Brian Frank O’Hara Nude with Boots:

Glavey Queer Ekphrasis and the Statuesque Poet

you were made in the image of God

I was not
I was made in the image of a sissy
  truck-driver
—Frank O’Hara, “Naphtha”

​I
n the fall of 1999, the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Los Angeles organized an exhibition of postwar American art
focused around the influence of the poet and curator Frank O’Hara.
The centerpiece of the exhibition and of the companion volume, In
Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art, is an impres-
sive assembly of representations of O’Hara painted, sculpted, or photo-
graphed by many of the most influential artists of the period.1 These
artworks testify to the power of the charismatic personality that, for
better or worse, has shaped the reception of O’Hara’s poems since his
death in 1966. One famous photograph renders the O’Hara persona
especially well. Taken in January 1960 by Fred McDarrah, it captures
a moment of motion, presenting O’Hara caught in mid-stride, stepping
through the revolving door of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)
(see fig. 1). Behind him, “the heavenly glass doors” fuse the reflected
geometry of the street with a glimpse into the lobby of the museum
where he worked for the last fifteen years of his life.2 The photograph
elegantly summarizes O’Hara’s reputation as the postmodern poet of
restless mobility, spinning out odes and elegies in the odd moment of
his lunch break, always open to the life of the city around him and to
the works of art that were his passion.3

American Literature, Volume 79, Number 4, December 2007

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2007-039  © 2007 by Duke University Press
782  American Literature

Figure 1  “Frank O’Hara at the Museum of Modern Art.” Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah.
30 January 1960. © Fred W. McDarrah.

But if this photograph represents the appeal of the mobile poet, a sec-
ond one taken the same day—perhaps just moments later—presents a
different persona. Outside in the sculpture garden at MOMA, O’Hara
stands beside the Rodin statue “St. John the Baptist Preaching,” aping
the sculpture with a smile on his face and a cigarette in his hand (see
fig. 2). This lesser-known image reveals an important irony behind
O’Hara’s perambulatory reputation, an irony highlighted not only by
the other portraits that fill In Memory of My Feelings but also by the
mere fact that there are enough portraits to fill a book and exhibition
in the first place. As his biographer Brad Gooch has noted, O’Hara is
almost certainly the subject of more portraits than any other Ameri-
can poet of the twentieth century.4 Despite his reputation for postmod-
 Frank O’Hara and Queer Ekphrasis  783

Figure 2  “Frank O’Hara in the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden.” Photograph by Fred
W. McDarrah. 30 January 1960. © Fred W. McDarrah.

ern restlessness, O’Hara thus spent a great deal of time standing per-
fectly still, striking a pose while his likeness was rendered in plaster
and paint.
The aesthetic of flurry and flux suggested by the revolving-door
photo has been central to understandings of O’Hara both as a major
postmodernist and as an important gay poet who deflated the high
seriousness of high modernism with the subversive flightiness of his
camp sensibility.5 According to this account, the power of his work
stems from the authority of his voice rather than the closed perfection
of the verbal artifact. But to fully understand O’Hara’s accomplish-
784  American Literature

ment, it is also important to attend to the statuesque O’Hara, the poet

pausing before the eye of the spectator, aware of his body on display.
This image of the poet is no less queer: his embrace of visibility is
an important revision of a normative notion of masculinity for which
homoerotic representations of the male body are unthinkable.
The rapid changes underway in postwar America brought with them
widespread anxieties about masculinity, anxieties embodied with par-
ticular force in the swaggering machismo of the abstract expression-
ists.6 As Michael Leja notes, the aura of heroic autonomy associated
with figures such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning served
as “a crucial component of Cold War national identity, differentiating
the nation politically and culturally from a Europe portrayed as weak
and effeminate.”7 Action painting exemplified the power and sponta-
neity of this artistic masculinity central to the politics of American
art, an understanding of the artist directly at odds with O’Hara’s self-
display. Rather than associate this embrace of visibility with femini-
zation, however, O’Hara created a homoerotic masculinity endowed
with the value and authority of modernist art. The painter Nell Blaine
explains, “Frank was the cock of the walk. . . . He didn’t mind strip-
ping and posing for us,” emphasizing not only O’Hara’s vanity but a
cockiness not far removed in its own way from that of a Pollock or a de
Kooning.8
O’Hara’s sense of the complex dynamics of this cocky self-display
is just as rich as his grasp of the ironies that constitute his poetic
voice. His experiments with words and images reveal a savvy under-
standing of the political and psychological power of visibility. Like
Gertrude Stein, whom he admired, O’Hara was energized to write by
sitting for portraits. He expresses the potential allure of being under
observation with characteristic humor in the callipygian ars poetica,
for instance, of “Personism”: “As 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.”9 But this association of poetic form with erotic self-
display is not only a laughing matter. Jonathan D. Katz has described
the 1950s as “arguably the single most actively homophobic decade in
American history,” noting that “queers who hoped to survive it had to
engage in a constant negotiation with the danger of self-disclosure.”10
With homosexuality treated not only as a sickness but as a threat to
national security, O’Hara’s attempts to find homoerotic images of the
 Frank O’Hara and Queer Ekphrasis  785

