what it is to be a subject of language in a concentrated fashion by asking what it is to be a poet. Forbes’s gift then is this contradiction: an attempted annihilation of the poet which through its exemplarity and rare ethos gives us the total re-instatement of the poet as scourge. Forbes mocks the Romantic identification of the self and its expressive symbols, and yet, as Philip Mead writes, “somewhere in there Forbes preserved the idea of poetry as a current of social revolution” (n.pag.). This late faith in poetry, expressed in a wicked scepticism, occults the figure of the author. It is a faith not shouted or sent forward in a moral guise but read through the praxis of poetry. The signature of John Forbes and his ghost are part of his poetics, yet the poet and the poem are not the same thing. Reading John Forbes is to read the techne of his self-surveillance and the surveillance of a civilisation as constructions. The word is taken up as the medium of engagement: it is both physical and metaphysical, mortal and immortal, both of and not of the world. The logic of the poems pretend to the patterns of discursivity, of logos, only to turn and return through tones and tenses, to turn out the fact that the writing is a performance of styles. The poems are aware of themselves as moments of mythos. Once the poems become artefacts of culture, of artifice, the subversive moment is over and the acts of the poet become pamphlets of satirisation. This struggle in a certain spirit must be attenuated by being accommodated in a Collected Work. The Geist becomes fixed, historicised, and consumable as a zeitgeist: a décor. The critical gesture in Australia has been to mythologise Forbes as “our Coleridge” or “a new Marvell” or “our postmodern Orpheus.” Kristeva writes that, “What one had to fight were all the possibilities in poetry that had been transgressive but were now encoded and thus categorised within the symbolic order as fetishes” (83). Can Forbes’s poems, as little machines of renovation, still be operable?

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In his theorising of poetics, Forbes’s ideal mode could be described as a kind of “immanentism,” which has its flush in the occasion or process of the poem. Words are allowed their lexical meanings, or a synchronic sense, but cannot be guaranteed by systems of metaphysics or cultural freight outside of the poem (Jenkins 96). The semantic meaning must be sought within the poem itself as the occasion for its being. This is to make language both personal and public, and in this sense demands a certain kind of attention to a “poetics of singularity.” The politics of such a poetics is to maintain the canniness needed to constantly re-read one’s myths, to feel for the state of the art through a hermeneutics of one’s self-mythologising, and be prepared to improvise and rewrite, to respond creatively to change or encounters with dominant cultural motifs. Forbes writes of O’Hara: championing his right to create his own cultural identity by changing the primacy of received identity … He sees the source of poetry … as creating his own identity and as a counter pressure to that identity his received culture would have him accept. Such a poetry cannot conform to any preconceived images of its occasion. (“On Frank O’Hara’s ‘In Memory …’” 217-18)

The narrative necessity, the weight or existential sentence of one’s own history, is subverted through an anti-narrative poetics that reifies the contingent, the fleeting, and celebrates an aesthetic of surfaces. This is the ethos which Forbes reads in the linguistic praxis of O’Hara and which charges the social aspect of his poetics. Forbes’s poems are machines which shuffle the mythic formations that emerge from the doxa (common parlance, common sense) of nationalism, humanism, and Romanticism. This chapter has demonstrated the ways in which Forbes critiques the self as lover, philosopher, and poet, and the sense in which these things are undifferentiated as facets of the subject. The figure of the troubadour allows us to think of poetry as being warlike in its constitutional action. It can effect a tussle between the forms of personal mythologies and those larger complexes of communion: love, nationalisms, and one’s relation with deities and daemons. In “Phaenomena,” Forbes reminds us that the process of territorialising the idea of a self in space is not other than poiesis and that poetry as a speculum allows us to observe the life of this signal fluxus in the middle of the action. This is poetry as a dirty ontology. It knows itself as complicit with

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the things of the world, and because it flaunts its artificiality and abstraction, it recoups a kind of epistemological honesty. It consistently presents itself as enigma: the sphinx that thinks about the riddle of the sphinx. Forbes keeps the self as an “abstract position in re.” The experience of experience is perceived to be an ongoing and syntactical line trick of tropes. These lines are that which is said, the stories which become their subject. The self is not other than its mythos. Forbes cares for the immortality of the poem but not the poet. Why is this important? The poems are admonitory, saying “this is how to be.” They take their place in the virtually spaced Republic of poetry like Catullus’s graffito: to instruct, to modify the making of selves. Yet this sacrificial ethos that would erase the figure of the poet occults it instead. Forbes has become a hero of poetic production in Australia because of the saucy or picaresque vida which begins this chapter, and which can take its place in the troubadour tradition, now that modernity is compelled to play with all historical cultural conceits in the present. This vida is being widely disseminated because he was the centre of a poetic community at a time of agitated experiment and revolt in poetries in English touched off by New Yorkers of the mid-twentieth century. In the interest of heresies, in the demi-monde of poetry in Australia and its attendant communities, Forbes has become something of an irascible god who tempts people to the production of poetry on behalf of themselves.

CHAPTER 7

The Pagan Sermons of John Forbes

One way we recognise the dead is that they don’t come to dinner. They don’t pick up the phone, don’t come to your parties. Yet ever since I became aware of John Forbes, I keep bumping into him. I’ve only ever known John Forbes as a ghost or the John Forbes that lives in the archive. Not a person, but something that to me has the presence and persistent aura of a person. About 15 years ago, after I mentioned I had been writing poems, Alison Lydiard handed me the John Forbes Collected, saying “Rose Lang gave this to me when my dad died— she said it would help. I can’t do anything with it, maybe you can.” I kept the book next to my bed for the next five years, thinking that these were difficult poems, but that they had a weird glamour: something about their style of address, their wit, but also the poems themselves had a kind of stealth to them, a European machinery that had grown a marsupial fur. I had never heard colonial Australia spoken about like this, as though everything that was going on was of vital concern. I had the feeling I was being inveigled into something great. I also started to get the feeling I was being nagged by these poems, this poet. Why has John Forbes remained such a charismatic figure in Australian poetry? There is in him an echo of the compelling adhesive and hectoring force that Alex Katz saw in Frank O’Hara who “seemed to be a priest who had got into a different business … [h]e was out to improve our world whether we liked it or not” (99). Forbes was going to become a priest, was © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Hose, The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94841-2_7

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within the sights of the Jesuits as being an exceptional candidate, as having the calling. Something happened to him in the plum of his youth, a morphing of desire, where he was overtaken by poetry as a more desirable material practice and metaphysical application.1 Forbes’s practice of poetry retains some of the essential drives of his Catholic faith: absolute devotion, ritual, self-sacrifice, doubt, a faith in sacraments and the commitment to the devotional community, transmitting something of the sacred, only this new application I will describe as having turned from a Catholic to a Pagan metaphysics, and the poems he produces as Pagan Sermons which demand some sort of follow through for those that come after. To complement Marx’s ideas of historical materialism and sociological determinism, Max Weber worked to describe the metaphysics of what he called the “Spirit of Capitalism” as an effort to account for the genealogy of capitalist culture. Forbes’s pagan sermons take this “spirit of capitalism” as their nemesis, working against a fresh neoliberal plague to promote not the financialisation but the poeticisation of life, advancing poetry itself as a superior physical/metaphysical practice of dealing with our animal being, checking the operation of glamour and our insistence on fetishising things, and displacing an idolising of money in favour of pursuing sensual experience: sex, dancing, feasting—the bacchanalia—and turning these experiences into art. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber writes: the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. (53)

1  Forbes in an interview with Hazel de Berg: “I began writing poems when I was about 16, I was living in Miranda with my parents. I had to write a poem for English class, and, uh, I got very interested in doing it. I was mainly influenced by concepts of beauty or imagism, at the time, and wanted to write a poem that would be like a really beautiful very early well you know, something like ha’past six on a summer’s morning, um, there was a bit of a gully near where we lived and there were a lot of gumtrees and they looked … I used to have a room at the back of the house and I could see this, and it was something like the same … I wanted to get into poetry the same feeling … an equivalent of that experience or that sight.”

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In an age devoted to money, where what remains is the glamour of the pyramid without the god within, our stake in the theatrics of matter has shifted. The grace that money brings is converted into displays of “animal glamour” and aesthetic economies of prestige that are materially practised through habitat, carriage, dress and comportment, and the exercise of power, of commanding, of disciplining, of apportioning reward and punishment. Where Weber pursues the “Spirit of Capitalism” and the disenchantment of the world as a morphing of religiosity, Jean-Francois Lyotard confronts Capitalism as a kind of bad pagan reformation of the old order and a warping of the will to power. In the process of articulating “a loss of faith in metanarratives” as a symptom of what would be called “the postmodern condition,” Lyotard wrote “Lessons in Paganism,” proposing and demonstrating in the form of a dramatic dialogue, a “pagan” faith in storytelling as a highly localised social practice to overcome or displace the master narratives which capital prefers. Naming it as the target of a pagan putsch, Lyotard suggests capitalism is: a godless power, and its narrative is about everything and nothing. I’m not saying that capital is pagan; it has its one god (money), its mass (discharging debts), its grace ordinary and extraordinary (profits and superprofits), its elect and its damned. So it is obviously not a pagus. But it is godless. (140)

What was a material practice of faith for Weber’s Protestants has become a devouring obsession for their descendants who have seen off the idea of divine authority. Lyotard sketches a spectral remainder of sacred practice in the dealings of capitalism: a partage of grace, a capricious distribution of favour, and the sense that its offices are available to those who have the calling. Capitalism is no joke: its powerful allure is appealing to the appetite of the will: to territorialise, to acquire, to conquer, to organise the world in its own image: to make little gods of human beings in lusty competition with each other or in the communal spirit of the parasite. The Spirit of the Spirit of Capitalism imitates the surfeit of being, so hotly desired by its potential host, which then hijacks its desiring machines as a means to reproduce itself (virally) (without end). Forbes’s close friend and occasional collaborator Mark O’Connor quipped that his poems are “constructed like sermons,” and I want to pursue and pervert the logic of this insight to describe the figure of this

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poet and the poems as pagan “constitutional acts,” as a way to isolate and describe the spell-like effects or charming action of some of Forbes’s poetry. I want to hunt John Forbes as “an escapee of the Jesuits” (Oakley qtd in Anderson) who applies to his life and his practice as a poet the strategies of a radical Catholic in a new discourse of structuring selves that are greater than themselves: that are careful, communitarian, reflective, taking seriously the things and events of the world beyond the tendency to reify the self as a compact deity. His Catholic bent never leaves him but he converts something of the charge of Christ’s ethos and ideas of grace as the distribution of divine gifts through vocation into a pagan practice of poetics, marked by materialist, sensual, and hedonistic belief in poems as charms. I have come to think of the effect on the living of John Forbes the poet as something like the daemonic.2 To the ancient Greeks, the daemon was an attendant spirit that guides a person though their life, or “generally, [a] spiritual or semi-divine being inferior to the gods,” acting as a go-between for mortals and immortals (Liddell & Scott 366). Heraclitus’s “fragment 119” proposes a metaphysical hypothesis for human being: ethos anthropos daemon. Ethos has been translated as “character” or the “outward bearing” of a person in which we can read behavioural codes through the repetition and difference of affective qualities over time (Liddell & Scott 766). The phrase presents an equation of the physical showing (ethos) of the human being (anthropos) and the forces, drives, appetites, or intuitions which animate them (daemon). The phrase ethos anthropos daemon is operationally devious: when you read someone’s ethos, through animal behaviour, you are also reading their daemon. Heraclitus’s phrase unites and divides the point of fascination between the spiritual (metaphysical) and the carnal (physical). It is a diabolical trope that wriggles on ahead of you and can’t be caught. Part of the condition of settler modernity is that now we must choose our daemons, having been removed through the diasporic effects of colonialism and globalisation from our more anciently accumulated ancestral links. We used to be allotted a daemon, as part of the allotment of our fate. Poets have always chosen their daemons from writers who have come

2  Though I discuss this in Chap. 2 (pp. 113–4), it is worth re-iterating Heraclitus’s formulae and refreshing its explication.

