Frank O’Hara’s "In Memory of My Feelings"
Valery Oisteanu
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), the legendary New York poet and "the Last Bohemian," lived a short life, but he managed to produce an amazing body of work in just 14 years of public creativity (1952-1966), and he remains one of the most important "poets among painters" of his time and a major influence on several generations of writers and artists.
Born in Baltimore, O’Hara originally trained to be a pianist, but as a Harvard undergraduate he changed his focus to poetry. He moved to New York in 1951 and became deeply involved with the art world there. He worked at the front desk and the bookstore of The Museum of Modern Art until 1953, when he became an editorial associate at Art News. He returned to MoMA in 1955 as an assistant in the International Program and in 1960 became Assistant (later, Associate) Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture.
Existentially surreal at all times, O’Hara’s writings are sophisticated in their use of metaphor, vernacular yet lyrical, gregarious, passionate, incisive, uncompromising. Many of his poems were written instantaneously, often during his lunch breaks at MoMA (see Lunch Poems, City Lights, 1964). O’Hara believed that poetry should be created in a spur of the moment, with personal style, spontaneity, and in a particular voice with private references. In an essay entitled "Personism: A Manifesto," he declared, "Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them." Because of this belief, much of his verse was composed in the spare moments, while eating a sandwich or walking the streets with Larry Rivers or Jasper Johns. Presumably he experienced bouts of "automatism" in its surreal form and recorded it as he saw it. He also was somewhat careless with his poems, often stuffing them into his pockets or shelving them alongside his groceries. Many poems were left around his apartment or sent in letters to friends.
From 1955 to 1966, via exhibits at MoMA, O’Hara gave the public its first or early exposure to his large circle of abstract-expressionist and pop-artist friends: Elaine and William de Kooning, Philip Guston, Marisol, Bob Raushenberg, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Niki de Saint Phalle, etc. Besides organizing a series of important exhibitions, he wrote notable art monographs on the works of Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, among 26 other American artists. This was an exciting time, when art and poetry were still entwined in the scene, taking place at the Cedar Tavern, in the cafés of Greenwich Village and in the dusty bookshops downtown.
O’Hara’s legacy is immense–there are some 145,000 entries on Google for just one of his poems, "In Memory of My Feelings." This title was "homage-appropriated" multiple times as a title for a painting by Jasper Johns and for a metal sculpture by Lutz Bucher (1990), as well as for myriad books, musical compositions and art exhibitions–including many images of the writer himself. As Barbara Solomon noted in the New York Times, "O’Hara posed more often than George Washington."
In 1967, a year after his accidental death on Fire Island, MoMA commissioned Bill Berkson to edit a selection of O’Hara’s poetry to be illustrated by 30 famous artists, many of them close friends of the late writer. The resulting book, In Memory of My Feelings, became an instant collector’s item in a limited edition of 2,500, filled with original art, drawings, watercolors and pop-cartoons.
During the recent renovation of the museum, a forgotten closet was unearthed, and inside–by chance–was discovered the original folios created for the book, preserved in mint condition. That triggered the effort to re-publish it in a conventional bound edition and with a newly designed paper jacket (by Jasper Johns) instead of a slipcase. This version in hard cover is otherwise an exact facsimile of the original.
The book is a reader’s dream. Each poem interacts with art to create a visual narrative, as in "A Step Away from Them," which recreates the kind of walk through New York City that O’Hara used to enjoy with Robert Rauschenberg, who paints a theater set on top of Frank’s poem about Time Square, adding his own words, such as "One Way" on a street sign, while next to the word "Bullfight" are some black men playing cards, or the back of a nude opposite the word "Taxi," echoing O’Hara’s lines, "one walks past nude magazines and posters for Bullfight." For "Poem V (F) W," Jane Freilicher added a portrait pencil drawing of O’Hara reading next to a window. Lee Krasner dripped India ink onto the text in dramatic blood-like splatter for "Like a chemical dropped on paper."
As poet Kenneth Koch summarized about O’Hara’s originality, "It is different in its music and its language, and in its conception of the relation of poetry to the rest of life, it is a poetry which has already changed poets and artists, and which promises to go on moving and changing them for a long time to come."