male body were important acts of self-fashioning and resistance.11 At

the same time, his poems display a prescient sense of the way a poli-
tics of visibility can become implicated in surveillance and fetishism.
“In this matter of the visible,” Jacques Lacan warns, “everything is a
trap.”12
The trap of the visible is the subject of one of O’Hara’s most impor-
tant works, the beautiful self-elegy “In Memory of My Feelings,”
which mourns the loss incurred when the poet’s desires are trans-
formed into art:
I have forgotten my loves, and chiefly that one, the cancerous
statue which my body could no longer contain,
against my will
against my love
become art (257)
O’Hara is fascinated by the malignant power of art to preserve desires
through homicide. And yet time and again he courts this power, identi-
fying with the aura of the objet d’art even as he meditates on the alien-
ation such identifications entail. His investigation of this dichotomy
belongs to the postwar American context alongside other figures such
as John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, all of whom
push the limits of silence and visibility in response to what Katz has
called the “compulsory Cold War closet,” attempting to negotiate
between self-preservation and self-disclosure.13
O’Hara’s explorations of the eros of portraiture perhaps have the
most in common with the work of Andy Warhol.14 Jonathan Flatley
has shown that Warhol recognized the legitimizing power and allure
of visibility even as he “saw that the poetics of publicity were also
those of mourning. To become public or feel public was in many ways
to acquire the sort of distance from oneself that comes with imagin-
ing oneself dead.”15 For Flatley, Warhol’s work should be understood
under the sign of prosopopoeia, a trope that gives voice to what is
absent, making it speak as though present. Paul de Man’s influential
discussion of prosopopoeia, which he defines as “the fiction of a voice-
from-beyond the grave,” emphasizes the imbrication of desire and
mourning that characterizes one’s attempt to have a public self.16 The
symmetry of the trope conjures the anxiety that in making the dead
image speak, the speaker will be struck dead— not only “silent, which
implies the possible manifestation of sound at our own will, but silent
786  American Literature

as a picture, that is to say, eternally deprived of voice and condemned

to muteness.”17 For O’Hara, as for Warhol, aesthetic experimentation
offers an avenue for exploring and exploiting the interplay between
self-love and self-loss involved in recognizing oneself represented in
the public sphere.
O’Hara brings this tension to bear on the lyric tradition of ekphra-
sis, the verbal representation of the visual arts. From the Greek
words ek (out) and phrazein (declare), ekphrasis is itself a sort of pro-
sopopoeia, an intermedial ventriloquism linked to the epitaph and
memento mori.18 In this tradition, the threat of muteness and petri-
fication is emblematically represented by the Medusa, an association
that highlights the gender and sexual politics that underwrite the fear
and fascination posed by the image. According to W. J. T. Mitchell,
“Medusa is the perfect prototype for the image as a dangerous female
other who threatens to silence the poet’s voice and fixate his observ-
ing eye.”19 Although this model explains the longstanding association
of ekphrasis with scenes of sexual violence, from the rape of Philo-
mela in Ovid to Robert Browning’s last Duchess, its insight into the
sexual politics of ekphrasis is limited by its assumption of the stability
of masculine and feminine gender roles.20 In particular, this critical
discourse subscribes to the doctrine that desire and identification are
two distinct mechanisms that can never overlap in respect to their
object. The castration anxiety generated by the apotropaic image of
the Medusa stems from the fear that desire for the image will give way
to an identification with it. This scenario takes it for granted that one
cannot plausibly identify with and desire the same object at the same
time, a heterosexist assumption that has been the object of scrutiny
in the work of theorists such as Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, and Mikkel
Borch-Jacobsen.21 O’Hara’s work anticipates such queer theoretical
investigations by exploring the fluctuations between wanting to be
something and wanting to have it. Writing about the work of David
Smith, O’Hara once claimed: “[T]he best of the current sculptures
didn’t make me feel I wanted to have one, they made me feel I wanted
to be one.”22
O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings” explicitly stages the relation-
ship between art and desire in terms of a Medusan encounter. Open-
ing with a revision of the modern archetype of the ekphrastic lyric,
Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the poem’s first section concludes as
follows:
 Frank O’Hara and Queer Ekphrasis  787

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.
(253)
Altering the bizarre family romance of Keats’s “still unravished bride
of quietness / [the] foster-child of silence and slow time,” O’Hara’s
poem opens: “My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent / and he
carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets” (252). Keats
casts quietness as the groom, the artifact as a still virginal bride. But
it is the speaker of O’Hara’s poem that is in the process of being rav-
ished—literally carried away—by quietness. The violence behind this
quiet is amplified as the poem continues:
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! (252)
Quietness carries the same aggressive overtones in an early lyric
entitled “Poetry”:
The only way to be quiet
is to be quick, so I scare
you clumsily, or surprise
you with a stab. (49)
As a statement about the nature of poetry, these lines reverberate with
O’Hara’s more famous claim in “Personism”: “If someone’s chasing
you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around
and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep’” (498). As
Caleb Crain paraphrases the joke, “[W]riting poetry feels like being
chased by someone armed with a knife.”23 “Poetry” and “Personism”
may put the poet on opposite sides of the encounter—the aggressor in
one instance and the victim in the other—but both imagine quietness
as a way to keep with the quick and not the dead. In other words, the
silence and visibility courted by O’Hara’s ekphrastic lyric cannot be
understood only in terms of self-reification or abjection. Such silence
belongs not alongside passivity or repose but with exile and cunning.
Thus, to argue that O’Hara’s poems flirt with quietness and the
788  American Literature

monumental is not to deflate the spirit of perpetuum mobile that crit-

ics have unanimously identified as the source of the power, appeal,
and liberating influence of his work. Marjorie Perloff’s groundbreak-
ing 1977 monograph articulates this perspective with particular force.
Citing O’Hara’s “To Hell with It,” in which the poet condemns to
the flames “all things that don’t change / photographs, monuments”
(275), she concludes: “Photographs, monuments, static memories—
‘all things that don’t change’—these have no place in the poet’s world.
We can now understand why O’Hara loves the motion picture, action
painting, and all forms of dance—art forms that capture the present
rather than the past, the present in all its chaotic splendor.”24 Perloff
is right to place O’Hara with those beguiled by sensual music and
bored by unaging intellect. But it is one thing to register O’Hara’s
frequent frustration with stasis and another thing to propose that it
has no place in the poet’s world. His poems are certainly bustling with
motion pictures, action paintings, and modern dance, but at the same
time, monuments, memorials, and especially statues make frequent
appearances as well—and not only as things worthy of damnation.
The centrifugal force that propels his poems outside of themselves
needs to be understood within the context of its dialectical relation to
a counter tendency: a centripetal drive toward closure and stability.25
The quotidian bustle of O’Hara’s most famous poem, “The Day Lady
Died,” would not have the power to move us if it didn’t also teach us to
hold still, hushed as “Mel Waldron and everyone and I stopped breath-
ing” (325). With this final breath, an elegy for Billie Holiday becomes
an elegy for the poet as well. O’Hara considered this tension between
motion and stasis crucial. When asked by Donald Allen to write an
essay about life in his beloved city, he chose a line from his elegy for
Jackson Pollock as his title: “standing still and walking in New York”
(303).26 We can render a more accurate portrait of O’Hara, both as a
major lyricist and a queer innovator, if we look at the two McDarrah
photographs side by side, the poet standing still and walking in New
York.