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before them, and these “influxes” are mixed with their native genius, which make a compound of metaphysical forces. I want to present you with my problem: how to approach reading John Forbes’s ethos in order to take on the daemon that inheres in it and pay attention to what it is demanding of us. To do this we need to maintain a critical ambivalence: I choose to invoke John Forbes as a daemon, an ally whose energetic signature is to be read in the ethos, the ethical and aesthetic tracks of charismatic animal being. There is no such “thing” as the daemon, yet the daemon might usefully exist for us as a figure of ancestral continuity and remind us of uncertain forces within and without the human that drive our fates. Courting the daemon reminds us of the self as a multiplicity, that a person is a consortium of forces, and in Heraclitus’s equation the daemon runs to excess, as what is unknowable but also undomesticated (feral). Like Dark Matter, the daemon and its operation is of no interest to Capitalism, since it is beyond commodification and unbiddable. This becomes a study of phantoms and virtual territories: the intolerability or absence of one we have never met and a more protracted cultural longing for the re-introduction of bogles and bogeys. In our efforts to secure ourselves against terrifying nature and the primitive, through the gentle sciences of the bourgeoisie, we have managed to clean up the spirits or daemons, yet like bacteria there are helpful and harmful species. In our world of passwords and digital platforms of professional and electronically mediated social being, this older technic of the imagination carries a promise of human ancestral continuity. Taking up the position of Fellow at the Fryer Library in Queensland, I was prepared to commune with the ghost of John Forbes through his papers and effects held in the Library’s Special Collection, especially the manifold drafts of poems which I have theorised as constitutional drafts of a self-mythology. Tracing the work of the author’s hand in blue ink, a crabby handwriting that I learnt to decipher, I experienced the shimmering there/not there of the poet’s presence and was able to enter the charmed relation that comes from handling relics. Reading Forbes thinking and writing about O’Hara, scanning his casual addresses to Berrigan, I realised I was a privileged receiver of the baton, and one of the living connections of the O’Hara, Berrigan, and Forbes troika, entering into a pandaemonium.

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Fig. 7.1  “Forbes’s notebook.” Fryer Library Holdings, University of Queensland UQFL 148/B/6

Pandaemonium The image below is of a sacred text. I was drawn to it perhaps through the same relationship of familiarity that draws Forbes to Shelley and makes me want to draw them across to the hemisphere of the living once again. It kept coming to my notice, as though the daemon repeatedly slid it out of the archive and towards me: “look” (Fig. 7.1): ‘In as much as he is social, and constitutes pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning and love in the intercourse of kind’ Shelley, Defence of Poetry.

A youthful Forbes re-inscribes Shelley’s ethos on the back of a Sydney University notebook. The act of inscribing this on a working notebook,

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especially at such a precocious age, snares our attention. Forbes’s notice of this credo, a performance of self in elegant prose, suggests that he has adopted the ethos and is therefore courting the daemon of Shelley, or Shelley as daemon. Forbes had at that age what Harold Bloom calls a “receptivity to daemonic influx” which is not quite the same thing as inspiration or influence (4). Nor is it mere flirtation; it is an opening up to possession that alters the way you live your life, the sacrifices you are prepared to make, and the way that you comport yourself as an animal. Once you have a taste for reading ethos you can practice it anywhere, especially on one’s “self.” How you position your body and your gaze in an elevator; when and where you allow yourself to pick your nose or spit; how you move among the chaos of a crowd of contending wills: do you yield or do you press your advantage, or seize an advantage and put yourself first. This sounds like a science of manners, and it is. For a testy and tasty introduction to the John Forbes’s ethos, we turn to the poem: ODE TO KARL MARX Old father of the horrible bride whose wedding cake has finally collapsed, you spoke the truth that doesn’t set us free— it’s like a lever made of words no one’s learnt to operate. So the machine it once connected to just accelerates & each new rap dance video’s a perfect image of this, bodies going faster and faster, still dancing on the spot. At the moment tho’ this set up works for me, being paid to sit and write & smoke, thumbing through Adorno like New Idea on a cold working day in Ballarat, where adult unemployment is 22% & all your grand schemata of intricate cause and effect work out like this: take a muscle car & wire its accelerator to the floor, take out the brakes, the gears the steering wheel & let it rip. The dumbest tattooed hoon

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—mortal diamond hanging round the Mall— knows what happens next. It’s fun unless you’re strapped inside the car. I’m not, but the dummies they use for testing are.                   (CP 169)

This poem I present as a pagan sermon, for the hectoring presence not just of Forbes but of Marx, Adorno, and the descendants of Grandmaster Flash. It has a few signature moves: the bravura opening line, the humorous and provocative alignment of Adorno with New Idea, the material and contingent example or working out of “intricate schemata of cause and effect” with the mechanical hedonism of the burnout, that Australian bogan spectacle of excess and animal prestige, the figure of the poet aside or excised from normal economic activity, though still nebulously involved, through thinking. It has a middle-class crack about bogans as “mortal diamonds”—picking the lumpen proletariat as a target is an unusual move for Forbes. The poem relates high theory to everyday life in a laconic or jokey or slangy manner, to make us at ease with the fact that an Australian idiom already knows all about ideological struggle (this insouciance has the tang of Forbes’s own animal prestige). Again one hears the definite pitch of what Meaghan Morris describes with some affection as “nagging.”3 The democratic flavour of “nag” is what seems familiar: the fierce friendliness and aggravations of the harpy or live earworm of the poem. Forbes’s love of caricature is described in the rapier wit: addressing an historically haggard Marx as the “old father” of an ideal beauty (communism) turned “horrible bride/whose wedding cake has finally collapsed” in an image that musters the erotic (nuptial rights) the legal-domestic (civic wedding) and the crumbling aesthetics of official communist propaganda (a failed epic confectionary). These poems leave biotic impressions, encourage a critical chattering which makes “what it means to speak and write as an Australian” appear, seductively, to be a potentially powerful resistant strain of making mythos (Morris 8). Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx deals with the Marxist heritage by addressing or calling up the old ghost of Marx as the revenant, the one who will always return, or insist, or plague, or harangue. To make this political point Derrida uses a literary example of Old Hamlet coming back to hassle his Prince, pointing the spectral finger saying you … what are you 3

 See page 281.

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going to do? Are you going to pull your head in, and eat your ice-cream, or are you going to stick your head out? The first crucial point is the confusion of life and literature; we live with these figures and their speech as though they were familiars: Marx, Derrida, and Forbes now speak from the hauntologue. Forbes’s ode demonstrates that you have a creative and constitutional license to deal with these demands of the dead in a very personal way. In the poem it is Ballarat, cold, we smoke, there is not just the fact but the negative affect and culture of high unemployment, whose effects are not only physical but also metaphysical: loss of the sacred, loss of meaning, loss of ritual which leads to boredom, methamphetamine, burnouts. Marx now appears as a remote monumental patriarch who tried to intervene in the justice of human relations with an enigma machine “no-one’s learnt to operate,” its promise therefore making it worse than useless. Forbes’s satires always make room for himself on the skewer: “this set-up works for me tho.” He gives us the picture of himself doing nothing, except his nothing has something to it; the grace of reflection, of thought, of empathy, and of turning all this into a poem. Even so, “The truth that does not set us free” is the truth of the poem. What are the rules of attraction: why do we fly towards the things we love? Skulking in the archive I have gotten a fine and finer sense that Forbes’s daemon is a composite of other ancestral daemons which lived through other people. John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Christopher Brennan: these are proper names for collectors and containers of daemons of the past which come to inform Forbes as a person and call him into being as a poet. This daemonic insistence is eerie (weird): the poet is charged with rejigging poetry for the changed world which they inherit and to transmit a tradition of making charms through poems as incantatory devices, yet they are already being addressed as a daemon to come, an ancestor in the making—one of the already dead. One originates from the dead and shall return to them, and there is a special charge on the living in this schema to do justice to the fact of their election, to transmit to the world a little of the “immortal energy” of creation (O’Hara Collected 234). There is nothing more serious than this. Forbes lives between two mythic operating systems, with the Catholic being a rebooting and modifying of the pagan configuration. In this poetics is couched the promise of the eternal return of new life and new forms. Forbes is a heretic, believing in neither the total redemption of the resurrection (Surrexit Dominus de sepulchre) nor the

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purity of inspiration which the Romantics demanded from a visit by the daemon, as we witness again in the poem. Anti-Romantic You meet your daemon & respond with contempt for all depth & poetry driven by love and breath self-conscious bitterness is best …        (CP 162)4

This is the tragi-comic statement of the melancholic alchemist, who is driven to make new things come into being through an essential lack or nostalgia for a lost object of love, relation, ego. The poem has a classic Forbes double action: being both self-mocking and an act of virtuosity it works as a scourge of his own self-image as a poet and of guileless Romantics who purchase the soft furnishings of “depth,” “poetry,” “love,” and “breath,” setting up these little puffballs of typical poetical value just to have them go directly under the hammer. The poet is heroic and damned and Forbes seems to prefer it this way: the narcissistic poise of a perfectly achieved poem, which this is, leaves you “ugly and stranded,” bathed in negative affect. The poem here is black matter, nothing is purified or transcended, and yet the abyss which it uncorks is immaculate with a sort of salty nihilism, whose consonantal and sibilant crystals: “self-conscious bitterness,” “lust,” “detached disgust” are in the mouth like chewing glass. The poem is perfectly ambivalent about its recognitions of the daemon: the idea of such a thing is mockingly classed with other Romantic standards: poetry, love, breath, yet as the negative participle of “[a]nti-­ Romantic” still contains the Romantic, the daemon is admitted through its naming and attempted shaming. Doubt, misery, and the risk of failure are muses for Forbes, as for they were for Frank O’Hara who decides “unhappiness, like Mercury, transfixed me” (292). Forbes’s paganism places its faith and practice in a ritualised attention to language as charm, creating on the utopic space of the page prime conditions for the trope, the infinitely mixed scheme of devious signs which we inherit, to go wild, allowing forms of life to proliferate following Frank 4

 See pages 315–6 for the full poem and further commentary.

