Table Of ContentA Study of the Urban Poetics of
Frank O’Hara
Focusing on the poetry and cultural practice of Frank O’Hara, the great
urban poet in the New York School during the 1950s and 1960s, the title
explores the interwoven relationship between his urban poetics and the urban
culture of New York, seeking to shed light on the poetic concept and its cul-
tural relevance.
The poetry writing of Frank O’Hara is deeply rooted in and nourished by
his urban experience as a metropolitan and an active participant in the
vibrant cultural scene in New York. Therefore, an investigation on the inter-
active dynamics between his poetry writing and the urban culture he helped
shape offers a feasible approach to his urban poetics, which serves as a start-
ing point for further study on the literary representation of European and
American urban culture. In the eight chapters, the authors look into the gen-
esis, theoretical constitution, interface with culture and aesthetics of O’Hara’s
urban poetics, and also the philosophical foundation, literary ethics, special
expression, and representation as well as the reception of modernity and
postmodernity in his poetics.
The title will appeal to scholar, students, and general readers interested in
American literature, poetry, and urban culture, especially Frank O’Hara and
the New York School.
Wang Xiaoling is Professor of English at Shanghai International Studies
University, China. Her research is primarily focused on contemporary
American literature and cultural studies.
Wang Yuzhi is an associate professor at East China Normal University,
China, specializing in English and American literature.
Zheng Mingyuan is an associate professor at North China University of
Water Resources and Electric Power, China, specializing in Western culture
and literature.
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A Thematic Exploration of Twentieth-Century Western Literature
Jiang Chengyong
Oral Epic Traditions in China and Beyond
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A Study of the Urban Poetics of Frank O’Hara
Wang Xiaoling, Wang Yuzhi and Zheng Mingyuan
After Postmodernism
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A Study of the Urban Poetics
of Frank O’Hara
Wang Xiaoling, Wang Yuzhi and
Zheng Mingyuan
Translated by Cheng Zhong,
Wang Xiaoling
This book project is sponsored by Shanghai Pujiang Program
(19PJC091).
First published in English 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
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business
© 2022 Wang Xiaoling, Wang Yuzhi and Zheng Mingyuan
Translated by Cheng Zhong, Wang Xiaoling
The right of Wang Xiaoling, Wang Yuzhi and Zheng Mingyuan to be
identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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This English version is published by arrangement with Shanghai
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wang, Xiaoling, 1971- author. | Wang, Yuzhi, 1962- author. | Zheng,
Mingyuan, 1980- author.
Title: A study of the urban poetics of Frank O’Hara / Wang Xiaoling, Wang
Yuzhi and Zheng Mingyuan.
Other titles: 880-01 Fu lan keAo ha la cheng shi shi xue yan jiu. English
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series:
China perspectives - literature | “This book project is partially
sponsored by Shanghai Pujiang Scholars Fund.” | Includes bibliographical
references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021057565 (print) | LCCN 2021057566 (ebook) | ISBN
9781032267425 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032267593 (paperback) | ISBN
9781003289791 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: O’Hara, Frank, 1926-1966--Criticism and interpretation. |
City and town life in literature. | American poetry--20th
century--History and criticism. | Poets, American--20th
century--Biography. | New York (N.Y.)--In literature. | LCGFT: Literary
criticism.
Classification: LCC PS3529.H28 Z95 2022 (print) | LCC PS3529.H28 (ebook)
| DDC 811/.54--dc23/eng/20220208
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021057565
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021057566
ISBN: 978-1-032-26742-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-26759-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-28979-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289791
Typeset in Times New Roman
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Contents
Preface vi
1 The Origin of Frank O’Hara’s Urban Poetics 1
WANG XIAOLING
2 Theoretical Basis of Frank O’Hara’s Urban Poetics 38
WANG XIAOLING AND WANG YUZHI
3 The Culture of Frank O’Hara’s Urban Poetics 68
WANG XIAOLING AND WANG YUZHI
4 The Aesthetics of Frank O’Hara’s Urban Poetics 97
ZHENG MINGYUAN AND WANG XIAOLING
5 Philosophy in Frank O’Hara’s Urban Poetics 126
ZHENG MINGYUAN AND WANG XIAOLING
6 Literary Ethics in Frank O’Hara’s Urban Poetics 148
ZHENG MINGYUAN AND WANG XIAOLING
7 Space in Frank O’Hara’s Urban Poetics 167
WANG XIAOLING AND WANG YUZHI
8 Modernity, Postmodernity, and Last Words 187
WANG XIAOLING, WANG YUZHI AND ZHENG MINGYUAN
Appendix: A Short Chronology of Frank O’Hara 215
Bibliography 217
Index 224
Preface
Frank O’Hara (1926–1966), a Hopwood Prize winner (1951), was one of the
greatest and most influential urban poets in the New York School during the
1950s and 1960s. In his poetry and cultural practices, O’Hara has absorbed
various elements of New York’s urban culture and cultivated a unique style
for his own urban poetics. The portrayal of New York City in O’Hara’s
poetry is, as evidenced by the existing scholarship on his urban poetics, not
only a representation of the spiritual appeal and pluralistic life cherished by
American urban residents but also a reflection about the glamours, transfor-
mations, and complexities of the urban culture in America. By exploring the
connections between Frank O’Hara’s urban poetics and New York culture,
this book aims to reveal the theoretical premises, aesthetic principles and
philosophical reasonings of his urban poetics, deepen the multi-perspective
study of urban poetry, Modernist and, Postmodernist literature, and the
urban ethics addressed in his poetry, and discuss the vitality, diversity, and
complexity of New York’s urban culture.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) believes that culture is by
no means a late attribute of human beings, nor is it one of the many attri-
butes of human beings, as people are always born in a certain culture and are
cultured, and constructing culture as well. It was New York City that nour-
ished O’Hara’s poetics with various ingredients of postmodern urban cul-
ture. In the meantime, however, the poet reciprocated the favor by illuminating
New York as the City with a culture full of poetic charms and implications.