Although artworks are frequently at the center of O’Hara’s poems, he

rejects the notion that they need to be spoken for, leaving them to
their own devices while he engages in his anecdotes, observations,
and verbal prestidigitation. In this sense, his works represent the
 Frank O’Hara and Queer Ekphrasis  789

power of speech acts, and the appeal of his poetry has much to do
with the chatty tone of voice that runs through it. As he writes in
“Homosexuality” (1954), “It is the law of my own voice I shall inves-
tigate” (182). This investigation is especially clear-sighted in “Why
I Am Not a Painter,” which does not attempt to verbalize the already
linguistic painting that is its occasion. The poem appears to answer
the question of vocation through a comparison of the composition of a
series of poems entitled “Oranges” with a painting by Mike Goldberg
entitled “Sardines.” Although offered as an explanation, the anecdote
leaves the question unclarified, even irrelevant: worse than apples and
oranges, the poetry-painting comparison becomes a matter of oranges
and sardines. Even as the poem distinguishes between the arts, it ren-
ders them casually interchangeable. The poem takes its inspiration
from a color; the painting begins with a word and ends up “only let-
ters.” This chiasmus carries on a centuries-old debate about poetry
and painting, but it can hardly be labeled ekphrastic in the traditional
sense due to the irrelevance of the artifacts themselves. The poet does
not give voice to Goldberg’s picture or describe it in any way, apart
from the offhand comment that it contains sardines (the word? the
fish?). O’Hara tells us that he sees the painting, but he is not inter-
ested in making us see it. Barbara Guest proposes that absence makes
this an abstract expressionist poem par excellence: “‘Why I Am Not a
Painter’ is about the importance of not having a subject. The subject
doesn’t matter.”27 Guest is right to emphasize the apparent unimpor-
tance of the poem’s purported subject. And yet in another sense, with
the word “I” appearing seventeen times (five in the first three lines),
the poem could hardly be more subjective.
The frequency of the first-person singular, a phenomenon theorized
in “Personism,” is one of the most famous characteristics of O’Hara’s
poetry. Although the self is ever present in his work, O’Hara’s avowed
distaste for the indulgence he identified with confessional poetry indi-
cates that he saw no merits in raising self-absorption to an aesthetic
ideal.28 As James Breslin explains, “[T]he self in O’Hara’s poetry—
honest and duplicitous, transparent and opaque—becomes a fictional
construct . . . , even though it is not easy to pin down exactly what has
been constructed.”29 This notion of selfhood is explicitly aesthetic.
The poet presents himself as an elusive fictional construct, as the
primary work of art in his poems.30 O’Hara’s ekphrastic lyrics tend
to lack an object precisely because the poet takes its place, ekphras-
790  American Literature

tic description giving way to ekphrastic identification. John Ashbery

summarizes this identification in O’Hara’s work with the credo, “This
is me and I’m poetry, baby”;31 but in many instances, O’Hara also
seems to be a painting—or sculpture.
This ekphrastic identification receives perhaps its most direct
treatment in O’Hara’s poem “Homosexuality,” which begins: “So we
are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping / our mouths shut? As if
we’d been pierced by a glance!” (181). George Chauncey has observed
that for the first half of the twentieth century the rhetoric of masks was
one of the dominant tropes with which gay men and lesbians under-
stood the relationship between their sexuality and their public lives.
Metaphors of adopting and removing masks performed a role similar
to that played today by the rhetoric of the closet, which, Chauncey
explains, was rarely used before the 1960s.32 O’Hara’s lines thus seem
to offer a sexual revelation. But the arch tone of the first-person plu-
ral raises a question about the relation between the speaker and the
addressee, implying the possibility of just the opposite: a multiplica-
tion of masks rather than simple self-disclosure. This poem, conclud-
ing with a bravely candid description of gay cruising, has been much
discussed with an eye to discerning the degree of autobiographical
revelation that can be read into it. O’Hara’s longtime companion Joe
LeSueur insists that the poem has “led to a misunderstanding about
the way Frank conducted his sex life. Which is to say, the poem is not
as confessional or as autobiographical as some of his readers might
assume.”33 But what has not been noticed is that the ambiguity of
the poem’s “we” opens up to interpellate not only the speaker, the
poet, the reader, the homosexual, and even homosexuality in general
but also addresses itself to a particular work of art. At the bottom
of the poem’s manuscript, dated March 1954, O’Hara wrote: “Ensor
Self portrait with Masks,” indicating that the poem can be read as
an exchange not only between poet and silent interlocutor but also
between a viewer and an oil painting (see fig. 3).
The fascinating self-portrait to which O’Hara refers had been at
MOMA in 1951 as part of James Ensor’s first major American exposi-
tion. In it, the painter’s face is completely surrounded by masks, enact-
ing a complex understanding of the revelatory nature of portraiture.
Are we to see Ensor’s unconcealed features as a mark of contrast with
his carnivalesque surroundings? Or as Libby Tannenbaum writes in
the exhibition catalogue, as another “mask in the midst of masks”?34
 Frank O’Hara and Queer Ekphrasis  791

Figure 3  “Self-Portrait Surrounded by Masks,” by James Ensor. 1899. © 2006 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels.
792  American Literature