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O’Hara’s credo: “Grace/to be born and live as variously as possible” (256). This credo is embodied for Forbes in the living body of the poet and the living body of language as it is loved by poetry, not as a necrotic discourse of agreed meanings or smiling topoi or two signs in the chaste embrace of a metaphor. Poetry promises the word made flesh again as it is put in the mouth. What I am trying to transmit is something of the fury of Forbes’s embrace of poetry as a revolutionary practice of an immanent awareness of incarnate being. To make a pagan sermon is not to preach but to take up the whip of the trope as a living thing, having investments in the physical and the metaphysical, the human and the inhuman, the homely and the alien. Forbes is no secular St Francis of Assisi: he gambled on the horsies and the doggies, he drank opiate derivative cough medicine to get high, he was addicted to it, his poems profess a fondness for both the plastic technofilth of his civilisation and the grubby propagandic plays of ideology on television, in the cinema, and in public political life. His poetry affirms these things as it critiques them. Questioned on the possible relevance of poetry to contemporary Australia (and elsewhere), Michael Farrell suggests that: Poetry—like most art—signifies something that resists the concept of “use value”. It’s the making of culture. Unlike many corporations, poetry networks aren’t making a huge effort to destroy the planet. Poetry entails a thinking about thinking that opposes the thinking in order to wield power of both governments and business.5

I am interested in the animal stakes of this collective instinct to operate against the predatorial and parasitical and against all cultural products being weighed as commodities. Forbes turns to poetry as a material praxis in order to engage in the pleasures of the secular world and its synthetic enchantments, and he eschews symbolic modes in favour of a fascination for tropes themselves as living species: the movements of the vernacular, slang, crusty rhetoric, cliché, whatever combinations of past and present usage combust in a kind of original rigour, to produce poems as “things … liberated from the drudgery of usefulness,” a notion that, within the cult

5  https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/20530/Interview-with-MichaelFarrell/en/tile.

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of productivity and a capital value on most things, becomes revolutionary (Benjamin qtd in Arendt 197).

The Critique of Animal Glamour Forbes’s pagan project is to displace the commodity fetishism of the spirit of capitalism with the fetishism of glamour, of our bodies and the products of those very bodies, so that art becomes a matter of exchange between friends of objects and ideas, rather than another market super-product.6 How do we reappropriate the power of the fetish? Forbes is invested in the material operation of the technics of glamour, of the demonstrated ethos of our being in the world. He pits the daemons of poetry against the “spirit of capitalism,” to tip the favour from a financialisation to a poeticisation of life and experience. As the symbolic animal we are bound to abstract and commodify things and their relations, and we are taught or we intuit the scale of prestige: the prancing stallion of Ferrari is not the respectably plebian sign of Toyota. Poetry like dance is an expressive techne of the body in which we become the carriage of ancestral being and in which we demonstrate the power or manna of the animal that we are. Money is a proxy object for desire: even as an abstract thing it is a promissory note rather than the thing itself. When it comes to the display of the accumulated power of money, money hangs on with its dead sequins and borrowed furs, and we see the projected idea of manna rather than manna backed up with “the pleasures of the senses.” This is not to say high animal prestige is not distributed across classes: we see accomplished animals in the deliriously rich as well as nomadic peoples with only an armload of possessions, but the Spirit of Capitalism, as the go-between, has set money before the whole world, and the resulting spree—materially, ethically, aesthetically, erotically—is murder. Sydney Harbour Considered as a Matisse One slip & you’re back, via Whiteley & Ken Done to what our boosters can’t tell it’s

6  I am using glamour here in both its modern and antique senses: the attractions of charm and beauty through animal presence or learned cultural production, and the sense, from the Scots, of glamour as magic or enchantment: of “putting the glamour over someone.” Glamour has a shared (and disputed) etymological root with grammar through the Latin “grammatical” denoting learning and occult practices.

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distinguished from: her number lipsticked on a crumpled Amex slip, or a forex dealer with a view, still chatting on his phone, fucks someone from behind. Pink tinged clouds decorate a perfect afternoon, white yachts weave & tack—the images don’t change beneath a varnish that embalms disgust— girls reduced to tears just once, blokes in sports cars fuming, their parasite careers. Can art be good enough to save all this, plus the perfume of frangipani blooms crushed on sandstone piers? Maybe just.                    (CP 186)

This poem addresses the glamour of cherished “things,” trying through “consideration” to play the ironic chasm between life and its mythologisation, or a possible real and its representation. Sydney Harbour has an ambivalent load: it is a pure commodity for tourism and real estate and is aesthetically charged as a boutique experience, especially for artists who want to territorialise the mythos of Sydney. The pagan sermon begins with O’Hara’s credo that for an artist “[t]he slightest loss of attention leads to death” (quoted in Berkson, 226). The “Sydneyness” of Sydney is like a siren that would engulf all but the canniest of sailors in an idealising solution: “One slip and your back.” Whitely and Ken Done are two poles of intensity in the spectrum of Australian kitsch painting, but the greater threat is that the spectacle of these mirages of simplified beauty are what our feelings become once we “slip” to the temptation of becoming poised as a living cliché, and the ineffable aura of the Harbour as Romantic milieu becomes “a varnish that embalms disgust.” This could be “Sydney Harbour Considered as a Bestiary”: we see prize animals stripped of their prestige, the financier “fuming” in their highperformance charger, trapped in traffic circulation and revealed as a “parasite,” the bankrupt erotic exchange of the love letter as a lipstick written number on the back of a credit card slip, and in the “forex dealer/still chatting on his phone (as he)/fuck(s) someone from behind.” We have first the poet and then the reader, pinned into position as a voyeur, a perve. No one escapes the poem as scourge.

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The (colonial) aesthete’s desire to read Sydney Harbour as a possession at least as valuable as a Matisse, in an effort to relieve the classical settler anxiety of inferiority, is stymied; the poetical “value” is put on a continuum with other commodities, but again, the moment we stop to admire our penetration of the satire’s subtleties, we have “slipped back” into a reification of the poet, which now belongs on the skewer with everyone and everything else. Unless it is to be sold, the excess of beauty is trampled, with “frangipani blooms/crushed on sandstone piers” having their own demimondaine sensual glamour of the sort that might appeal to Baudelaire. The poem then asks itself the ultimate question of the poet’s vocation, “Can art be good enough to save all this?” with the answer being an exquisite heresy: “Maybe just.” How do we reappropriate the power of the fetish from the seductive aura of commodity to the operation of glamour in being our “selves” as admirable animals; not as cronies of the “spirit of capitalism” but as incarnations of the daemon? Like “Sydney Harbour” as a tradeable currency in the Ideal, artists are made commodities to condense the capital value of their works through the cult ring of the name: Matisse, Ken Done, Whitely, Gucci, Balenciaga, Ferrari. The poet here is prone to the things he despises: who does not want to enjoy a “million dollar” view while you “fuck somebody from behind,” perhaps while thinking of your yachts or your new Bugatti. Perhaps not you, but this position our culture tells us is universally desirable. Forbes slyly punctures the last remaining hope of the modernists and the children of the bourgeoisie: is art good enough to save all this? Not art as commodity, but as the superior booty of a pagan sermon? The poem throws everything into jeopardy: it both gives the rumour of and withholds consolation. It is more precisely a threat saying, perpetually, pay attention, yet the wit of the whole, the ambiguous laughter of the daemon is companionable. The more subtle jeopardy lay in the satisfaction this brings, the temptation to identify with the poem’s superior perspective, which has already been subsumed as a John Forbes moment, not your own. The efficacy of this pagan sermon is to make you take a step away, to practice the poem’s gift of scepticism on the poem itself. We tend to align prestige with money, power, and beauty, those with cultural influence, forgetting other, more inscrutable, or occulted types: accomplished human beings, those with “natural” authority not institutionally conferred, those who possess or who are possessed by the daemonic, charismatic storytellers who have gifts of grace in making mythos.

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Strength, physical grace or awkwardness, great hair, bad hair, startling eyes have mythological as well as phenomenal charge, though these animal features are only sparingly recorded as ghostmarks: like events they only survive if they become storied.7 In “Sydney Harbour …” Forbes displays his animal prestige as a hunter of the spirit of capitalism; an assassin of bad taste and bad ideas, and in the ethos of the poem, floated in the voice and in the sting of its images, we get the excoriating attention of the daemon demanding something better or at least something less despicable, while relishing somehow this despicability. In the troubadour tradition, the poem is a sirventes, the satire of social vices, entertaining in its mockery. The poet does not “appear” in the poem as a phenomenal shape outside of this critical attention: the poem itself takes up this phenomenal shape. The apprehension of each line is a coup de grâce, demonstrating a certain panache that is at once physical and metaphysical. In “Monkey’s Pride” Forbes does appear in public:                Soon new technology will detach me         & I’ll be employed on a rowing boat           mounted in a park,     the one the avenues lead to because society has elected me/to decorate              its falling apart         with a useless panache.                      (CP 98)

The vaunted position of the heroic figure in a boat (I think of Odysseus or of Cy Twombly’s floating myth-machines) is here posted as ridiculous poise: the nostalgic decoration for a disintegrating culture. The dextrousness here, stamped as “panache,” is the capacity for withering satire, of himself and his vocation, but also of a society that requires a monument to uselessness, which all “the avenues lead to.” “Panache” belongs to social theatrics in the sense of operating with flamboyance or insouciance, but there is a martial dimension as well, “panache” denoting in the French a plume of feathers decorating a war helmet; so we have the display of the 7  In his Enchantment, C. Stephen Jaeger plots the transition of charismatic persons and their representations in art to artworks themselves becoming charismatic in the West. He uses as an example the return of Ulysses, and the manner in which his storytelling cumulatively charges the aura of his presence and condenses his prestige as an exceptional figure in their midst among his listeners.

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cockerel, armed with the cockspur, the proud and deadly male bird. For the cavalier, the dandy soldier, panache is a whole style of animal glamour, the rhetorical flair of the physical in excess in terms of being and bearing. Forbes’s panache is ambivalent in its operation: it works, it is this poem’s vanity, yet its gestures are unreadable to a population regimented in leisure or corporate wear. The poem’s footwork or “hopscotching” down the page belies this uselessness, its deadly cuts and thrusts are made to look like playful “divertimento” or entertainments, yet for those paying attention the cuts made through the fabric of “Sydney Harbour Considered as a Matisse” are permanent. The archive or the poem may seem to be an odd place to look for the display of animal glamour or animal prestige, but Forbes is a notoriously textual creature; we know his moves through his torsional syntax, the music of his rhetorical duende. There is a darker shading to Forbes’s punk posturing, in the calling out as corrupt or inferior what one may at times feel inferior to: luxury penthouse ownership on the harbour, the reputation of Matisse, the glamourous loading of “the Harbour,” a casual knack of being able to “fuck someone from behind” while making more money over the phone: sexual, economic, artistic prestige.8 Forbes’s is a renegade vocation, the maker of pagan sermons, but one senses spots of dirty blood where at least a semblance of these earthly comforts is craved. There is a double appetite to both wield the scourge and to take one’s place as an enfranchised debauchee. A strong part of the charm of these poetics is their ambivalence: Forbes is a lover and loather of Sydney; Forbes is a devotee and a sceptic of language. Virtuous and intelligent contradiction is at the complex “heart” of Lyotard’s conception of being pagan. He seizes the pagan as a figure of radicalised political citizenship, one that operates on the margins, within and without the dominant discourses of the polis. He suggests that it is not possible to take control of the master narrative without becoming it: if an individual or a group get surplus power, the master narrative will make of these ventriloquists. Marx as terrible prophet and Communism as a nominated utopia is just as catastrophic for the living as other monumental narratives. What is possible, he suggests, is the localised insertion of small, resistant, bandit narratives of living people with proper names that 8  In his subtle appraisal of Forbes and his relation to European or Old World sensibilities, Peter Porter remarks that “[s]atire … enables you to find a way of feeling superior to whatever feels superior to you, or what has simply ignored your significance” (22).

