O'hara S Movie Poems example essay topic

Frank O'Hara: His Movie Poems and the Effects They Have On Society and Pop Culture In a world where people are judged not just by what they say but how they say it, American poet Francis (Frank) Russell O'Hara has been judged many times over the past fifty years. He has been ridiculed by such literary greats Jack Kerouac, who once said, "you " re ruining American Poetry, O'Hara" (Lehman 336), to critics like Marjorie Perloff (who wrote a biography of O'Hara in 1977 titled Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters), who readily admits in her revised introduction to this biography in 1997 that she misjudged O'Hara's poetry the first time around, but she now sees that O'Hara's "poetic has come of age" (xiv). Continuing with the criticism (both good and bad) that O'Hara had to deal with during his short life and the many critiques of his life and works after his tragic death, one must ask himself, who is Frank O'Hara and what is his poetry about? Does his poetry transcend the 1950s' New York Poet mentality, or is he (as Perloff warns us against doing) a "mere representation of fifties' queer sensibility" (xiv)? These questions can be difficult to answer, especially when one takes into consideration the "camp" label that has been placed upon O'Hara's poetry. But, is he "campy", and if he is, does his "campiness" make his poetry any less important or take away from the astute observations of the human condition that O'Hara was addressing?

The Answer: No. Walt Whitman once wrote: The question, O me! , so sad recurring-what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here-that life exists, and identity; That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. The last two lines clearly establish what O'Hara did with his poetry in regard the question that Whitman posed, he "contribute [d] a verse", a verse that is finally being read and listened to by more and more people, a verse that changed the structure, style and content of poetry forever, a verse that is slowly establishing O'Hara as one of the most influential and insightful poets of all times. Although he has often been referred to as a writer of "camp" poems, O'Hara's honesty, sincerity and unwavering stance in his beliefs allow for people to look past the "camp" to see the serious side that is O'Hara.

During his lifetime, O'Hara spent all of his time involved with the world around him and used what he saw to inform us of and critique the way we live. So, in order to prove the strength of O'Hara's words, in regard to his "campiness", one need not look any further than his movie poems. Within these poems, one can easily see O'Hara's infatuation with pop culture, but by looking below the surface, one will see that O'Hara was not just talking about actors and actresses-he was talking about the human condition and revealing it to us in the only way he believed we could understand or relate to his words: he did it through our own love and fascination with the silver screen. O'Hara once wrote, in a piece titled " Teens Quiz A Critic: "What's With Modern Art?" that: Pop art is not a reaction, necessarily, but at best a response to what we see in America around us, both on billboards, on theater marquees, in newspapers and on TV... it gives you the artist's interpretation of what we all see in daily life, rather than the non-objective artist's interpretation of what we all see in daily life. (O'Hara 29) O'Hara believed in these words and practiced them within the poems he wrote. He wanted his audiences to relate with what he was saying because they had been there or experienced the same / similar event.

O'Hara disliked many confessional poets of his time, primarily Robert Lowell, because he felt their "declarations of agony were transparently confessions [their] own moral superiority" (Lehman 343). O'Hara saw poets like Lowell as being "animated by the impulse to preach and to mourn" (348), but O'Hara understood that poetry was meant to praise the things in the world that reward one's regard" (348); simply put, O'Hara said, "It's my duty to be attentive" (348). Joe Lesueur, O'Hara's friend and long time roommate, said, in regard to O'Hara's need to use Hollywood in his works, that the "Golden Age-roughly the period from 1930 to 1945, which corresponds with the childhood, adolescence, and early youth of Frank's... generation... entangle [ed] [his] formative years with Hollywood's golden years" (72), showing that an entire generation gained its ideals, morals and general attitudes about life from movies. So, it is easy to see why O'Hara relied on film in so many of his poems-films were his common bond to all people, not just his intimate group of friends.