O’Hara’s ekphrastic self-portrait, much like Ashbery’s more famous

example of the genre, allows him to flirt with disclosure with the same
confounding logic, disclosing a self and closing it off in the same ges-
ture.35 His ambiguous first-person plural functions not only to identify
and distinguish himself from the sexual identity his poem details but
also allows him a guarded identification with the work of art.
O’Hara’s investigation of the law of his own voice is thus an iden-
tification with a picture, an identification that allows him to examine
the way the law manifests itself through the voice. As Michel Foucault
has argued, the very notion of a sexual identity is constituted by the
proliferation of speech rather than its repression. To give a name to
nonverbal desires is to bring them into the symbolic order where they
can be policed. As Foucault writes of confession, “Not only will you
confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform
your desire, your every desire, into discourse.”36 O’Hara’s identifi-
cation with the silent painting—its mouth shut—might be read as
an important queer strategy for survival in a homophobic culture, a
strategy found in surprisingly consistent form from Oscar Wilde’s
late-nineteenth-century “truth of masks” to Foucault’s late-twentieth-
century “aesthetics of existence.”37 The strategic identification with
works of art allows O’Hara to approach the love that dare not speak its
name by striving toward the condition of the visual rather than the ver-
bal, allowing the poet, as Terrell Scott Herring has put it, to become
“visibly invisible”: “showing all but disclosing nothing.”38 Ek-phrastic
in a quite literal sense, O’Hara’s meditations on art declare that he is
out, even while they reinforce the logic of the closet as described by
Judith Butler: “outness can only produce a new opacity; and the closet
produces the promise of a disclosure that can never come.”39
If the aesthetic offers a means of partial escape from both the law of
the voice and the piercing glance, this is because it is governed by a
mimetic logic that operates under the signs of likeness and similitude
rather than the binary opposition of identity and difference. As Breslin
notes, “O’Hara operates in a world of proliferating likenesses, but not
identities.”40 These multiplying affinities thus seem to short-circuit
the possibility of a revelation that would pin the speaker to an authentic
identity. At the same time, the poem forges a conceptual link between
the potentially disruptive power of mimesis and homosexuality, asso-
ciating both with artifice and disguise. Michael Moon has described
this ambivalent association with the term “hypermimesis.”41 Though
 Frank O’Hara and Queer Ekphrasis  793

in large part a product of the homophobic public imagination, this

association, actively taken up and transfigured, has been an impor-
tant means of achieving visibility and recognition. O’Hara’s proliferat-
ing likenesses might therefore be read as an effort to revise the con-
ditions of gay visibility and legibility. Anticipating queer theoretical
investigations of sexuality and mimesis by Moon, Butler, and others,
O’Hara cogently summarizes his gender trouble in “Naphtha”: “you
were made in the image of God / I was not / I was made in the image
of a sissy truck-driver” (338). Presumably a degraded copy of a more
masculine truck driver, the sissy (from sister) is already an imitation.
To be made in his image is to be a copy of a copy, to be completely
simulacral. As Butler has argued, this in-betweenness, neither clearly
masculine nor feminine, challenges the naturalness of both genders.42
Inspired by the art brut pioneer Jean Dubuffet, “Naphtha” is in a
sense another ekphrastic poem, turning to the visual arts to harness
the power of mimesis in order to trouble the boundaries between the
genders and between the arts. Drawing a phrase from a MOMA exhi-
bition catalog, the poem quotes Dubuffet, who claimed to paint “‘with
a likeness burst in the memory’” (338)—a testament to the explosive
power of resemblance. O’Hara formally enacts this boundary blurring
through ekphrasis, which Frederick Burwick describes as the mime-
sis of mimesis,43 constructing an intermedial aesthetic that looks to
poetry and painting not as the sister arts—each with her own distinct
identity connected by family resemblance—but as sissy arts—each
art always already made in the image of the other.44

The suggestion that O’Hara’s poetry involves a subversive embrace

of mimesis must contend with the common assumption that it shares
its aesthetic sensibility with the nonmimetic abstract expressionists.
O’Hara has been so closely associated with this aesthetic that critics
have often overlooked the profound differences between his work and
that of action painters such as Pollock and de Kooning.45 Although
O’Hara ardently supported abstract expressionism in its high mod-
ernist manifestation, his own practice is more closely aligned with
the so-called second generation New York painters, many of whom
revolted against the hegemony of abstraction as well as the hypermas-
culine artistic ethos that accompanied it. On 21 January 1955, O’Hara
offered a defense of these “New Figurative Painters” in a panel discus-
794  American Literature

sion with Clement Greenberg at the Artists’ Club in New York. The
panel (which also included the critic Hilton Kramer and the director
of MOMA, Alfred Barr Jr.) focused on O’Hara’s essay “Nature and the
New Painting,” which had recently appeared in the literary magazine
Folder.46 In the essay, O’Hara sought to qualify Greenberg’s claim that
avant-garde art was necessarily abstract and to defend the younger
New York painters—notably his friends Larry Rivers, Grace Harti-
gan, and Jane Freilicher—against claims that they “had lost heart and
abandoned abstract-expressionism in a cowardly fashion to return to
representational work.”47 According to these accounts, the return to
figurative painting was itself figured as a loss of nerve, a forfeit of the
independence won from feminized European traditions.
The very notion that a return to figuration might be a sign of cow-
ardice shows that the issues involved were more than purely aesthetic.
What was at stake, according to Greenberg, was the very identity
of art, an identity that must be preserved through willful delinea-
tion and purification. The earliest and clearest articulation of these
views is found in two influential Partisan Review articles with which
O’Hara would have been familiar: “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939)
and “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940). The two essays cover similar
ground, and Greenberg decided to include only the former in his 1961
collection Art and Culture. But the latter reveals the degree to which
Greenberg’s theory of the avant-garde is indebted to the anti-ut pic-
tura poesis tradition inaugurated in the eighteenth century by G. E.
Lessing. Greenberg’s title alludes, of course, to Lessing’s 1766 trea-
tise The Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry and,
more directly, to Irving Babbitt’s humanist revision The New Laokoon
(1910). Like his predecessors, Greenberg is dedicated to the mainte-
nance of clear and distinct boundaries between the arts, as well as to
the proposition that the disruption of these boundaries is a symptom
of moral—not merely aesthetic—confusion.
But Greenberg draws these lines of demarcation even more vigor-
ously than Lessing. Whereas Lessing differentiated between poetry
and painting with an eye to their different mimetic capacities, Green-
berg suggests that the very notion that painting should engage in
mimesis at all is a misconception, in effect the mistake of confusing
painting for literature.48 Painting is impure to the degree that it
attempts to represent subject matter, an attempt that leads to disso-
lution and depravity. For Greenberg, this indulgence in illusionism is
 Frank O’Hara and Queer Ekphrasis  795

