WORKING IN THE GAP BETWEEN ART AND

LIFE: FRANK OHARAS PROCESS POEMS

MARK SILVERBERG
In the mid 1940s Jackson Pollock took an important step in his
painting that would become a provocative symbol not only of
Abstract Expressionism, but also for neo-avant-garde artwork in
general in the 1950s. Around this time, Pollock began tacking his
large unstretched canvases to the floor of his tool shed studio on Long
Island, and painting in a spontaneous, direct manner. The
movement from easel to floor marked a decisive step in what Harold
Rosenberg would come to call Action Painting. With the canvas on
the floor, Pollock could not only approach his work from all sides and
at all angles, he could also, as he famously stated, be literally in the
painting (Shapiro 1990: 356).
Pollock explained that this new method allowed the artist to treat
the painting as an extension of the body and as a process of discovery
rather than an act of intention. The subject of the painting was not an
external object to be represented, but an internal state whose process
was simultaneously discovered and defined in the act of painting.
Pollocks work became one of the most successful examples of what
was soon called process art, a term used to denote the shift from end
result (product) to creative behaviour (process) that is highlighted not
only in Pollocks action painting, but also in many contemporary neoavant-garde forms: John Cages aleatory music, Robert Rauschenbergs chance-inspired Combines, Merce Cunninghams unscripted
dance Events, and Allan Kaprows Happenings, among others. In
contemporary poetry, process was highlighted by many practitioners:
from Charles Olsons emphasis on breath (in his famous manifesto
Projective Verse [1950]) to Allen Ginsbergs and Jack Kerouacs
method of spontaneous bop prosody, to the painterly action
poetry of Frank OHara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and others.
Willem de Kooning once remarked that Pollock broke the ice for
American painters. One of the many reasons Pollock looms so large in

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the American cultural imagination is that his breakthrough signified

a shift not only in painting but in all the arts: a shift from product to
process, from representation to dramatisation, from contemplation to
action. Pollocks breakthrough seemed to open a new painterly and
metaphorical space (which, Pollocks promoters would have us
believe, allowed both for a new kind of painting and a new kind of
relation between artist and work). But though Pollock was repeatedly
heralded as a path blazer in fact what he did, like so many artists of
the neo-avant-garde, was to reprise techniques of the historical avantgarde (here in particular surrealist automatism though now in a
plastic form). Along with the foregrounding of the artists process, his
gesture or action, Pollocks work productively revived the dilemma of
the relationship between art and life. By blurring the line between
unconscious gesture and premeditated brushstroke, between body and
canvas, in other words, between life and art, Pollock brought to the
fore the problematic at the centre of Peter Brgers well-known theory
of the avant-garde.
Over the past decade Brgers work has come under intense
scrutiny from many quarters, and in particular his central idea that the
avant-garde sought to reintegrate art and life has been seen as
precipitate and overly simplistic in the words of Richard Wolin
(quoted in Murphy 1999: 27). A major problem is that Brger
totalises and dehistoricises the infinitely multifaceted categories of
life and art. By removing their historical specificity, and setting
them up as binary opposites, Brger makes art and life
unproductive abstractions. What is art and what is life here? Hal
Foster asks in The Return of the Real.
Already the opposition tends to cede to art the autonomy that
is in question, and to position life at a point beyond reach. In
this very formulation, then, the avant-garde project is
predisposed to failure. (Foster 1996: 15)

And of course fail it does in Brgers theory though as Foster points

out, from Brgers point of view the avant-garde fails heroically,
tragically (1996: 13). I want to suggest that neo-avant-garde art, and
process art in particular, asks us to question the sense of some
absolute, utopian sublation of life and art, and instead keeps art and
life in play, as perennially contingent categories. For the neo-avantgarde Brgers reintegration is less a concrete goal to be
implemented, as Richard Murphy (1999: 259) has noted than a
general orienting principle to be borne in mind, a question to be