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live in operative communities, which reply to and interrupt the flow of official Logos: In pagan works, it is rhetorical acts themselves that are events. What matters for the pagan is not the exemplary value or universal significance of the speech-­acts—it is of little or no importance whether what they say is true, or whether it will become canonical—but the disruptive effects that such acts have the moment they are spoken, their transformative potential and the possibilities for thinking and speaking that they open up. (9 Intro Lyotard reader)

Lyotard’s “Lessons in paganism” is his critical reply to the disappointments of the revolutionary energies apparent in the spring of 1968,9 and one his bogeys is the dead rhetoric of the left: it failed to escape its master narrative, which negates the singularity of people and events in favour of the inhuman march of history. His solution is Nietzschean: an affirmation of events in their singularity, of just what happens and just what is as it is put into speech. Events then have no objective criteria: there would be unleashed an anarchy of making mythos, but this proliferation of tongues is to be preferred as that which negotiates with maximum vitality (Katz 99).

Do We Really Believe in the Daemon? I have pursued to excess the idea of Forbes’s poetry as a practice of self-­ mythologising, but nowhere is this admitted so explicitly in the work. I have supposed, made rhetoric, argued, cajoled, set traps, but the closest thing to a “capture” is Forbes saying that his work is “demythologising rather than mythologising” (Redford 40) or that the poetry is “avoiding myth and message” (Collected 131). Some two months into my work as the Fryer Library Fellow I opened a folder, a fragment of paper fell loose covered in a neat scrawl (Fig. 7.2):   Biographia Litteraria John, Our myths look sexy and terrific now that we’ve arrived. I read about myself and for the first time believe it my biography fits perfectly and looks sharp.                 (UQFL 148/A) 9

 It was within this historical epoch that John Forbes started writing poetry.

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Fig. 7.2  “Note from the Daemon.” Fryer Library Holdings, University of Queensland UQFL 148 A

This little bit of graffito on the walls of the archive seems a joke at my expense, and this kind of paranoid knowing (kenning) is the obverse side of an imagined intimacy or sympathy. Forbes insisted that it is the poetry and not the poet that should persist as the point of fascination, and yet here we report with glee a case of have your cake and eat it-ism. The creature turns to admire its tracks specifically as a territory-making animal in the luminous spaces of legendary biographies. The “who” of its address, “John,” the one whose written ethos “looks sharp” is the trinity of the fleshy thing holding the pen, the pricking consciousness and the ultimate prize of a golden name and created thing that supersedes mortality. The title “Biographia Litteraria” floats between an idea of the biography of a subject who writes literature and the subject being always and only a function of literature. This ploy is pinched from Frank O’Hara who pinched it from Coleridge who probably pinched it from someone else. The authorial voice here is of the one who manages identity on both sides of

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mortality, and which is perfectly aware of animal glamour as a fetish commodity to be distributed and exchanged, a sort of “sexy” “terrific” mask that “fits perfectly.” Is it an instance of the anthropos, the human, reading and admiring its ethos? It is struck with hubris: the pagan aficionado knows from earlier episodes that such an arch posture fetches an attendant curse. The “thing” of the mythic creature has been hunted and found; there is a charmed moment of locking eyes, but who now is regarding whom? Is it a rare articulation of the daemon addressing its human host (John), then congratulating themselves (we) and finally becoming a sort of bastard or self-made sovereign (Forbes Rex) with “I” and “my” who in the mind’s own eye “looks sharp”? The creature is Forbes, but a daemonised Forbes that encompasses past, present, and future. In a letter to Frank Moorhouse the younger Forbes declares: “I lust for fame” (UQFL 148 C). This usage of “lust” has the hot shove of a Catholic terror and excitement about it, as the word “fornicator” allows us to see its horns now that it is an illustrative atavism of transgression. Anthony Domestico finds in Gerard Manly Hopkins’s poems “an irreconcilable tension—on the one hand, the selflessness demanded by Jesuit discipline; on the other, the seeming self-indulgence of poetic creation,” a vocational quandary that applies just as well to Forbes. The dialectic of self-abnegation and self-admiration is a persistent motor of Forbes’s sensibility, the convulsive alternation of vanity and self-­loathing. The self as the prize apparatus of capitalist culture is both claimed and resisted, and it is this contradictory energy that keeps his speech outside of the official organisation of the polis, speaking from the pagus.10 Forbes’s ethos appears to possess the living through a range of caricatures that operate with an amazing consistency across his acquaintance within the testaments of the Homage to John Forbes: the poet with an unusual drug addiction, the idoliser of unattainable women, the generous

 “Pagus,” the Latin root of pagan, indicates a small administrative territory. Lyotard seizes upon it specifically to “identify a region that has not been assimilated by consensual politics. The pagus, a border of the polity without being totally in it, is the position from which a critique of the polity can be made”. Thomas Docherty in Stuart Sim (ed.) The Lyotard Dictionary, 158. Docherty continues: “Paganism acknowledges that many gods have to be appeased, even when the gods demand contrary things of the human subject. Paganism is thus ‘impious’ … it describes a situation where ‘pagans’ can no longer subscribe to the totalizing story told by Marxism, yet still demand a form of justice.” 158–9. 10

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and brutal critic of friend’s work, the competitive male.11 The reductive quality of these stories is unsettling for such a complex figure, who is an assassin when it comes to sketching the bad manners and delusions of peoples and nations, yet who was sublimely delusional about aspects of his own life, while simultaneously aware of this. His mythology of himself as poet is built of beautiful contradictions: critical of nationhood yet chauvinistic, “naïve yet ferocious” (Kenneally 114), selfless and fatally egotistical, graceful in art and often awkward in person, or as Alan Wearne suggests of the ingredients of Forbes’s self-mythologising: “part hyperbole, part selfdeprecation, part imagination” (128). As a figure of biographia litteraria, Forbes creates and inhabits a schizotopia where all these things are true and functional. Both Gig Ryan (in her introduction to the Forbes Collected) and Peter Porter (at the closure of his piece for the Forbes Homage) warn us against an appetite for the poet before the poems, yet Porter’s account is a set of anecdotal nuggets showing us the quality and consistency of a “beastly” ethos: the light and dark displays of animal prestige, while Ryan turns our fetish attention back to the poems as a set of animal tracks “of course he was like his poems, witty and brilliant” (15). It is perhaps undesirable to separate the poet from the poetry in a figure like this: how can we fail to take an interest in the animal that leaves such beguiling traces of a total mode of being, an expert commingling of the life and the art, where the intricacy and power (puissance) of the ethos guarantee proximity to a first-class daemon, and whose ambivalence towards everything: poetry, the spectacle of politics, the daemonic, romanticism, humanism, is not merely clever but exemplary. My encounters with Forbes have taken place in his poems and in those that knew him, who will often perform or ventriloquise some of his habitual gestures or sayings, and who are always compelled to ask: “did you know Forbes yourself?” noting that the ghost is now sought in me. I initially sought the ghost of John Forbes in the archive, and the more uncanny effect of this is to realise that I am the ghost in the archive. Rather than pursue a species of necromantics, or to fetishise the dead as dead, I want to court the daemon as a critical presence which we can cumulatively appreciate through being saturated in their compositional ethos: a style of being in language that is to be absorbed and emulated in 11  These motifs are repeated across the various accounts of the poet’s life collected in Ken Bolton’s Homage to John Forbes.

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spirit, that is, with the same insurrectionary charge. This constitutes the nachleben, the afterlife of the poet’s work, both in the recitation of the poems and a continuation of a peculiar species of intellectual spunk. I am not selling some paranormal truth by suggesting John Forbes returns to us as a daemon, but this (antique) notion has proven to be provocative in thinking about how a compelling cultural figure continues to function through their work and their myth. Peter Porter speaks of “the dangers of hagiography” (33) in any approach to Forbes, but the charisma of Forbes as a figure is enriched by including its dark matter, and so we do not require the writing up of the life of a saint but something much saltier. What is it that Forbes’s daemon wants to transmit? When asked by Ken Bolton to contribute to Forbes’s Homage, Carl Harrison-Ford privately responds by addressing the daemon’s ability to pester: like many of us, I think about John quite often. It seems to me that one reason John has stayed in so many of our minds—more so than many other deceased writers of talent and influence, and amongst a wide literary and non-literary constituency—is that, in death, he lost his power to exasperate. Or that that power moved from legendary to mythical. Of course this sounds mean-minded and I offer the suggestion only as a supplement to more valuable reasons for treasuring John’s skills and memory … but it did seem to take his very real absence to sharpen/hone a certain and precise sense of value as well as loss. (less mean-­mindedly, there’s John’s intellectual and poetic unpredictability. It baffles me as much in memory as it did at the time. I can’t think of anyone else I find it so hard to second guess. (UQFL F3806)

Harrison-Ford sketches a darker aspect of the Forbes daemon: the “power to exasperate” is recalled both for its productive negative capability (“intellectual and poetic unpredictability”) and a more cantankerous or destructive capability. He reports a presence that is not easily accommodated with the furnishings of sentimentality but continues to offer a challenge, an opportunity for animal confrontation that pricks one to attention as in a duel. Yet the insistence upon this style of engagement is what is exasperating, and the charm falls away to reveal something of a pestering or marauding animal in your garden, whose virtue as an ally becomes ambivalent. Forbes produces sermons that do not directly proselytise but continue to address the question ethos anthropos daemon: what can we learn of the spirit of capitalism through hunting its apparent ethos, and how exactly is