the historical result of the dominance of literature over the other arts,
which results in “a confusion of the arts . . . by which the subservient
ones are perverted and distorted; they are forced to deny their own
nature in an effort to attain the effects of the dominant art.”49 Green-
berg responds to this identity crisis with militaristic gusto, suggesting
that the arts must be forced to reveal their true natures against their
will through active policing and containment. In “Towards a Newer
Laocoon,” he famously identifies the success of the avant-garde with
the fact that “the arts have been hunted back to their mediums, and
there they have been isolated, concentrated, and defined.”50
This rhetoric takes on intensified resonance in the Cold War cli-
mate of the early 1950s, in which homosexuals and communists were
being hunted, isolated, and defined by the United States govern-
ment. This insistence on purifying the visual arts from the influence
of literature and its subject matter more generally must have struck
O’Hara as particularly puzzling as he wrote his defense of figuration
in 1954. At the time, he was recovering from his tempestuous affair
with Rivers, a relationship that was itself an extended confusion of the
arts. Their relationship yielded major works of collaboration, which
blurred the boundaries between the verbal and the visual, as well as
some of O’Hara’s most ambitious poetry—notably the long surrealist
experiment Second Avenue. It also gave him first-hand experience as
the figure of figurative painting. Rivers recalls that during that period,
O’Hara “helped me stretch canvases and was the subject matter of
every fifth thing I did,”51 noting that
[h]is long marvelous poem Second Avenue, 1953, was written in my
plaster garden studio overlooking that avenue. One night late I was
working on a piece of sculpture of him. Between poses he was fin-
ishing his long poem. Three fat cops saw the light and made their
way up to make that “you call this art and what are you doing here”
scene that every N.Y. artist must have experienced.52
Rivers’s anecdote contextualizes their collaboration within an envi-
ronment of policing and suspicion. Although every artist might have
been subject to this sort of harassment, it is clear that the subtext
for this suspicion was the surveillance of homosexuality. David Cra-
ven describes the homophobic culture surrounding postwar art,
noting that “one need only recall Robert Motherwell’s appearance
before the draft board in the 1940s. The first question asked by the
796  American Literature

military officers was, ‘Are you a homosexual?’ When Motherwell said

no, the members of the military board refused to believe him, since
‘anyone who lived in Greenwich Village and was an artist had to be a
homosexual.’”53
The homoeroticism and the spirit of camp with which Rivers
attacked the self-aggrandizing seriousness of abstract expression-
ism caused considerable skepticism and scorn. In an interview with
O’Hara, Rivers describes the reaction to his “Washington Crossing
the Delaware”—itself the subject of one of O’Hara’s best ekphrastic
lyrics—as “about the same as when the Dadaists introduced a toilet as
a piece of sculpture. . . . Except the public wasn’t upset—the painters
were.”54 Many were baffled by Rivers’s apparent embrace of an image
that had long since become cliché, demonstrating an aesthetic of
irony and camp that served as a major precursor to the Pop art of the
1960s. But the more immediate focus of the controversy surrounding
Rivers in 1954 and 1955 was O’Hara Nude with Boots (see fig. 4), a
painting that took months to complete and must have been under-
way as O’Hara wrote his essay on figurative painting. David Lehman
describes the larger-than-life canvas as being “as much a love paint-
ing to O’Hara as O’Hara’s ‘To the Harbor-Master’ was a love poem for
Rivers.”55 As Gavin Butt has argued, the portrait was a daring cele-
bration of a homosexual relationship: “By painting O’Hara in nothing
but his boots, Rivers echoes contemporaneous representations of men
from physique photography which similarly stage the homoerotic
appeal of the near naked (rather than nude) male body.”56 The public
response to this celebration caused a stir that followed O’Hara until
the end of his life. After his death in 1966, the New York Times all but
ignored his poetry in its obituary, focusing instead on the ballyhoo
surrounding Rivers’s painting. Before even mentioning poetry, the
obituary devotes its longest paragraph to the latest reappearance of
the controversy: “A year ago the question of when exposure of human
anatomy in painting is or is not offensive became an issue at a show-
ing in the Jewish Museum of Larry Rivers’s paintings. The exhibition
included not only female nudes but also a full-length portrait of the
artist’s friend, Mr. O’Hara, posed frontally and clad only in shoes and
socks. The issue was not resolved.”57
The lingering condescension implicit in the Times decision to
exhume this controversy over an old painting resonates with Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick’s comments in Epistemology of the Closet regarding
Figure 4  “O’Hara Nude with Boots.” By Larry Rivers. 1954. Art © Estate of Larry
Rivers/Licensed by VAGA; New York, New York.
798  American Literature

the relationship between a major strain of modernist abstraction and

the male body. Sedgwick’s hypothesis suggests that the abstractionist
ideologies of modernism exiled not only Venus, as Wendy Steiner has
suggested, but Ganymede as well.58 What was rejected, according to
Sedgwick, was “not the figuration of just any body, the figuration of
figurality itself, but, rather, that represented in a very particular body,
the desired male body.”59 O’Hara’s life and work testify to this insight
into the way homoerotic imagery becomes both cause and casualty of
the much-discussed shift from the beautiful toward the sublime that
characterizes modernist abstraction.
O’Hara is strangely silent in his poems about this picture and the
surrounding controversy, but he takes up an almost identical theme in
a poem about the statue Rivers made of him during the same period,
a choice that highlights the Medusan character of mimesis and calls
to mind the Hellenistic appreciation of male beauty. Nowhere is the
experience of being made in an image—and being made into an
image—more directly treated than in the second of O’Hara’s seven
poems entitled “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday”:
I am so glad that Larry Rivers made a
statue of me
and now I hear that my penis is on all
the statues of all the young sculptors who’ve
seen it
instead of the Picasso no-penis shep-
herd and its influence—for presence is
better than absence, if you love excess.
Oh now it is that all this music tumbles
round me which was once considered muddy
and today surrounds this ambiguity of
our tables and our typewriter paper, more
nostalgic than a disease,
soft as one’s character, melancholy as
one’s attractiveness,
offering the pernicious advice of dreams.
Is it too late for this? (190)
 Frank O’Hara and Queer Ekphrasis  799