However, before delving into O'Hara's movie poems and showing the importance they had to the people of the 50's and 60's as well as today's society, one must first have a strong understanding of what is meant by O'Hara's poems being considered "camp", and if that label can be seen as a positive, or if the label is solely negative, forcing one to prove that O'Hara's movie poems may contain elements of "camp" but, overall, they should in no one fall into that category. "Camp", as defined by Susan Sontag, in her essay "Notes on 'Camp,' " is the "love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration" (275). She also says that prior to her essay, "camp" had never truly been discussed because talking about it and defining it in regards to works of art is the act of betraying it. (275) But how can something like O'Hara's poems be defined as "campy" if it cannot be discussed without destroying the term that is being created to describe his poems? Simple. Sontag writes, "if the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves" (275-6).

So, if discussing O'Hara's poems as "camp" leads to a "moral or spiritual improvement", the term may be used. However, this explanation of "camp" comes across a bit abstract and hard to grasp; therefore, by looking deeper into Sontag's essay, one finds that she provides a clearer, more applicable definition by saying that "camp" can be see as "one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon... in terms of the degree of the artifice, of stylization" (277). Sontag goes on to say that "camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular kind of style... love of the exaggerated... of things-being-what-they-are-not" (279). Taking this definition, one can start to see what the word means when applied to the arts-camp is the overblown, the theatrical; camp is the piece that relies upon artificial concepts, manmade objects that are brought to life and elevated above the natural; camp is our undying affection for films like Flash Gordon and Space Balls; camp is the Stephen King type novels that continually bring in millions of dollars to their authors. Camp is unnatural, or as Sontag puts it, "Nothing in nature can be campy" (279). Okay, so if camp is unnatural, O'Hara's movie poems (because they deal with film (unnatural or fictitious events played out before our eyes by actors (people portrayed to be someone / something he / she is not) ) ) O' Hara's poems should naturally be viewed as campy.

But placing this label upon one's work cannot be as simple as that. So, in moving forward, Sontag argues that camp is the "triumph of the epicene style" and that "life is not stylish. Neither is nature... [and] today's Camp taste effaces nature, or else contradicts it outright" (280). Taking this argument into consideration and applying it to O'Hara's movie poems would mean that these works deal with a sexless style that wants to wipe out or eradicate nature all together. Camp is also defined as resting on "innocence", as being based on seriousness, but a "seriousness that fails"; as being the "spirit of extravagance"; as attempting to do "something extraordinary"; as proposing itself "seriously, but [that] cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is too much" (283-4). Listening to Sontag and applying all these qualities to O'Hara's poetry when labeling it as camp completely contradicts what he is trying to do when he wrote in "Person ism" that "you just go on your nerve" , doing what one feels is right-the most natural act a person could take part in.

There is no "extravagance" in those words, there is no "innocence", there is no attempt to disavow nature. What there is in those words is a Whitman esque or Thoreauvian sense of return to nature, return to oneself, find one's true nature. O'Hara's movie poems might have a bit of camp to them by being a "glorification of 'character' " or containing an "aesthetic experience of the world" , but O'Hara's poems are a lot deeper than the labeling that is often placed upon them. And as Sontag admits, "Not only is Camp not necessarily bad art, but are which... merits the most serious admiration and study" , but the "canon of Camp can change" . Say based on this notion, I will now argue that Frank O'Hara's movie poems, although containing some Camp elements and possibly being seen as campy for the time period in which they were written, have transcended the "camp" definition and should no longer be discussed in that light. Robert Duncan wrote in "The Homosexual in Society" that "almost co-incident with the first declaration for homosexual rights was the growth of a cult of homosexual superiority to the human race; the cultivation of a secret language, the camp" (320).

Duncan establishes here that the term "camp" was created to give homosexuals a voice "loaded with contempt for the human" (320). If Camp is a word used to separate homosexuals from other people, to give them their own unique language, why does O'Hara's movie poems not have this "I am gay, I am better than you because I have a greater insight into the world around me" attitude? Easy. His poems are not "camp". David Lehman, author of the Last Avant-Garde and chronicler of much of O'Hara's life and poetry, argues in favor of O'Hara having a "camp sensibility" and that being a positive. Lehman bases this "compliment" on O'Hara's use of Lana Turner in his poem "Steps" and his unnamed work that beings with the line "Lana Turner has collapsed because he believes these poems show O'Hara's passion for movies in regard to Sontag's view that camp writers see the world "not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization" .