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it modulating and mutilating the anthropos, the human, turning it from a pack animal to a complex system of parasitism, where a few organisms exploit and feed excessively on the life forces of the whole. The daemon does not require belief: I and many others are occupied by the daemon of Forbes, as Forbes was possessed by the daemon of O’Hara, who was infected with the daemons of Rimbaud, Rachmaninoff, Apollinaire, Mayakovsky, and so on. Life in the archive, in the forensic critical business, is weird, where intimacy with and knowledge of the writer or writing might only appear to be deepening. It is especially strange when you cannot or will not meet your subject, though he or she influences and informs parts of your own existence and animal being (and may resemble one’s favourite parts of oneself). The person of the poet Shelley is remote from Forbes, and so the daemon Forbes courts is less stuck with human gristle. The smirch and charm of Forbes the animal still shows traces in the community of poets Forbes moved among. Forbes is taunting as a ghost for me, as we were alive at the same time. Forbes didn’t have that with Shelley: perhaps he felt something similar for the New  Yorkers O’Hara, Ashbery, Berrigan, Koch, Padgett: a chronic proximity. With Forbes I’m almost stepping on his shadow, even now in Darlinghurst, or Carlton, or O’Hara’s Collected. Having ditched totemic relations with our terrestrial friends (snake, gang-­gang, gumtree) and the gods in favour of ourselves, the operation of animal glamour through stuff as a way to assert prestige has gone into overdrive. Forbes’s fetishistic relationship is with language, managing the technics of charm through the materiality of the coded song and dressing the idea of the troubadour with new dark plumage in a time when their visibility is diminishing, as a way of producing culture that has a stake in the physical and metaphysical dimensions of being. His poetry shows a distaste for displays of animal prestige through the operation of glamour that have nothing of the sacred to them or that which does not echo or court the daemons of our ancestors. The poetry is not preachy: it remains ambivalent in order to provoke a ritualised attention to the moment of speech, the moment of making mythos, and is not intended as a sort of spiritual hygiene or proxy religion. It celebrates poiesis as a kind of transcendental corruption, an infidel melding of the mortal and the immortal. Keeping poems and poets as shimmering fetishes for thought feeds the desire for novelty and commodity. This is perhaps hopelessly idealistic,

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especially in the case of a poet like Forbes as a figure of contradiction and exasperation, but because his poems work as elusive quarry they excite a pursuit for something that stymies the acquisitive impulse. The action of transmission, of grace and the partage or communal sharing of the poet as literary daemon is what we desire and what is seemingly desired by the daemon “itself” as an old multifarious pagan “divinity.” We lose the nostalgia for a monotheistic “solution” to the variety of forms (nostalgia of the infinite) and invent instead a pantheism that makes sacred all the forms of life (nostalgia for the infinite) (O’Hara CP 498). What is unco about the archive is that you are living among the scratchings of a legendary animal who knew how the daemonic works, but there are no secrets of ethos in the archive that might reveal more of the daemon; Forbes is immaculately consistent in his public and private work—he is his poems in a very real sense—we can contact the “ordinary” or “dirty” sublime of his life. Forbes’s sublime is not an “exalted semblance of life” (Jaeger 41) to which we should aspire, but more of a human tragicomedy in which language is shown to be the source of power and transformation for the thinking animal. By hammering this notion of sermonising, I do not mean to engrave the impression of Forbes’s poetry as a mad rout of apocalyptic chants to counteract the “bad paganism” of capitalism. A long-time ear for these pagan sermons, Ken Bolton writes in his recent poem “Letter to John Forbes”: If you were still here—or here again—you’d hop a bus beachwards. Sydney beaches—they’re still magic   & the people, the young, you’d love. I do. It’s been noted, I think, how atmospheres,   the feel of air & weather, on the skin, or thru   a T-shirt, are in your poems: sand, concrete, tar, blue sea, blue metal, macadam, bats & moths & bugs & traffic, perspiration, the lungs—part of the gift to us from you—that we liked, as we read the poems, even as we saw it as incidental. But it remains.

Bolton ends his address to the spirit of Forbes on the beach, no longer the last place you would expect to meet a spook, in a democratic gesture of love that somehow grips the perplexing and beautiful feeling of “being

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here” spiced with the light hedonism that Sydney seems to offer through its own resident genius. The lightness of Bolton’s foot is noted as he performs a tango with Forbes’s style: the rhyming, the conceits, and the steps are precisely familiar with the ethos of his dead friend’s poetry. The Forbes charis, or gift of grace, through a wicked attention to the snakeyness of the trope, is to celebrate the life of sensuality that is the body’s whole existential vocabulary. A John Forbes poem is as often subtly carnal as it is intellectual, offering a return of attention to the marvellous carcass that we are.

CHAPTER 8

Charismatic Animals

In pursuit of O’Hara, I found the following letter to Grace Hartigan at the Museum of Modern Art: Hotel Inghilterra, Rome August 19, 1958.

Dear Grace,    This is a very pleasant hotel where Byron stayed if you haven’t decided where to stay in Rome, not too expensive and near the Spanish Steps, which I can tell you are a lot prettier than that disgusting Trevi Fountain those 3 starlets threw their coins in. I sent you a postcard from Madrid my last night but forgot to mail it for the utter tragedy of my departure. I was absolutely crazy about someone there and still think it is one of the major tragedies of space travel that I had to leave. You know long it’s been since I cared about someone. I mean really. Frank.1

Written in O’Hara’s famed “beautiful script,” the letter is an emblematic recital of self, with its declaration of tragedy, its campy eros for high and low cultural inversion, its chattiness, and its tone of intimate address. The name of Byron charms the circumstance through an invocation that seems utterly casual and familiar: “Byron” has become atmospheric. Yet 1

 Frank O’Hara Papers, 18. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Hose, The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94841-2_8

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the accidental effects of pilgrimage or its recognition are there. Having a common “fidelity to the immediate” (Soderholm 154), affective mobilité or chameleon changeability, suggests Byron and O’Hara share an ethos, and so we may presume, a daemon. In O’Hara’s will to morphology, and his principle motifs of the hunt (being pursuer and pursued) and the serpent (rebellious, dark, and sexy), we read a startling sympathy with the self-mythologies of Byron. O’Hara makes an affectionate trifold coterie of Frank, Grace, and Byron, outside of whom flees an unnamed beloved: a quarry for their mutual hunt, perhaps. Passing through the shadow of Byron, reaching a hand to Grace, O’Hara is tracking some of his favourite animals. It is a private consortium, though O’Hara is always aware of acting across temporal dimensions.2 To have the “beautiful script” of the letter in one’s possession is to partake in this consortium. The critical vocabulary which structures this book tends towards the epiphenomenal: “Daemon,” “possession,” “hauntologue” and “phantasmatic transmissions,” “charm,” “aura,” “charisma,” and “glamour” are all as inscrutable as the concept of “myth” itself. At the edges of epistemic stability or outside the sovereignty of logos, aspects of selfhood and community are always in excess of what can be known and a speculative vocabulary is therefore fitting. We eschew the self as an object of knowledge and instead enjoin it as a practice of poetics. The problem of apprehension is one of figurativity, of testing new “apparatus of capture,” yet the pursuit of the myth of the poet remains always unfinished. The critic necessarily moves within the immanent atmosphere of myth and becomes part of the transmission of charm. As one shapes the other so one shapes one’s self through a dialectic of mythography and mythopoiesis. Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, and John Forbes are self-reflexive wranglers of personal mythologies, navigating what can be known of self-making by working at the psychic frontiers of what can be said. They each receive and return poetry as an improved revolutionary apparatus for modulating “self” and “nation” as mythic complexes, presenting myth as process rather than myth as archive. For each, an active scepticism for the forms of the self, even as it is speculatively constituted in poems, is part of the charm of their praxis. The poet is the one who puts personal mythologies into the space of the public, through the social institution of language and the lyric as the forum for a virtual or textual republic of linguistic 2  The “three starlets” throwing their coins in the fountain could be a Hollywood incarnation of the three Graces (Charis), and again the trefoil comes to represent the primitive knot of physical and metaphysical sociality.

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selves. In this respect, they show not only how anyone can become a poet but also that perhaps one should become a poet in the making of oneself. Their poetic myth-making is answered to and extended through communal response, all three receiving a homage that testified to their unusually intense presence in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry communities. Yet what began as a study of the mythopoetics of poet, self, and nation with a focus on such generative processes also found the challenge of the daemonic forces that could be in black excess. Charm can pique adrenalin and love but also prick in pain. Beginning with O’Hara I read the action of a “dialectic of the heart” that runs an erotic economy and marks a hauntological community of poets and poiesis. He explores how to become what one is or how one might live as a work of art while holding to account the seductive abstracts of “self” and “nation” and charging the living to a semiotically activated citizenship. In “Today in Ann Arbour,” Berrigan also stages mutual mythmaking as a dialectic of the heart, reporting on the ways in which living in language puts the charm on one’s being and the being of others as oneself: * Johnny Stanton says: “Ted, you are a myth in my heart.” He is a myth in my heart! So, we are both myths!            (CP 358)

The poem has the clasping structure of a pendant, fixing their image in a reified homosocial bond that is permanently amorous. This cleaving-to is a signal effort of sociality which somehow advertises the abyss or the threat of disappearance it would seek to cover. The poet puts into their charms those things that they themselves have found charming. It is the constellation of these surcharged things in which we seek the texture of a personal mythology. When O’Hara declares, “my heart is in my/ pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy” (CP 258), he renews the sense of charm as something carried about the person to ward off evil or to bear the signs of a fated destiny. Forbes’s untimely death is still worked through as a kind of collective melancholia. Those who never knew Forbes gain charge from his signature poems which wrangle the production of “self” and “Australia” and render his myth actively charismatic. In Charles Segal’s Orphic triangle of art, death, and love, death figures forcefully. This spurs a kind of obsessive compulsion: what does it mean to have Forbes there (and not there) in Australian poetry? Recalling Pasternak’s theorem “You in others—this is

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your soul,” we can say that John Forbes’s spectral presence circulates through his Homage and among Australian poetry and poets today, his name bandied about as a charm. What one cannot have is the person of the poet or a desired proximity to the locus of production. Like poems, ideas of the poet are ephemeral formations. What one can be possessed by and possess is myth, since reading it is to become an active constituent and transmissive agent of it. Forbes, O’Hara, and Berrigan all have an afterlife, with varying degrees of energy, in the living, as phantasmatic presences, as daemons, in a transmissive textual system that moves across corporeality which we have characterised as the hauntologue. I have approached Forbes as the extensive territory of his poetics via the poets he especially loved and whose ethos he lived with: Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan. Examining O’Hara’s endless self-making, I trace his return as a daemon through contemporaries and those who come after. Engineering himself as a poet, getting a handle on the “baffling combustions” of authorial tropes (troubadour, sonneteer, Don Quixote) that generate legend, we have read Berrigan as cosmophage, one who ingests everything and who confuses life and writing to a diamond degree. Yet, as I have demonstrated, Berrigan’s compact of life and writing is full of anxious fractures, and this glimpse at vulnerability has its own cloying effects. The sense that he may or may not be “getting away with it” exerts a charm all of its own. Berrigan shows a poet at risk daily in exemplary fashion. The textual remainders of O’Hara, Berrigan, and Forbes, incorporated in the collected poems and various homages, all seem bent on artfully reproducing the ethos, or phenomenal showing, of the human animals that they were and continue to be in phantasmatic form. The troubadour technologies of vida and razo are tricks of presence that are demanded by lovers of the poets and seem to respond to a desire for reports on the carnal dimensions of self-­mythologising, peppering the imagination with scenarios or something like rare “sightings.” How do the practices of self-mythologising in manipulating code extend to the rhetoric of the body and appeal to our subtle appreciation of tactility, sensuality, and ductility, that is, our animal intelligence? Joe LeSueur writes (in his introduction to the Selected Plays) that “Frank O’Hara is more alive now than in his lifetime” (xi), proving O’Hara’s efficacy as a daemon to interrupt or “burst forth” in the living. In the Homage we see a desire to preserve in art O’Hara’s beastliness: his poise, his grace, his magnetism as an animal, and his occasional monstrous