Like most of O’Hara’s work, this poem about a statue written in honor
of a composer sets out to confuse the arts with a vengeance. Even its
date of composition is confused: written on 10 April 1954, it is nine days
belated (though closer to the mark than many of O’Hara’s other Rach-
maninoff poems). Yet the poetic license O’Hara takes with the Russian
composer’s date of birth seems somehow appropriate, since his loving
appropriation of Rachmaninoff’s romanticism in these opening lines
is perfect April Fool’s camp, a textbook example of a sensibility that
could not be better summarized than by the proposition of the third
stanza: “presence is / better than absence, if you love excess.” Such
rhapsodism is precisely the sort of muddiness that Greenberg-style
modernism attempts to purge from the arts: one art bleeding into
the next under the overwhelming influence of heightened emotions,
undermining the difference between identification and desire.
This muddiness is itself a meditation on the confusion of absence
and presence underlying the discourse of modernist aesthetics, and
it remains unclear whether the poet does love excess. Despite the po‑
em’s foregrounding of presence, the statue appears only in its absence,
another example of the prosopopoetic logic of ekphrasis. O’Hara
learns that his phallus has taken the art world by storm only through
second-hand gossip: “now I hear that my penis is on all the statues of
all the young sculptors who’ve seen it” (my emphasis). Just as in “Why
I Am Not a Painter,” the poet lets us hear what has been seen with-
out betraying any interest in the effort to make us see it. Far from a
simple salute to presence or excess, the poem embodies the complexi-
ties and contradictions of publicity and the difficulties involved in an
attempt to imagine an aesthetic outside the boundaries of modernist
impersonality.
The divide between modern and postmodern is not as great as
it might seem. O’Hara’s quip about the shepherd (castrated with a
hyphen) obscures the fact that, in its own way, Picasso’s modernism
is phallic to the core. Abstraction tends toward excess every bit as
much as figuration. One common explanation of the power of nonrep-
resentational art is that in refusing to point toward an absent referent,
the abstract image can be more fully present as itself. “Presentness,”
as Michael Fried famously proclaims in defense of modernism, “is
grace.”60 O’Hara, in love with all the theater between the arts, would
seem to have a different presence in mind, as well as a different grace.
As he exclaims in two of his most quoted lines: “Grace / to be born
800  American Literature

and live as variously as possible” (256). But even this manifesto for
the expansive soul testifies to the way self-presence and absolute self-
absence come to the same thing. In an irony that O’Hara would surely
have appreciated, this couplet was chosen after his death to serve as
the poet’s epitaph—its celebration of variability literally written in
stone.
The new figurative artists can no more escape the play of presence
and absence, this confluence of death and desire, than their predeces-
sors, and in this regard O’Hara’s second Rachmaninoff poem repre-
sents continuities undergirding postmodernism’s break with modern-
ism, a break in which, as Michael Davidson has noted, “the attempt
to go beyond the artisanal poetics of high modernism often replicates
phallic ideals of power, energy, and virtuosity that it would seem to
contest.”61 But rather than accept this replication as a failure, O’Hara’s
work lays claim to the cultural authority of high modernism even as
he critiques it. The literal phallogocentrism of the Rachmaninoff poem
quickly becomes flaccid, its metaphysics of presence giving way to
the softness of melancholy and nostalgia. Although O’Hara definitely
revels in the power of art, he does not laud the poet as the heroic sub-
ject of the act of creation but as its subject matter.
The poem concludes with a return to the idea of what can be made
out of the poet:
I am what people make of me—if they
can and when they will. My difficulty is
readily played—like a rhapsody, or a fresh house. (190)
Unlike Hamlet, O’Hara concedes his selfhood to anyone who would
know his stops—even his difficulty is easily played. Being made into
a statue is not an identification with presence or permanence but an
acceptance of the “softness of one’s character.” The poem gradually
evacuates the poet’s claim to his own subjectivity through a process
of being made by others, first into a musical score—dependent upon a
performer to be realized—and finally into a new house, to be entered
and occupied. To be sure, this self-denial is a sort of death. But it is
also the condition that enables the poet’s image to enter circulation,
to have a visible influence. The ambivalence of O’Hara’s poetry, which
is often most moving when most amusing, is well summarized by the
“melancholy [of] one’s attractiveness.” The poet celebrates his own
desirability but, seeing himself represented as an object of the other’s
 Frank O’Hara and Queer Ekphrasis  801

desire, recognizes that to be figured is to forfeit himself to others, who

will make of him what they will—stories, stereotypes, statues.
The Rachmaninoff poem both celebrates the poet’s phallic power
and acknowledges mortality and loss. It exemplifies O’Hara’s com-
plex understanding of the need to lay claim to recognizable self-
representations in the public sphere. But even as O’Hara stakes out
forms of visibility, his poem highlights the alienation that accompanies
such identifications. In the pre-Stonewall decades of the gay rights
movement, O’Hara offers a prescient analysis of the difficulties of visi-
bility politics, testifying both to the need to see oneself represented
and to the fact that such figurations are always disfiguring. His work
looks to the intersection of the verbal and the visual as an important
site for the transformation of the association of homosexuality with
spectacle and simulacrum, both resisting and indulging in the imposi-
tion of silence through his poetry. O’Hara’s ekphrastic identifications
transfigure the potentially disempowering experience of being made
into an image—of a “sissy truck-driver” or a statue—into a source of
poetry and pleasure, imagining a way to give in to the experience of
being made into a Rivers and still remain an O’Hara.
University of South Carolina

