JUST EXPERIMENTING WITH O’HARA, by Greg Hewett

Still thinking about the mainstreaming of gay culture, and more specifically, gay poetry, and I am struck by the fact that so many of the touchstone poets for younger poets today happen to be gay men:  Duncan, Ginsberg, Spicer, Blaser, Wieners, Ashbery, O’Hara.  This unbigoted interest and longing for influence is wonderful.  What this group of mid- to late-20^th century poets has in common, besides their sexuality, is an iconoclastic, avant-garde bent (as it were). However (and I hope I don’t sound like a curmudgeon), I worry a little when so much talk is about the experimental aspects of these poets, usually without even a mention of their gayness or queerness.  I of course don’t want to be reductive and proclaim that only gays should read gay poets, or that all readings of these poets should be queered (although one could argue that there might be a range of gay sensibilities that describe their individual poetics). But a little more acknowledgment might be good.  After all, Duncan went out on a very dangerous limb for all of us in the midst of the homophobic climate of World War II when he published the essay, “The Homosexual in Society,” in Politics.  This is said to be the first open essay on the subject.  We can’t forget that Ginsberg’s work was prosecuted and censored in large part for its gay content.  And O’Hara wrote many overtly gay poems, such as “Homosexuality,” “Joe’s Jacket,” and “You Are Gorgeous and I’m Coming,” as well as fey-gay poems like “Lana Turner Has Collapsed.”

O’Hara’s mock-manifesto, “Personism,” is a great example of the kind of crossover of avant-garde New York School poetics to a gay sensibility, or rather the sensibility embedded in the poetics.  The more formal concerns are pronounced with outrageousness:  “I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff.  You just go on your nerve.”  These concerns are spliced together with campy passages: “It [Personism] was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond).”  He ends with a wry brattiness or insouciance: “The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.”