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turns when drunk.3 Lawrence Osgood gives homage to O’Hara’s snout as part of his “Frank’s Physique (a Selective Inventory)” in particular the way: Frank sometimes used it for firing small explosive snorts in the air. One of these snorts would start somewhere under the roof of his mouth to the back of that cavity and, passing through his nasal passages like an express train through a tunnel, would shoot out through his nostrils like a judgement bursting on the world. It was a thoroughly animal sound, and it seemed to clear his whole head as well as his sinuses, for it often heralded a remark of more than usual incisiveness and always was a signal that something was about to happen. When Frank snorted, ears pricked up. I’m convinced Frank never snorted on purpose or was even aware that he ever snorted; it was instinctive. (23)

O’Hara’s “instinctive” animal being pricks people to attention, and this is not to be apart from his lethal intellectual capacity. “One of these snorts” portends or is a charismatic smack—the transmission of something “unusually incisive” and “a signal that something was about to happen.” Quite a few contributors to the Homage comment on the startling profile or salience of the O’Hara nose, but only Osgood thinks to report on the poet’s “use of it” as an organ of punctuation, a ballistic discharge of sound that orders a situation (“when Frank snorted, ears pricked up”) that aligns with his brilliant capacities for making mythos as an animal. Frank’s snort is a signature move that is syntactical in its bodily guile, and occasionally one might hear it when reading his Collected as the poems rear up to deliver a deadly stroke. There are few human animals whose snort carries a charismatic smack. Perhaps one punctuates a poem like “Heroic Sculpture”: We join the animals not when we fuck      or shit not when tear falls

3  The poet noted as a distributor of dark charms: “O’Hara was not always tolerant of friends whose nerve failed them … [o]n rare occasions, drunk at some late hour, he would mount titanic and vituperative personal rages. He could instill misery and dread to the same extent that he habitually evoked affection and joy. Yet in the words of a young poet who knew him, ‘No matter what he did, he never lost that movie-star quality, in the best sense. He never seemed less than glamourous and heroic’” (Scheldahl 142).

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but when     staring into light     we think.             (CP 311)

True “beastliness” is thinking: a signature O’Hara provocation that is both hot and cold. The thinking here is happening not just in but as poetry. What poetry and the animal have in common is that they both provide a confrontation which puts the “nature” of the “human” into question, while maintaining a certain impenetrability; the creature of code stands aloof staring back at you, and you do and do not recognise yourself in it. In The Animal that Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida makes an analogy of the singularity or intransigence of one’s confrontation with a poem and with the animal, or one’s animality. He immediately moves on the shady affective dimensions of these moments, citing shame, involuntarity—being struck momentarily from the apparatus of fiction that enables us to identify with our identities. He writes: “[t]hinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There you have a thesis: it is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of. It is the difference between philosophical knowledge and poetic thinking” (ATA 7).4 O’Hara as a syntactical animal is alive on the page; the style of his nerve, his appetites, and the timing of his turns are trackable. In “Heroic Sculpture,” poetic thinking never leaves the body. We turn to this poem of O’Hara’s as a topos of undecidability. The “heroic sculpture” handles its blasphemy lightly, dismissing the scandal of casual obscenity (“not when we fuck”), stagey sentimentality (“nor when tear falls”), and the body’s messy and embarrassing (and pleasurable) capabilities, in favour of a scandal against philosophy: the most refined brutishness is in thinking. “Thinking” here is a reified activity, struck out of the flow of life and cast in the bronze of a heroic sculpture “staring into light.” The compass of affect is turning between the plangent and the sarcastic: the poem’s argument is not necessarily about thinking or not thinking, the animal or not animal: it shows poetry’s genius for movement confounding these categories. The satisfied argument is like a statue: transfixed. As soon as we have an answer, the argument is dead. “We join the animals/ not when”;  Derrida continues: “I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation of what I do, think, write, live, but, in fact, of everything, of the whole of history, culture, and socalled human society, at every level, macro- or microscopic” (The Animal 92). 4

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any enjoining is false: thought is mechanical and its logical movements are greased by the oily appreciation of its own conceits. The poem acts as a little creature: the bloody thing won’t sit still, won’t meet your gaze or accede capture to satisfy a static “idea.” Meaning, here, cannot be chased down, and thinking, though seemingly still—statuesque—is the human animal in hot pursuit. The animal O’Hara is a lively one from anecdote and a legendary one from literature by now, Schuyler admiring his “feline grace” (Homage 187), John Meyers seeing “an over-bred polo pony” (Homage 34), Alice Neel seeing the profile of a falcon (Homage 96). Peter Schjeldahl’s taxonomy of the O’Hara build and strut as “classically bantam” guided by “limpid blue eyes with a certain hypnotic charm” extending to a deeply accultured theatrics of the flesh: “[h]is every movement bespoke will and self-assurance, poise, and a kind of unmannered courtliness” (Homage 141). Frank was totemic to those who were around him, and the remarkable variety of beasts speaks of a personalised vision or a singularity that the poet demanded. His charm is bound up with his animal magnetism, and his life stands as a brilliant refining of what the human is or could be (Heraclitus’s ethos anthropos daemon). Kenneth Koch warned the young Bill Berkson that O’Hara would “probably become something of a germ in your life.”5 This germ succeeds in its living transmission still and continues to find new hosts glad to have themselves infected. O’Hara’s “professional fandom,” his appetite for coterie across time with the sense that no permission other than love is required, is a sort of turbo mechanism that increases in its potency as it continues to chew through generations that follow, tracked here through Berrigan and Forbes. The ambivalent O’Hara germ as infectious animal changes the organism which it inhabits, as much through its grand and campy permissions in casual myth-making as its diabolical range of exemplary moves: syntactical, rhetorical, musical, and scatalogical. There is a wildness to the raconteur-ship of O’Hara, Berrigan, and Forbes; though their styles of address are markedly different, they are rooted in the fortified liquors of the mythopoeic, where events, people, and talk are charged into the stuff of myth. Answering Claire McMahon’s suggestion that O’Hara’s trickster handling of anecdote is a trait of “Irishness,” Berkson recounts:

5

 A Frank O’Hara Notebook. Bill Berkson. NP.

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I remember him tell a story that I said or someone said, particularly if it was me and I realize it wasn’t what I’d said, but he made it sound great … that’s like directing a memory or your construction of the event to a, well, you could say, a heightened place. You say, ‘It’s Irish.’ It is Irish. It’s ‘putting the Irish on’. (Berkson in McMahon 211)

O’Hara is an amplifier of talk; he increases the glamour of the real by putting the charm on it, the gift of the blaguer here designated as “putting the Irish on.” Part of O’Hara’s being as a poet is to harvest anecdotes out of the day, to foment the fabulous from the mundane, not recounting experience only but making an experience of the recounting. Who has this power to re-enchant the world or, as Berkson suggests, to “make things and people sacred”? O’Hara is the bomb: an explosive event to bring back authority to the person through the power to distribute charms and curses, to make living mythos glow, charging episodes as a wild animal that has courted and been “infected” by his ancestral daemons as part of his being a poet. What speckles the bon vivant is spores of the saturnine, and Berkson notes that these stories are almost elegies for little bits of wit heard earlier, of what should have been great, and almost was, so will be in Frank’s telling. There is something here in O’Hara’s method of performative verve to hold at bay if not slay tedium, the energy of which is preserved in the poem “Animals”: Have you forgotten what we were like then when we were still first rate and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth it’s no use worrying about Time but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves ……………………………………………. I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days.                       (CP 30)

In its blithe dismissal of time, and therefore death, art pretends to triumph through this “trick … up the sleeve.” It goads us into thinking of the day as a well-dressed carcass “fat with an apple in its mouth” for our delectation, but in the happy greed and speed of youth the “whole pasture” only looks like our meal. What is nourishing is a delusion, a vista

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which is known to have the texture of a private mythos: a life with less regulation (no speedometers), with the innocence and perceived purity of penury (managing cocktails out of ice and water). Having the air of an ode, the poem plays with presence in absence and absence in presence, celebrating the fracture in love with the other and with other, earlier, versions of oneself. O’Hara was only 24 when he wrote it, perhaps knowing he was enjoying a precocious middle age. It has the charm of longing which involves the melancholy charm of separation; it consoles as it laments. It is written for a friend, but the only person who can take the place of that friend is you. Formally restrained, this “song” has the structure of a short waltz, that seems to say “move with me” and “I like to recall moving with you.” For all the wistful charm of this embrace, the poem still pricks with an admonition: “Have you forgotten…?” This is the animal who walks on the balls of his feet, who fumes, who says “the slightest loss of attention spells death.” In the dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze declares: If someone were to ask me what it means to be an animal, I would answer: it’s “l’être aux aguets”, the being on the lookout. It’s a being fundamentally on the lookout. Parnet: Like the writer? Deleuze: The writer, well, yes, on the lookout, the philosopher, on the lookout, obviously, we are on the lookout. For me, you see, the ears of the animal: it does nothing without being on the lookout, it’s never relaxed, an animal. It’s eating, [yet] has to be on the lookout to see if something is happening behind its back, on either side, etc. It’s terrible, this existence “aux aguets.”6

O’Hara occupies this figure of the writer as animal perched vigilantly on the present, who is not allowed to slide into a “vat of longing and suffocate in its suet,” whose making mythos is the nervously engaged, vital, and also terrifying business of making territory, negotiating alternative structures of kinship (Shaw 114), and doing justice to the stupefying “grace to be born/ and live as variously as possible” which reads as the limit request of this creature’s daemon. Frank O’Hara is a generative force, making not just poems but poets in turn. Though they crossed paths and moved in the same psychographic 6  https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/lectures/en/1-ABCMsRevised-­Notes%2,002,052,020.pdf.

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territory, the Frank O’Hara that Ted Berrigan loves is the warrior-like being of the poems that matches their ethos and their daemon with immaculate integrity, showing how a total response to life (juste) is possible. Berrigan was turned on to becoming “Ted Berrigan” by the style of O’Hara as charm converter, mixing the Romantics and the modernists with an American vernacular to have unco effect on Berrigan’s invention of himself as one who makes mythos: [W]hen I read more of his [Frank O’Hara’s] poems, they were poems where he wrote just as elaborate and literary language as just about any poet that I’ve read. But there were so many poems by Frank where he spoke and I saw that I spoke that way too. He was this Irishman, born in Baltimore and brought up in New England. And I was this Irishman brought up in New England and we both spoke the same way, and I saw that I could just sit down and write … Frank opened all the doors for me. (Talking 29)

Once Ted taps into the source of charis, of Grace, he becomes the thing. Frank’s life and work are revelatory—the vocabulary of hagiography here is appropriate. Ted’s burden is to take the charismatic transmission and show how to live it, to continue day to day, writing poems, being the poet. In A Frank O’Hara Notebook, Bill Berkson says with charming simplicity: “Frank was Easter, Ted, Easter Monday” (n.pag.). An anonymous reviewer of his Collected tells us “Berrigan was a notoriously charismatic reader, teacher and participant in the community that developed around the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church; his persona has been cited as often as his poems. This book closes the gap once and for all.”7 The “notoriously charismatic” must be a charlatan performing a seduction, a ruse, a trick. Charisma alone in its operation, like glamour or prestige, could be real for the sceptic in the way of a passing fever. It was always a part of Berrigan’s self-initiation into mythopoesis, to work the carnal dimensions of selfmythologising, circling back to the social erotics of the troubadours, where the mesmerising animal, as distributor of light and dark charms, is absolutely a part of the work. The Naropa University Archives and PennSound now hold an impressive selection of Ted Berrigan talking, reading, clowning, pontificating, and we get to hear his high riding tremuloso at length, as one desires. Like other phenomenal aspects of being a poet, Berrigan impishly comments  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-520-23986-9.