Notes

For their ideas, attention, and inspiration, I am grateful to Andrea Bobotis,

Rita Felski, Neil Hultgren, Victor Luftig, Kate Nash, Jahan Ramazani, Eleanor
Stein, Jordan Taylor, and the students in my course “The New York School
and Contemporary Poetry,” University of Virginia (spring 2006).
1 See Russell Ferguson, In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and Ameri-
can Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1999).
2 Frank O’Hara, “F.Y.I. #371 (The Nun),” Poems Retrieved, ed. Donald Allen
(Bolinas, Calif.: Grey Fox Press, 1975), 201.
3 David Lehman encapsulates O’Hara’s aesthetic in an ekphrasis of McDar-
rah’s photograph: “This is the O’Hara of the daily poems . . . on a hot date
with the muse of 53rd Street, looking lucky, with an eye out for a not-
to-be-overlooked tabloid headline, his tie blowing out behind him in the
cool, irresistible air of Manhattan” (“Frank O’Hara’s Artful Life,” Art in
America 88 [February 2000]: 119–24).
4 Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York:
Knopf, 1993), 4. Gooch emphasizes this claim by quoting the painter
Philip Guston’s exclamation at O’Hara’s funeral: “He was our Apolli-
802  American Literature

naire” (11). Marjorie Perloff seconded this estimation when she titled her
groundbreaking study Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters, borrowing an
appellation originally applied to the French poet (New York: G. Braziller,
1977).
5 Bruce Boone offered the first serious appraisal of the critical potential
of O’Hara’s camp; see “Gay Language as Political Praxis,” Social Text 1
(winter 1979): 52–59. See also Michael Davidson, Guys like Us: Citing
Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004);
Andrew Ross, “The Death of Lady Day,” in Frank O’Hara: To Be True to
a City, ed. Jim Elledge (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1990), 380–
91; Mark Silverberg, “Ashbery, O’Hara, and the Neo-Avant-Garde Mani-
festo,” Arizona Quarterly 59 (spring 2003): 137–65; and Perloff, introduc-
tion to the 1997 edition of Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters, xi–xxx.
6 On Cold War masculinity, see Davidson, Guys like Us; and Robert J. Cor-
ber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of
Masculinity (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1997). For an account of
abstract expressionism’s role in Cold War foreign policy, see Serge Guil-
baut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1983).
7 Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Paint-
ing in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 256. See also Ann
Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press). For the argument that abstract expressionism’s relation-
ship to the cult of masculinity was in fact more complex and ambivalent,
see David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent
during the McCarthy Period (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999),
115–23. The important point, however, is not whether abstract expres-
sionism was wholly complicit in the homophobic, misogynistic version of
masculinity prominent during the McCarthy era but, rather, how queer
artists such as O’Hara were able to create forms of artistic subjectivity
other than those represented by artists such as Pollock and de Kooning.
On queer aesthetics, see Moira Roth, “The Aesthetic of Indifference,”
in Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp,
and John Cage (Amsterdam: G and B International, 1998), 33–48; and
Jonathan D. Katz, “Identification,” in Difference/Indifference, 49–70.
Mark Silverberg offers an excellent analysis of these issues in “Ashbery,
O’Hara, and the Neo-Avant-Garde Manifesto,” Arizona Quarterly 59
(spring 2003): 137–65.
8 Nell Blaine, caption, n.p.; quoted in David Lehman, The Last Avant-
Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Double
Day, 1998).
9 “Personism,” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 498; further
 Frank O’Hara and Queer Ekphrasis  803

references to Collected Poems will be cited parenthetically in the text. Be‑

hind this disarming humor is not, as has often been suggested, a casual
disregard for the particularities of form; rather, the poet reconceptualizes
aesthetic form in such a way that this “technical apparatus” can become
the vehicle for desires that had previously not been considered suitable
for poetry.
10 Katz, “Identification,” 53.
11 On homophobia in the Cold War era, see John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics,
Sexual Communities: The Making of the Homosexual Minority in the United
States: 1940–1970 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983); and Corber,
Homosexuality in Cold War America.
12 Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 93.
13 Katz, “Identification,” 51. See also Katz, “John Cage’s Queer Silence or
How to Avoid Making Matters Worse,” in Writings through John Cage’s
Music, Poetry, and Art, ed. David Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chi-
cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), 42–61; and Gavin Butt, Between You
and Me: Queer Disclosure and the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2005), 77. Perloff discusses O’Hara in terms
of this artistic milieu in “Watchman, Spy, and Dead Man: Jasper Johns,
Frank O’Hara, John Cage, and the ‘Aesthetic of Indifference,’” Modern-
ism/Modernity 8 (April 2001): 197–223.
14 Andy Warhol apparently filmed O’Hara at a poetry reading in 1963 or
1964, although the film was never screened; see Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol,
Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997),
21. In general, O’Hara tended to be dismissive of Warhol and his work;
see Gooch, City Poet, 395–98; and Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism:
The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harvest, 1980), 186–87.
15 Jonathan Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of
Prosopopoeia,” in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan
Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press,
1996), 105.
16 Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanti-
cism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), 75.
17 Ibid., 80, my emphasis.
18 See Jahan Ramazani, Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and
the Sublime (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), 152–61.
19 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 172.
20 For an overview of this history, see James Heffernan, Museum of Words:
The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1993). Heffernan is careful to note the limitations of the Medusa
model, situating it in a long, complex history as old as writing itself.
21 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Iden-
804  American Literature