Lehman continues quoting Sontag and includes that "homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard-and the most articulate audience of camp... and movie criticism... is probably the greatest popularizer of Camp taste today, because most people still go to the movies in a high-spirit and unpretentious way" . So bases upon this argument, because O'Hara is gay, loves movies and writes poems, he is automatically campy. Why can it not be that O'Hara shared John Updike's view of Lana Turner in the fact that she with Hedy Lamar r were "considered the two most beautiful women in movies-that is to say, in all America" and through this "natural" beauty, O'Hara viewed her as holding traits that were uncharacteristic in most people-traits that he deemed good and pure, and being someone who should represent more to the American public than just an actress. In O'Hara's untitled poem (written about Turner), he refers to a headline that read, "LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!" (449). Now, this line can convey multiple meanings-the first and most literal being that Turner has fallen down. She could have tripped on a red carpet outside of a movie premier, fallen down the steps of her home and been injured, but looking at the line in this way shows the campy feel that people attribute to O'Hara.

They see him as being solely interested in the lives of these "gods and goddesses of the silver screen". But if this were the case, wouldn't O'Hara focus a bit more on where she collapsed, why and what happened to her in his poem-one would have to think so. However, O'Hara does not delve more deeply into Turner's "collapse"; so he must be making reference to this incident on a deeper level. O'Hara is using Turner in this poem as a representation of the larger part of society, which can be seen in the poem's last line: "oh Lana Turner we love you get up" . The first aspect of this line that shows O'Hara is not attempting to be campy is his choice to not capitalize the word 'oh. ' If he had capitalized this word, it would have made the sentence more dramatic-showing that unnecessary emphasis that camp writers use, but O'Hara chooses to keep out the capitalization as well as all natural punctuation, allowing the line to carry a more somber tone, one that evokes the futility that O'Hara sees in society, for he knows that Turner will not get up.

O'Hara has chosen to use Turner's collapse to symbolize the fall of humankind-a fall that does not effect only those who act "perfectly disgraceful", but a fall that catches up with those that are full of grace as well as idolized and revered by those around them. Turner's collapse solidifies for O'Hara the terminal condition our society is in when even our heroes and icon began to fade away. Another way that this poem can be viewed revolves around the fact that the poem was composed as an "antithetical response to [Lowell's] 'Skunk Hour' " . If O'Hara felt that Lowell's poem was too self involved, too full of "didacticism, symbolism, and grandiose egoism who likens the welfare of the body politic to the state of his psyche" (Lehman 348) and wanted to attack Lowell's "moral superiority" and show the human condition is larger than one man's life, how can this poem be Camp? Yes, the poem deals with Hollywood and a beautiful actress as its backdrop, but the poem, as a whole, should not be written off as the "familiar O'Hara persona, the old-fashioned, mercurial, and sometimes bitchy camp" (350), because, while this poem might be "bitchy" in reference to Lowell, O'Hara is making a stand and a statement against poets like Lowell that use their singular experiences to represent all of the world, rather than using the world-or objects and people the world can actually relate too, to represent the world. In O'Hara's other poem that mentions Lana Turner, "Steps", he uses the "where's Lana Turner / she's out eating", but the poem doesn't focus on her like the previous one.