Working in the Gap between Art and Life

39

reflected upon, and even an aporia to be experimented with and

worked-through. I want to continue, then, by considering New
York School poet Frank OHara, whose work continually raises the
problematic of life and art, not with the imposing goal of finally
resolving or reintegrating the two, but with the more modest aim of
perpetual[ly] testing the conventions of both (Foster 1996: 16).
OHaras work resonates well with that of Robert Rauschenberg who
famously commented: Painting relates to both art and life. Neither is
made. I try to act in the gap between the two (Stiles and Selz 1996:
321).
Frank OHara has rightly been called the vital center of the New
York School (Lehman 1998: 7). Perhaps the most frequently painted,
sculpted, and otherwise represented writer of his generation, OHara
seemed to be everywhere in the 1950s: a regular at the Cedar Bar and
Artists Club; a contributor to key little magazines and the central
figure of Don Allens landmark 1960 anthology The New American
Poetry; a playwright and actor in the Poets Theater; and a
collaborator in many media with a host of artists including Larry
Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Al Leslie, Joe Brainard, and Norman Bluhm.
Since Marjorie Perloffs groundbreaking Frank OHara: Poet Among
Painters (1977), OHaras star has steadily risen so that he has
become not only one of the most imitated but also one of the most
discussed post-war American poets. In his day job, OHara climbed
from selling postcards in the gift shop to the position of Associate
Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum
of Modern Art. He was also an editorial associate at Art News and the
author of the first American monograph on Jackson Pollock (1959)
among several works of criticism. OHara provided support and
encouragement for dozens of artists and acted as a crucial bridge
between artists and institutions like the Museum of Modern Art. His
intimate understanding of and work within one of the most powerful
institutions of art (to concretise another key term from Brgers
analysis) is one of the things that most uniquely separated OHara
(and the New York School poets in general) from other writers of
their generation. All the New York School poets (OHara, John
Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler) spent a
great deal of time looking at and writing about visual art. Their
careers as critics and curators required them to think frequently and
deeply about arts commerce with society, and this heightened
consciousness about the institution of art had an important impact on
their own writing. Indeed, I argue elsewhere that what most uniquely

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Mark Silverberg

characterises the New York School as a group (and I suspect what

characterises the neo-avant-garde in general) is their keen awareness
of the institutionalisation of the avant-garde (Silverberg 2003: 13642). Having seen Jackson Pollock domesticated by the market and
conscripted to promote Country Homes real estate and couturier
fashion, and having watched the once outcast Beat writers now being
used to sell everything from pulp fiction paperbacks and Hollywood
films to beachnik swimsuits, the New York School poets were
highly attuned to the dangers and enticements of the culture industry.
Unlike their historical avant-garde predecessors, neo-avant-gardists
faced the new and unusual problem of success. The danger for young
experimentalists, John Ashbery argued in The Invisible AvantGarde, was not neglect or hostility, as in the past but, ironically, a
too easy and too quick acceptance. According to Ashbery, these artists
had to guard against winding up Joining Andy Warhol and Viva and
the rest of the avant garde on The Tonight Show (Ashbery 1989:
392).
Working with major artists and theorists of Abstract
Expressionism and Pop Art made OHara a much more sophisticated
artist than was frequently realised in his time. His particular form of
process art combined the self-conscious and self-mocking camp of
Pop with the more self-congratulatory rigor of Abstract
Expressionism. This mixture produced a unique postmodern poetry
that seemed to register both irony and sincerity simultaneously. And,
as I will argue, this combination gives the OHara poem a new way of
approaching the art/life problematic.
A STEP AWAY FROM THEM
It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.
On
to Times Square, where the sign

Working in the Gap between Art and Life

41

blows smoke over my head, and higher

the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, bell' attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.
There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.
A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy. (OHara 1995: 257-8)

A Step Away from Them is both a meditation on death and the

fleeting nature of time (First/ Bunny died, then John Latouche,/ then
Jackson Pollock . . .) and a celebration of Coca-Cola, chocolate
malteds, ladies with poodles in fox furs, and hot (glistening, sweaty,
sexy) construction workers. I want to use this work, one of OHaras
best known I do this, I do that poems, to illustrate his poetics of
process which, like other process work, plays with the line between
action and object, life and art, without holding out the hope of some
final reconciliation.
Harold Rosenberg famously described the Abstract Expressionist
painting as a kind of autobiographical action:
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one
American painter after another as an arena in which to act

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Mark Silverberg
rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, or
express an object [] What was to go on the canvas was not
a picture but an event. (Rosenberg 1959: 25)