tity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New
York: Routledge, 1995); and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject,
trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988).
22 Frank O’Hara, “David Smith: The Color of Steel,” in Standing Still and
Walking in New York, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas, Calif.: Grey Fox Press,
1975), 123.
23 Caleb Crain, “Frank O’Hara’s ‘Fired’ Self,” American Literary History 9
(summer 1997): 288.
24 Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters, 21.
25 The importance of this tension is evident in O’Hara’s lecture on design
delivered to the Artists’ Club in 1952, where he assigns the poet the task
of balancing the centripetal and centrifugal; see “Design,” in Standing
Still and Walking in New York, 35.
26 Although O’Hara’s essay was never completed, Allen chose its proposed
title for a posthumous collection of O’Hara’s prose.
27 Barbara Guest, unpublished interview with David Lehman, quoted in
Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde, 344.
28 See O’Hara’s discussion, for instance, of confessional poetry and Robert
Lowell in his interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, October 1965, in
Standing Still and Walking in New York, 13.
29 James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry,
1945–65 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 230.
30 Perloff attempts to separate the myth of Frank O’Hara from his poetry,
expressing her regret that after the poet’s tragic death, “[t]he artist,
in short, became a work of art, and attention was deflected away from
O’Hara’s real achievement, which was his poetry” (Frank O’Hara: Poet
among Painters, 3). While the importance of this move away from the
mythology and toward the text was without a doubt a crucial one that
helped pave the way for the recognition of O’Hara’s work as a major
object of study, I argue that one reason O’Hara’s poetry is such a remark-
able achievement is precisely because it treats the artist as a work of art.
This realization should not deflect attention from the poetry but help us
to see the way the poems explore the relationship between the poet and
the text.
31 John Ashbery, “Authors and Issues: Frank O’Hara’s Questions,” Selected
Prose (New York: Penguin, 1985), 82.
32 See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Mak-
ings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 6.
The rhetoric of masks is reflected in the fact that the Mattachine Society,
started in 1951 and widely understood to be the first organized gay rights
movement in the United States, took its name from the masked dancers
of the matachin, an early modern sword dance; see D’Emilio, Sexual Poli-
tics, Sexual Communities, 57–74.
33 Joe LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 38.
 Frank O’Hara and Queer Ekphrasis  805

34 Libby Tannenbaum, James Ensor (New York: The Museum of Modern

Art, 1951), 110.
35 See John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Selected Poems,
188–204. Heffernan discusses the way Ashbery adopts this strategy of
guarded disavowal in “Self-Portrait,” though not in regard to his sexu-
ality. See also Lee Edelman, “The Pose of Imposture: Ashbery’s ‘Self-
Portrait,’” Yale Journal of Criticism 3, no. 1 (1989): 189–207.
36 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 21.
37 See Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. Michael
Lucey (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2004), 247–49.
38 Terrell Scott Herring, “Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet,” PMLA 117 (May
2002): 415, 414.
39 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out:
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge,
1991), 109.
40 Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary, 241.
41 Michael Moon, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in Ameri-
can Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ.
Press, 1998), 9.
42 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Iden-
tity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
43 See Frederick Burwick, Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections (University
Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2001), 13.
44 Here, of course, I am borrowing the title of Jean Hagstrum’s classic study,
The Sister Arts: The History of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry
from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958).
45 Perloff does speculate that O’Hara “was really more at home with painting
that retains at least some figuration than with pure abstraction” (Frank
O’Hara: Poet among Painters, 85); and in the new introduction to the 1997
edition of this book, Perloff explains that the division between O’Hara
and the high modern abstractionists was deeper than she had supposed,
noting how uncomfortable he was with their “discourse of male power
and authority” (xxi). See also Perloff’s discussion of O’Hara and Jasper
Johns in “Watchman, Spy, and Dead Man.”
46 See Gooch, City Poet, 259; and Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A
Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1997), 184.
47 Frank O’Hara, “Nature and the New Painting,” Standing Still and Walking
in New York, 43–44.
48 For an illuminating discussion of the gender politics implicit in G. E.
Lessing’s The Laocoön, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideol-
ogy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986). Considering the prominence
of statues and serpents in O’Hara’s poems, particularly in “In Memory of
My Feelings,” not only Lessing’s work but also the Laocoön itself provide
interesting insights into O’Hara’s poetry.
806  American Literature

49 Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Pollock and After: The

Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Harper and Row), 36.
50 Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” 41. The imbrication of these
formal questions with anxieties about gender and sexuality is even more
explicit in Greenberg’s immediate predecessor, Irving Babbitt’s The New
Laokoon, a major influence not only on Greenberg but also on literary
modernism as formulated and practiced by Babbitt’s student T. S. Eliot.
Babbitt, who renews Lessing’s call for an end to the confusion of the arts,
points to Wilde, Verlaine, and Huysmans as evidence for the homosexu-
ally coded decadence that accompanies a lack of respect for aesthetic
boundaries. “Think of the meaning,” he disdainfully cautions, “that is
coming to be attached in popular usage to the phrase ‘artistic tempera-
ment’” (The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts [New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910], 243–44). The necessary response to such
corruption, he insists, is “to bring once more into honor the broad, mas-
culine, and vigorous distinction. We might then have a type of writing
that is not intended primarily for women and men in their unmasculine
moods,—for the tired scientist and the fagged philologist and the weary
man of business” (245). For a discussion of Babbitt’s influence on Anglo-
American literary modernism, see Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of
Modernism (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984).
51 Larry Rivers, “Life among the Stones,” Location (spring 1963): 92.
52 Larry Rivers, quoted in O’Hara, Collected Poems, 529.
53 Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique, 117.
54 Larry Rivers, interview with Frank O’Hara, Art Chronicles, 1954–1966
(New York: G. Braziller, 1975), 113.
55 Lehman, “Frank O’Hara’s Artful Life,” 119.
56 Butt, Between You and Me, 77.
57 “Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator,” New York Times, 26 July 1966. Tell-
ingly, the subhead reads: “Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies—Also a
Poet,” leaving his primary calling as an afterthought.
58 See Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-
Century Art (New York: Free Press, 2001). For a discussion of the homo-
erotic dynamic of modernism’s rejection of beauty, particularly in regard
to its disavowal of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, see Leslie Higgins, The
Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics (New York: Pal-
grave, 2002).
59 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 167.
60 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and
Reviews (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 168.
61 Davidson, Guys like Us, 29.