7

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upon the qualities of his talking and reading voice, promising of a particular recited poem: “I can read it with my famous Berrigan virtuoso quaver … all I have to do is make myself nervous … take more pills.” This jittery style of talk is peculiar: it sounds like someone making an emotional effort not just to read but to be the work, to get behind it, to risk it, and we are made aware that this is a type of labour and that the “immortal tape recorder” is always running (Forbes CP 48). One gets the sense that his audience is bigger than the auditorium he is reading to, going into earth’s memorial past and casting himself into the memorial future in what we might call mythical time. His display of power and finesse, of “awkward grace,” is not just for the living, and it is this awareness that seems to be replete with a full showing, because the stakes are absolute. The poet charms the world with their voice. No other human pursuit has managed to displace poetry as the ultimate technology of enchantment, of putting the charm on the world. Along with its more abstract physical being—music, mathematics, architecture, image—poetry’s fleshy being—fine voice, fine shank, finer posture, fine movement—begins with Orpheus, whose working of glamour, of grammyre, of song out of the body, can literally bend the world and make it turn to him and be altered or adulterated. The poetry, the poet, the glamour all co-exist as charm and charmer. The carnal theatre of performing mythos, of the self and of the group, continues in the invention of the courtly traditions of the troubadours and is transmitted through the later twentieth century to the present by the poets presented here as a tradition of “charismatic animals.” They show us new ways to constitute the self as an art and to continue with guile practices of self-mythologising, including the conscious distribution of dark and light charms, and an awareness of being a hauntologue, a compendium of the living and the dead that speak through us, whose eventual uncanny gift is the feeling that we ourselves are already ancestors in the making.

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Index1

A Achilles, 134–135 Adorno, Theodor, 186, 205, 214, 258 Agamben, Giorgio, 19, 46, 114, 134, 175, 195, 229, 233 Alighieri, Dante, 62 Anderson, Benedict, 13–14 Animal, poet as, 2, 8, 10, 11, 17, 34, 77, 270, 278, 282–283 glamour, 253, 262, 266 magnetism, 116, 278, 281 prestige, 258, 262, 265, 272 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 31n1, 35, 35n5, 37, 41–43, 45–46, 51, 57, 74n24, 272 Apotropaic, 15, 18, 101, 120, 139, 201 Aratus, 228–233 Areté, 133, 133n5 Aristotle, 153

Armstrong, Gillian, 220–222 Arnold, Benedict, 139 Ashbery, John, 24, 26, 35, 37, 44, 44n14, 62, 94n4, 136, 154–155, 259, 272 Auden, W. H., 226 Aura, 34, 34n4, 56, 137, 142, 170, 183, 186, 193, 202, 238, 251, 276 B Barg, Barbara, 180 Barthes, Roland, 235–237 Bataille, Georges, 45, 234 Baudelaire, Charles, 37, 107, 264 Baudrillard, Jean, 243 Beckett, Samuel, 60, 61 Behan, Brendan, 155 Benjamin, Walter, 11–12, 34n4, 262

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Hose, The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94841-2

299

300 

INDEX

Berkson, Bill, 35, 86, 112 “Homage to Frank O’Hara,” 112–113, 124, 168, 184–187, 189, 189n12, 191–199, 281–282 Bernstein, Charles, 152–153, 161, 183–184, 204 Berrigan, Sandy, 134n6 Berrigan, Ted, 8, 22, 24–28, 127–207, 209, 226–228, 240, 241, 259, 272, 276–278, 281, 284–285 “Clear the Range,” 141 “Don Quixote & Sancho Panza,” 203 “Frank O’Hara,” 167 “From a Secret Journal,” 137 “LXIII,” 13 “LXVI,” 157 “LXVIII,” 157 “LXXXII,” 154–155 “LXXXV,” 158 “LXXXVIII-‘for Chris’”, 158–159 and myths of America, 139–149 “Red Shift,” 148–149, 190 “Sonnet LX,” 131–135 “Sweet Vocations,” 156–157 “Tambourine Life,” 144 “XXIII,” 141 “XXX,” 153 “XXXIII,” 150 “XXXIV,” 151 “XXXV,” 152 “XXXVI,” 157 Bersani, Leo, 138, 160 Blackburn, Paul, 170 Blake, William, 215 Bloch, Ernst, 205, 216 Bloom, Harold, 37, 45, 257 Bolton, Ken, 230, 241, 271, 273 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 102n8, 103, 163, 163n1, 206 Borges, Jorge Luis, 15–16, 129, 130 Bourdieu, Pierre, 165

Boym, Svetlana, 14, 15n5, 32–33 Brainard, Joe, 118–119, 137, 199 Brawne, Fanny, 181n9 Brennan, Christopher, 259 Breslin, James, 36, 77, 100, 102 Brossard, Olivier, 70–71 Brown, Pam, 22 Burroughs, William, 135–136 Butt, Garry, 92, 105 Byron, George Gordon Lord, 8, 17–20, 26, 48–50, 102n8, 162–163, 163n1, 206, 213, 275–276 C Cage, John, 135, 136, 149, 194 Capitalism, spirit of, 28, 252–253, 255, 265–266, 271 Carson, Anne, 5 Cassirer, Ernst, 91 Catullus, 28, 240, 241, 249 Céline, Louis Ferdinand, 140 Cendrars, Blaise, 140 Cervantes, Miguel de, 204 Charisma, 3, 6, 11–13, 271, 276 charismatic animals, 255, 275, 285 charismatic text, 6, 9, 24–25, 61, 112, 264, 265n7 Charm, 1, 2, 7–9, 11, 16, 18–24, 26, 28, 56, 59, 74, 122, 170, 179, 213, 241, 254, 272, 276–278 as carmen (song), 1 charmed relics/articles, 8, 188, 191, 193, 200 dark charms, 6, 28, 56, 58–59, 78, 106, 114–115, 279n3, 284 and mythopoiesis, 21, 32, 69, 190, 196 poem as, 254, 259, 260, 277 as ritual act, 1, 188–191 Chaytor, H J., 243–244 Chiasson, Dan, 33n3, 118

 INDEX 

Cixous, Hélène, 178 Clarke, Bruce, 88 Clark, Tom, 128, 148–149, 168 Clune, Michael, 100, 104 Cochran, Peter, 48 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 38, 40, 51, 90n2, 132 Collaboration, 92 Community, 8 Constitutional poetics, 8, 16–17 Corbett, William, 94n4 Crane, Hart, 34, 72 D Daemon, 20, 87–90, 95, 97, 100, 107, 117–125, 122n13, 158, 170, 198, 213, 241, 248, 254, 255, 259, 264, 270–272, 276, 278 Dark matter, 255 Davidson, Michael, 191, 195, 196 Davila, Juan, 226 Davis, Colin, 125 Dean, James, 23 De Berg, Hazel, 252n1 de Kooning, Elaine, 199 de Kooning, Willem, 33–35, 103, 139 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 54, 80–81, 145n10, 218n4, 283 de Man, Paul, 74 Derrida, Jacques, Spectres, 10, 73–74, 125, 194, 210, 258, 280 Desnos, Robert, “Night of the Loveless Nights,” 49 Dever, Maryanne, 191 Diggory, Terrence, 76n25, 107 Docherty, Thomas, 269n10 Docx, Edward, 187–188 Domestico, Anthony, 269 Donatus, Aelius, 72n23 Done, Ken, 263

301

Don Quixote, 168, 202, 204–206, 213, 243 Dubris, Maggie, 180 Ducasse, Isidore, 160 Duchamp, Marcel, 128, 135–136 Durand, Marcella, 180–181, 180n8 Duwell, Martin, 217 E Egan, Margareta, 170–171 Elmslie, Kenward, 122 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 148 Enchantment/re-enchantment, 1, 2, 11–12, 22, 32, 76, 253 Engels, Friedrich, 216 Epstein, Andrew, 40, 93, 97n7 Ethos anthropos daemon, 87, 90n1, 254, 271, 281 Evans, Steve, 58n16, 124n14 F Falco, Raphael, 25 Farrell, Michael, 261 Feldman, Alan, 72 Feldman, Morton, 31n2, 52 Filreis, Al, 141 Fite, David, 232 Forbes, John, 8, 13, 26–29, 209 “Anti-Romantic,” 246–247, 260 “Anzac Day,” 223–224 “Biographia Litteraria,” 267–268 “Europe, Endless,” 235–238 “Lessons for Young Poets,” 241 “Love Poem,” 242 “Monkey’s Pride,” 265 “Ode: inspired by ‘The Last Outlaw’a TV mini-series ‘brought to you by the Australian Mining Industry’”, 219–222

302 

INDEX

Forbes, John (cont.) “Ode to Karl Marx,” 216 and O’Hara, 209–249, 251–275, 277 “Phaenomena,” 227–235 “Sydney Harbour Considered as a Matisse,” 262–263 “To the Bobbydazzlers,” 210–212 “troubadour,” 237–241 Ford, Mark, 23 Foucault, Michel, 70, 198, 210 Franklin, Benjamin, 139 Fraser, Veronica M., 173, 176 Frederick II, King of Prussia, 206 Freilicher, Jane, 60, 118 Freud, Sigmund, 45 Frye, Northrop, 17 Futurism, 55 G Gallup, Dick, 139, 156 Garber, Frederick, 34 Garbo, Greta, 191 Gare, Aaron, 130 Gaunt, Simon, 7 Gilmore, Mary, 221–222 Ginsberg, Allen, 96 Glamour, 3, 14, 34n4, 38, 57, 111, 112, 157, 159, 169, 174, 184, 193, 199, 212, 220, 241, 251–253, 262–264, 262n6, 266, 269, 272–273, 276, 279n3, 282, 284–285 Glueck, Grace, 107 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 89–90 Goldin, Frederick, 174, 176 Gooch, Brad, 33n3, 122n13 Goodman, Paul, 111 Graham, Peter, 19