This poem focuses on the state of New York, which is established by the line, "How funny you are New York" (370), showing that he noticing something out of the ordinary about his city. From this point, O'Hara moves into a bit of a personal narrative about his day writing, "I go by to check a slide and I say / that painting's not so blue", which equates the color of the painting to his current mood as well as the mood of New York. O'Hara, himself not being too blue, shows that although life is not perfect, like the "Pittsburgh Pirates", we are "all winning / we " re alive" . With this poem, O'Hara makes references to the Pirates winning and Lana Turner eating out somewhere (again the where is not important) to show that life continues to go on. "All those liars have left the UN" and a "gay couple/... moved to the country for fun" , and that is where we find ourselves-sitting on the "little box... out on the sidewalk" , drinking beer and waiting to be knocked down. O'Hara says that life may not be fair, but "oh god it's wonderful" and he gets his point across to his readers in terms they can understand, using typical, everyday American vernacular and grounding his example in actresses, sports, politics and people's sexual orientations-all issues that society deals with on a daily basis.

O'Hara is not trying to do anything "extraordinary" here, he is making a valid point about the fact that our lives are not always filled with excitement or loneliness, and people could see this point if they would refrain from seeing this poem as comical and overly campy. Another group of O'Hara's poems that have been widely criticized for their "campy" material are his James Dean poems. Critics like Sam A strachan, of The New Republic, attacked O'Hara for implying that Hollywood or society at large was responsible for the untimely death" of Dean. There were even ordinary people like Turner Cassity, who wrote a letter to Life magazine, that stated that "the James Dean necrophilia has penetrated even the upper levels of culture" , implying that O'Hara's admiration for Dean was a morbid and sick act that Cassity believed people of "high culture" should be above.

In spite of these attacks, O'Hara's fondness for Dean shows that (although he might be highly excited and one of 1950's high-minded intellectuals, who knew about the arts) he must have seen something in Dean, his life and his works that people like Paul Goodman (who said, "What does [O'Hara] think he's doing, writing poems about dead movie stars) obviously could not see. According to Joe Lesueur, O'Hara was "crazy about [Dean], like his looks, moody personality, overwrought style of acting-plus, of course, the pathos he elicited" . Lesueur goes on to say that it was during the time that O'Hara started writing the Dean poems that most of O'Hara's poems became full of "camp and gay overtones" . But the view of the Dean poems being primarily "gay" and "campy" truly misses Dean's deeper, more point that he's trying to get across. To many people who disliked Dean, mainly Elia Kazan-the man who directed Dean in East of Eden, the young actor was seen as " 'self-pitying, self-dramatizing and good-for-nothing,' just like the teenage heroes he played in his films" . Many people of the time period (many the older generation) felt that Dean's films promoted the "mistaken idea that parents are the enemy and that kids are all sensitive and misunderstood" , but O'Hara saw Dean and his films differently.

Just like Dean's character Cal, in East of Eden, who had a "father he could never please", Dean "too had such a father" , and O'Hara could relate to this type of relationship by "identifying with James Dean's Cal, whose confusion seemed more that of an incipient gay adolescent than a straight kid growing up problems" . O'Hara used his Dean poems to praise someone whom he believed fought against all social norms. Dean was known for hating "phonies and studio bosses and the Hollywood game" much the way O'Hara disliked artists and poets who were untrue to themselves and the world around them. In "For James Dean", O'Hara begins with the lines:" Welcome me, if you will, / as the ambassador of a hatred / who knows its cause" . Here O'Hara is not being campy, he is clearly stating that he, like Dean and many others, have been misunderstood and hated for the way in which they have chosen to live and act-basically, hated for being true to their natural selves. O'Hara goes on to attack God, the "creator" of this society of hate, stating: He has banged into your wall of air, your hubris, racing toward your heights and you have cut him from your table which is built, how unfairly for us!

Not on trees but on clouds. These lines are very reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's "Victory comes late" when she writes, "Was God so economical? / His table's spread too high for us / Unless we dine on tip-toe" . By addressing God, or the beliefs that society holds to be true in regard to religion, O'Hara criticizes the way that we are supposedly created in "God's image" but we are not allowed to be like him or sit with him.

God's Table is "unfairly" constructed for "us", making it difficult to ever truly be god-like in the way one lives or acts in life. O'Hara sees the mentality of judging people for being different as a tremendous problem within our world, especially in the newly grounded religious 1950's America that had finally returned to God after the depression and World War II. O'Hara also uses his poem to mock those of us who believe we are better than those around us. Those who consider themselves the "high art" crowd who would never put themselves in a theatre to watch a Dean Film.