Rosenberg takes pains to explain that this painting should not be read
as a psychologically-oriented autobiography of the person but a
process-oriented transcription of the moment. Nonetheless, it is clear
that what is enacted on the canvas is an identity that precedes the
moment of expression thats why, particularly for Pollock or
DeKooning, the persona of the painter is so important to the quality of
the painting. OHaras I do this, I do that poems are similarly
performative events of the poets daily life, chronicles of personality
in process. It is the action of OHaras life and the movement of his
body that both inspires his poetry and constitutes its subject. The
poems enact Franks lunchtime strolls from his MoMA office on West
53rd to restaurants, bookstores, artists studios, nightclubs, parties,
movies, concerts, and other favourite spots. However, unlike the
Abstract Expressionists gesture or for that matter the selfrevelatory, confessional gestures of a Robert Lowell or Anne Sexton
OHaras poems are not portraits of a stable identity (an identity
which precedes writing), but rather postmodern studies of identity in
action/through language. OHaras is a performative self which exists
contingently in the time span of the lunch hour and the space between
West 53rd St. and Times Square (in this case).
As with Rauschenberg, neither art (the poem) nor life (the I)
is already made; both are in the process of becoming. The poem is in
large part about its own becoming the way it generates itself as it
goes along. What is interesting in OHara, contra Lowell or Sexton, is
not a sense of psychological depth (an identity anterior to the poem)
but a vibrancy of painterly surface, a surface which is both poem and
identity, art and life. Readers follow the poems and the poets
progress through a variety of routes. For example, we are offered an
excursus on the colour yellow (from the hot sun and the yellow
helmets, through the hum-coloured cabs, to the final glass of papaya
juice); we journey through a variety of textures (glistening torsos,
blowing smoke, falling water, ticking clocks); and, as the last item
suggests, we experience a brisk meditation on fleeting time (from the
passing of the lunch hour to the passing of friends). Whatever
personality readers may find in OHara (a poet who made
Personism not Personality his central credo) is mitigated by the
works high level of stylisation. This can be seen, for example, in
OHaras grammatical awkwardness: in his frequent use of misplaced

Working in the Gap between Art and Life

43

modifiers (. . . with yellow helmets on), fragmented clauses (. . .

And a chocolate malted), shifts in pronoun (I stop for a
cheeseburger at JULIETS CORNER. . . . and one has eaten and one
walks . . .) and shifts in tone (like the move from the colloquial to
iambic pentameter in But is the earth as full as life was full, of
them?). All these defamiliarising gestures make OHara seem less
a person (literally in the poem as Pollock would have it) than a
linguistically produced subject (an author-function as Foucault
would have it).
OHaras intention was to create poems (as he thought Pollock
created paintings) that were events as much as objects. Another way
of putting this is that he wanted to make poems that were not about
experiences but that were experiences and thus poems that brought
readers into the process. As he explained in Personism: A
Manifesto, his goal was to put the poem between two persons
instead of two pages (OHara 1995: 499) another metaphor for the
erasure of the boundary between art and life. So, how does he go
about doing this? We can see the poet labouring towards this effect
(though not very successfully) in an early poem of 1950 or 51:
Lets take a walk, you
and I in spite of the
weather if it rains hard
on our toes
well stroll like poodles
and be washed down a gigantic scenic gutter
that will be
exciting! (Poem, OHara 1995: 41)

While this early attempt reads more like bad A.A. Milne than typical
OHara, what we are witnessing is the makings of an important
strategy for transforming a poem into an event by presenting it as a
communal journey (between two persons instead of two pages). It
took some time for OHara to find more sophisticated and convincing
ways of bringing readers into the poem, but with Lunch Poems like
A Step Away from Them, The Day Lady Died, or Personal
Poem (1959) he had succeeded.
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

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Mark Silverberg
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 Im happy for a time and interested
I walk through the luminous humidity . . .
(Personal Poem, OHara 1995: 335)

These poems create effects of spontaneity, immediacy, and inclusion

which together contribute to the feeling of the poem as event rather
than object. One key realisation OHara came to over this period is
that the reader need not be addressed specifically, but instead the
manner of address could imply and thus produce a sense of intimacy.
OHara was among the first and the most successful poets at creating
the illusion of acquaintance by building an enticing community which
readers are invited to join. His poems, with their seemingly personal
talk, their striking use of proper names, their soliciting tone, and their
unique employment of gossip, tempt readers into the poets circle. In
Join the Club, a review of OHaras Selected Poems for the Village
Voice, Peter Schjeldahl foregrounds this quality of inclusiveness:
At Frank OHaras funeral in 1966 [] his friend Larry
Rivers said, There are two-hundred people in New York who
thought of Frank as their best friend. Vicariously, that
original group keeps expanding, as readers discover a poetry
more deliriously intimate than anything in English since
Whitman. (Elledge 1990: 71)