Grandmaster Flash, 258 Graves, Peter, 222 Greenblatt, Stephen, 33 Guattari, Félix, 218n4 Guest, Barbara, 24, 114–115, 119 H Harrison-Ford, Carl, 271 Hartigan, Grace, 74, 104, 275 Hauntologue, 10, 20, 91, 125, 160, 189–190, 241, 259, 276, 285 Hawkins, Ralph, 162 Hayden, Bill, 222 Hayes, Ira, 154 Hejinian, Lyn, 136n7, 169n2 Hektor, 134–135 Hell, Richard, 168, 201–204 Henry, Brian, 216 Henry, Tim, 161 Heraclitus, 20, 40, 87–88, 90n1, 254n2, 255, 281 Herd, David, 24 Hofmann, Hans, 155 Homer, 133 Hopkins, Gerard Manly, 259, 269 Horn, Eva, 12–13, 125 Hunter, Sam, 92 I Indyk, Ivor, 216 J Jackson, MacDonald P., 129n2 Jaeger, C. Stephen, 12–13, 22, 121, 265n7, 273 Jarry, Alfred, “Ubu Roi,” 132n3, 156 Johnson, Lonnie, 154, 155

 INDEX 

K Kane, Daniel, 180 Katz, Alex, 85–86, 88, 119, 267 Kauffman, Linda, 237 Kay, Sarah, 9, 182 Keats, John, 31, 136–138, 156, 181n9, 213 Kelly, Ned, 282 Klee, Paul, 42 Kline, Franz, 139 Koch, Kenneth, 24, 55n15, 62, 111, 154–155, 272, 281 Koh, Dong-Yeon, 103 Kraut, Rochelle, 173, 177–178, 180–182, 180n8 Kristeva, Julia, 65, 247 L Lacan, Jacques, 203 Ladkin, Sam, 65, 74, 77–78 Lang, Rose, 251 Lautréamont, Comte de, 160 Lawson, Henry, 222 Leites, Edmund, 118 Leprechaun, 168, 185, 189, 201 Le Roman de la Rose, 181 LeSueur, Joe, 79, 81, 92, 111, 118, 278 Leutze, Emanuel, 100–102 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 229 Lewis, Cassie, 225, 235 Lewis, Joel, 206 Lingis, Alphonso, 197 Liszt, Franz, 51 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 34 Lydiard, Alison, 251 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 253, 266–267, 269n10

303

M Mad Men, 33, 35 Madrigal, 20, 31–32, 50, 60–61 Maldoror, 160 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 37 Marcus, J.S., 117 Marinetti, Filipo Tommaso, 42 Marshall, J.H., 10 Marx, Karl, 11, 216, 239, 252, 257–258, 266 Matisse, Henri, 262–263, 266 Mauté, Mathilde, 107–109 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 14, 15n5, 20, 26, 37, 37n8, 42, 88, 213, 272 McCarthy, Bridie, 245 McClary, Susan, 32 Mead, Philip, 29, 247 Medusa, 65, 76, 236 Melville, Herman, 34 Meyers, John, 108 Michaux, Henri, 140 Miller, Henry, 154–155 Milne, Drew, 86 Moby Dick, 151–152 Monroe, Marylin, 156 Moorhouse, Frank, 269 Morris, Megan, 104, 217, 221, 258 Murphy, Christine, 156, 159n15 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), 35, 112 Myles, Eileen, 180, 189, 189n11 Myth, and desire, 5, 36 embodied, 2, 16, 35, 121, 185 mythology of the poet, 8, 14, 41, 199 of New York, 20, 34–35, 40, 54–55, 59, 127, 149 personal mythology, 15, 15n5, 17, 18, 35, 69, 72, 97, 100, 146, 157, 165, 235–236, 248

304 

INDEX

N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 2, 105 Narcissus, 183 Neel, Alice, 117–118, 281 Ngai, Sian, 22n8 Nicholls, Angus, 87 Nichols, Stephen G., 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 20, 41, 41n12, 82, 210, 267 Norling, Lisa, 151n12 Notley, Alice, 128n1, 138, 149, 153, 159n15, 172–173, 180, 203, 204n19

and Berrigan, 133–134, 141, 155, 158–159, 163, 182, 194, 199–201, 200n18, 206, 276–277, 281–282 “Grand Central Station,” 113 “Heroic Sculpture,” 109, 279–281 “How Roses Get Black,” 96 “In Memory of My Feelings,” 64–80 “Meditations in an Emergency,” 46 “Memorial Day 1950,” 41–45 “Naphtha,” 56 and New York, 34–35 “Personal Poem,” 200 “Poem (I ran through the snow like a young Czarevitch)”, 39–40 and self-mythologising, 32–57, 93–97, 111 “Stones,” 105–111 “Those Who Are Dreaming, A Play About St. Paul,” 47 Oklahoma, 142, 146–148, 186 Olsen, Redell, 75–76 Olson, Charles, 69–70 Orpheus, 3–6 Osgood, Lawrence, 112, 120, 123, 279 Ovid, 130

O Oakley, Barry, 254 O’Connell, Shaun, 20 O’Connor, Mark, 210, 253 Odysseus, 13, 265 Oedipus Rex, 5, 81, 82, 85, 100 O’Hara, Frank, 8, 15n5, 19–28, 31–125 “Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul,” 59–60 “Animals,” 282–283 “Autobiographia Literaria,” 38

P Padgett, Ron, 121–123, 122n13, 168, 272 Palatella, Jon, 133, 133n4 Parnet, Claire, 283 Pascoe, Judith, 163n1 Pasternak, Boris, 39, 40, 42, 88, 110, 125, 213, 277 Patell, Cyrus R.K., 34 Peck, Gregory, 134n6 Pennsound, 284 Peraino, Judith, 182, 191

Mythologising selves in community, 2, 14, 20, 35, 55, 86, 91, 104, 112–125, 186–192, 276–277 Mythopoetics of nation, 2, 14, 19, 26–29, 34, 66, 67, 70, 76–80, 97, 100, 139–149, 153–155, 212–213, 219–226, 276–277 Mythopoetics, of self, 2, 8, 17, 18, 23–25, 32, 33, 48, 62–63, 69, 74, 89, 94, 100, 111, 153, 159, 185–186, 197, 213–214, 223, 276–278

 INDEX 

Perloff, Marjorie, 31n1, 34–35, 35n6, 63n18, 80–81, 106 Pessoa, Fernando, 73 Petrarch, 138, 180 Phantasm/phantasmatic/ phantasmagoria, 14, 38, 73, 80, 98, 117, 122, 138, 162, 168, 174–175, 185, 192, 194–198, 205 Picasso, Pablo, 42, 45, 107 Poe, Elizabeth, 169n3 Poetry Project (St. Marks), 178n6, 179–180, 240, 284 Pollock, Jackson, 23, 103, 139 Porter, Peter, 270–271 Possession, 10, 12, 117, 257 Pound, Ezra, 10–11, 169, 174–175, 179 Pritkin, Renny, 140, 189 Prokofiev, Sergei, 39 Proust, Marcel, 120, 121 Pushkin, Alexander, 40 R Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 31, 48–52, 88, 272 Rancière, Jacques, 202–203 Rembrandt, 49 “The Polish Rider,” 100 Reverdy, Pierre, 37, 53, 60, 213 Richter, Gerhard, 68n21 Ricoeur, Paul, 146 Rifkin, Libby, 135, 137, 154, 158, 159, 161, 164–166, 183 Rimbaud, Arthur, 15n5, 37, 40, 64, 88, 107–109, 140, 155, 213, 272 Rivers, Larry, 91–105 “Double Portrait of Frank O’Hara,” 97 “Stones,” 105–110 “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” 99–103, 118

305

Robinson, Kit, 136n7 Robinson, Peter, 149 Rodefer, Stephen, 194n15 Rogers, Will, 146 Rorty, Richard, 55 Rorum, Ned, 123 Rosenbaum, Susan, 54 Rosenberg, Harold, 97n7 Rosenthal, Bob, 180 Russia, 38 Ryan, Gig, 238, 270 S Saint Paul, 11 Salome, 96 Sappho, 5–6 Savage, Tom, 164 Scarborough, Milton, 232 Schjeldahl, Peter, 92, 96, 281 Schneeman, George, 184, 186, 189, 189n12, 191–193, 198 Schuyler, James, 24, 37, 93–94, 94n4, 119–120, 122n13, 281 Scriabin, Alexander, 51 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky Segal, Charles, 3–6, 277 Selby, Nick, 119, 148, 150, 154, 179n7 Self-mythologising, 8, 17, 19, 24–25, 32, 36, 50, 54, 55, 57, 70, 76, 77, 79, 81–82, 89, 94, 100, 111, 138, 149, 161–162, 173–184, 190–191, 200–201, 206, 213, 223, 235, 240–241, 248, 267, 276–278 Selinger, Eric, 141, 159, 205 Shakespeare, William, 129–130, 137–138, 180, 213 Shapiro, David, 115, 158 Shattuck, Roger, 35 Shaw, Lytle, 16, 20–21, 21n7, 23, 67, 71, 74, 94, 105, 113

306 

INDEX

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 19, 256–257, 272 Signature, the, 191, 193–194, 200n18, 202, 229, 233–234, 247 Simondon, Gilbert, 218n4 Slotkin, Richard, 40 Smith, David, 79 Smith, Hazel, 23, 63n17, 104 Smith, Patti, 140 Soderholm, James, 276 Sontag, Susan, 36n7 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 181 Sprezzatura, 58, 176, 176n4 Stanton, Johnny, 180 Stein, Gertrude, 41, 107, 139 Stevens, Wallace, 17 Stoneley, Peter, 56, 200 Stravinsky, Igor, 95 T Talisman, 184 Thompson, James R., 17 Timmens, Susie, 180 Tolstoy, Leo, 100 Tomasevskij, Boris, 162, 168, 170, 183, 202 Troubadour, 6–8, 10, 168–180, 210, 238–241 canso, 7, 173 at court, 6, 179, 207, 240, 242 erotics, 7, 182, 234, 237 performance of love, 5–7, 176–183, 226–233 sirventes, 7, 176–177, 246, 265 vida and razo, 7, 9–10, 168–171, 174–175, 181, 183, 189, 193–194, 198, 202–203, 207, 233, 241, 278 warrior culture, 244–245, 248–249

Twombly, Cy, 265 Tzara, Tristan, 136 V Valery, Paul, 73, 118, 230 Vendler, Helen, 63n18 Verlaine, Paul, 107–109 Vico, Giambattista, 14 Vidal, Peire, 169–177, 179, 181, 194, 213, 243 Villon, Francois, 241 Vincent, Howard P., 151 Volk, Katharina, 229, 232 W Wakeling, Corey, 213n2 Waldman, Anne, 168, 199 Ward, Geoff, 61, 80 Warhol, Andy, 136 Washington, George, 99–104, 104n9, 112, 118 Weber, Max, 11, 25, 252–253 Weiners, John, 114 Whiteley, Brett, 262 Whitman, Walt, 15–16, 20, 37, 62–63, 71, 88, 139, 142–143, 148, 149, 189 Wilkinson, John, 64, 155, 184, 198 William IX, Duke of Aquitane, 244 Williams, William Carlos, 37 Wilson, Frances, 18 Wodehouse, Richard, 136 Wolf, Hans Georg, 73 Y Yeats, William Butler, 90n2, 194–196