O'Hara writes, "is it true that you high ones, celebrated among amorous flies, hated the prodigy and invention of [Dean's] nerves" ? O'Hara wants to know if these people hated Dean simply because he was different and lived his life the way that felt right, not the way that society advised. In regard to the way Dean lived, it was once said that he "threw himself on the world like a starved animal", meeting those around him "with the same urgent probing curiosity: 'Here I am. Here are you' " , which is much the same way O'Hara approached those around him to share the many poems he carried stuffed into his pockets. O'Hara believed that Dean, as the rebel struggling against society and parents that did not fully understand him, represented the larger portion of society. We are all at times misunderstood and taken for granted, but O'Hara wanted to wake us up to that fact.

He could have addressed this issue without the use of James Dean, but as mentioned previously, O'Hara relied on actors and Hollywood in his poems because film is the common equalizer of all people. We all go to the movies; we know the names of actors and actresses (both past and present), so by O'Hara incorporating the world of the silver screen into his writing make his writing campy? No. What it does is show O'Hara's intelligence in knowing how to get and hold our attention and tap into what we know. Like O'Hara says in the final stanza of "For James Dean,"I am the dead man's voice, / stammering, a little in the earth" . O'Hara's placing of himself "in the earth" makes himself one with all life, "stammering", but still speaking the words that we need to hear.

And to reiterate Sontag, "Nothing in nature can be campy", and so, by O'Hara grounding himself in the earth-the source of all nature-he cannot be seen as campy. Andrew Epstein writes in his article " 'I Want to be at least as Alive as the Vulgar': Frank O'Hara's Poetry and Cinema" that O'Hara "neither wholeheartedly embraces 'low' art nor does he... mock pop culture's vulgarity, but rather conveys a complex mixture of ambivalent feelings toward cinema" demanding "our attention because of its combination of beauty and baseness, motion and permanence, illusion and 'reality' " . One can see in these words that O'Hara's movie poems are not about praising films and discussing how wonderful they are, he is merely using films as his platform to address the world around him. In the movie poems, O'Hara "suggests that perhaps the true 'myths' of contemporary life are actually figures like James Dean and Lana Turner" , because like all of us, they to have normal, everyday problems. Why should people turn to ancient mythology when discussing life, especially when many people are not familiar with this form of mythology and the gods of ancient myth are not real? Poetry should have to be grounded in ancient myth-unless it wants to be "high art" and unattainable to the majority-and that is what O'Hara is doing with his movie poems; he is showing the world that the people in Hollywood, the ones we see everyday, are just like us.

They have flaws and, for that reason (and because their names are as common in American households as 'milk,' O'Hara feels a sense of duty to incorporate these names into his works. One of his most famous and widely anthologized poems dealing with Hollywood is "To the Film Industry in Crisis". This poem has been read by many as his campiest poem off all because of the excessive references to actors and actresses. The poem, to many, is seen as a catalogue of memories that O'Hara has about movies he knows and that all he is doing is showing the impact that film has had on his life. But, this poem is so much more. As Epstein states, "the cinematic world provides a temporary, albeit illusory alternative to the realm of suffering, transience, and dying.

The very human and fragile universe O'Hara's poetry so often confronts" . O'Hara believes that Hollywood gives tremendous insight into our world and its many ills. During the 1950's, the big screen was threatened by the small screen (television) and many believed that TV was "robbing the film industries of its audiences" . If TV consumed the movie world, O'Hara saw that we would be losing a large part of what helped in molding our outlooks on life-the silver screen. So, in "To the Film Industry in Crisis", O'Hara tells of how "in times of crisis, we must all decide again whom we love". This line, because of the fact that O'Hara's getting at our love of the film industry appears a bit campy, but when one looks at film as being the one constant, the one aspect of life all people have knowledge of, the campiness wanes.

We cannot all turn to the "Catholic Church" or religion in general.