The delirium of this intimacy (Schjeldahls particularly apt adjective)

derives in part from OHaras constant confusion or conflation of
person and persona (the real Frank OHara and the subject of the
poems). On one hand, this blurring of the boundaries between art and
life helps produce the sense that what we are getting is not a poem but
a person. The subject and speaker in almost every work in OHaras
five hundred page Collected Poems is putatively the author himself
and indeed, as one reviewer noted, the entire volume can be read as
one long poem which is equivalent to our acquaintance with OHara
(Elledge 1990: 55). However, unlike Pollock and the Abstract
Expressionists, or for that matter the confessional poets, selfconscious artifice is at the top of OHaras list of commitments.
Readers are constantly reminded that what they are getting is not a
person but a text, not life but art, not the secret heart but a halfconcealed book of poems (by Pierre Reverdy or Frank OHara).
Contra Peter Brger, OHara doesnt take the possibility of closing

Working in the Gap between Art and Life

45

the gap between life and art seriously. Instead, he plays with the
possibility, thematising it in almost all his work: holding out
reconciliation with one hand only to withdraw it with the other.
OHaras life is everywhere and nowhere in the work; he is
constantly and enticingly deferred. His whole oeuvre might be better
seen as our pursuit of rather than our acquaintance with OHara, a
figure whose compelling presence presages its equally effective
absence.
The final trope of A Step Away From Them, the book of poems
in the pocket, can be read as a metaphor for the OHara authorfunction not the person but the existence, circulation, and
operation of the authors name in the poems (Foucault 1977: 124).
The figure offers the poets heart (itself a synecdoche for the
author), but concealed. Rather than on his sleeve, his heart is in his
pocket: we know where it is, but we cant quite reach it. Moreover,
OHaras heart is not quite his heart. The heart, that is, the
transcendental signified (meaning, soul, presence) is persistently
deferred. Its vehicle, appropriately, is Poems, but more troublingly
these poems are by somebody else so that the author/heart is no
longer self-identical. This last gesture (the sudden introduction of
Reverdy) stages another level of deferral by a poet who is always
hiding in plain sight, a poet who refuses to settle on art or life but
persistently works in the open gap between the two:
MY HEART
Im not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I dont prefer one strain to another
Id have the immediacy of a bad movie
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says Thats
not like Frank!, all to the good! I
dont wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart
you cant plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.
(O Hara 1995: 231)

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Mark Silverberg

Works Cited
Altieri, Charles
1979

Ashbery, John.
1989

Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry

during the 1960s. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP.

The Invisible Avant-Garde in Bergman, David (ed.) Reported

Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987. New York: Knopf: 389-95.

Elledge, Jim (ed.)

1990
Frank OHara: To Be True to a City. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Foster, Hal
1996

The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the

Century. October Books, MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass.

Foucault, Michel.
1977
What is an Author? (tr. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon)
in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews (ed. Donald F. Bouchard). New York: Cornell UP:
113-138.
Lehman, David.
1998

Jackson Pollock
1990

The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of

Poets. New York: Doubleday.

My Painting (Statement by Jackson Pollock) in Shapiro, David

and Cecile Shapiro (eds) Abstract Expressionism: A Critical
Record. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 356-57.

.
Murphy, Richard.
1999
Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the
Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
OHara, Frank.
1995

Perloff, Marjorie
1977

The Collected Poems of Frank OHara (ed. Donald Allen).

Berkeley: University of California Press. (orig. Knopf, 1971)

Frank OHara: Poet Among Painters. New York: George

Braziller.

Rosenberg, Harold
1959
The American Action Painters in The Tradition of the New.
New York: Horizon Press: 23-39.

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47

Rauschenberg, Robert
1996
Robert Rauschenberg Untitled Statement in Stiles, Kristin and
Peter Selz (eds) Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists
Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press: 321.
Schjeldahl, Peter
1981

Silverberg, Mark
2003

Zinnes, Harriet
1990

Join the Club Review of OHaras Selected Poems in Village

Voice (16 Dec 1981). Reprinted in Elledge (1990): 71.

Ashbery, OHara, and the Neo-Avant-Garde Manifesto in

Arizona Quarterly 59.1 (Spring): 136-65.

Review of The Collected Poems in Elledge (1990): 55-58.