In recent years, more and more effort has been made, both in and outside
China, to compile and publish O’Hara’s poetry, whereas the study of his
poetry seems to have just begun. The interest in getting to know O’Hara bet-
ter through his poems, paintings, music, movies, museum appreciation, and
other artistic practices has been quickly spreading among readers as well as
critics, but scholarship on O’Hara’s urban poetics and its interactions with
New York’s postmodern culture, especially the kind of critical engagement
based on certain theoretical framework, is still, frankly, quite rare.
At the time of his death, O’Hara was better known for his work in the art
world than his work as a leading figure in the New York School. With a fame
of “also a poet,” his poetry attracted only sporadic and limited critical
engagement and analysis. After his untimely death, a series of poetic
Preface vii
collections and commentaries introduced O’Hara’s poems to a much broader
audience. Donald Allen edited The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1971)
and John Ashbery compiled Selected Poems, which collected some of
O’Hara’s poems. Paul Poroll’s The Poem in Its Skin (1968), reviewed the char-
acteristics and significance of Frank O’Hara’s early poetry. Alan Feldman
added some newly discovered poems and supplementary discussions to his
book Frank O’Hara (1979). In his book Frank O’Hara, Standing Still and
Walking in New York (1975), Donald Allen compared O’Hara’s poetry with
New York culture for the first time, and explored O’Hara and his poems from
the standpoint of cultural criticism. Toward the end of the twentieth century,
in City Poet, The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (1993), Brad Gooch fur-
ther explores O’Hara’s poetics within the context of the postmodern urban
environment. However, it is Marjorie Perloff, a professor at Stanford
University, who did the groundbreaking work on O’Hara and, almost single-
handedly, put him on the map first and then in the canon of American poetry
by systematically reviewing his poetics and artistic practices, collecting his
letters, interviews, and poems, and publishing her book, Frank O’Hara, Poet
Among Painters (1977), which triggered a climax of O’Hara studies in the
United States.
Today, most O’Hara scholars regard him as a poet who fully captured the
essence of urban culture, vividly represented urban dynamics in poetry,
expanded the space for poetic creativity, and shared his intriguing interpreta-
tions of urban culture with readers and critics of poetry. Thanks to the inno-
vative efforts of O’Hara and other urban poets, the poetry of the New York
School has evolved into a unique poetic genre that delineates with the attri-
butes, charms, complexities, and challenges of postmodern culture in cities.
As scholars around the world continue to expand their research on O’Hara’s
poetics, more and more scholars in China have discovered, with great aston-
ishment and admiration, the defiance against the conventions in art and life,
the expression of new temperament in urban environment, and the power of
an inquisitive voice in his poetry. In the 1990s, the translation of O’Hara’s
poetry began in China, but it was very selective and infrequent. So far, the
total number of translations that appeared in journals is less than 20. As of
today, there is not a single selection of O’Hara’s poetry published in Chinese.
His poems only appeared in anthologies, such as The 20th Century American
Poetry (1995) edited by Zhang Ziqing et al. According to the China National
Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), only a dozen or so articles on O’Hara
have appeared in prestigious Chinese CSSCI journals, such as Foreign
Literatures, Foreign Literature Studies, Contemporary Foreign Literature, and
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, and these articles written by the
authors of this book as the preliminary outcomes of their research projects
on O’Hara. Since the 1990s, there has been only one master’s thesis from a
major university in China that has studied O’Hara’s poems, namely, Yu
Pengyuan’s “On Action Painting Notions in Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems.”
However, it never specifically focuses on O’Hara’s urban poetics. Besides,
there is no monograph on O’Hara. Occasionally, a critical assessment of
viii Preface
O’Hara has appeared in anthologies. In her American Contemporary Poetry
in the Perspective of Postmodernism(2005), Wang Zhuo, a scholar from
Shangdong Normal University (China), merely offers a brief introduction to
and some comments on him. The Chinese scholarship on O’Hara is, by and
large, limited to the basic introduction to his main works, and its impact is
seldom, if ever, strong enough to initiate a sustainable wave of enthusiasm
within the academia. The translation of his poems has yet to be continued.
At present, though, only some real enthusiasts have tried to translate O’Hara’s
poems online, and scholars have not paid much attention to his achievements
in music, painting, museum appreciation and film. Clearly, these are also key
parts of his career and legacy that O’Hara Scholars in China should delve
into in earnest and cultivate in depth.
Based on a full understanding of the existing scholarship on O’Hara at
home and abroad, this book intends to explore O’Hara’s urban poetics in the
context of the space and connotations of New York’s urban culture by prob-
ing deeper into O’Hara’s life and career in the City, examining the way in
which O’Hara nourished his urban poetics with various ingredients of urban
culture, showcasing the feature and vitalities of New York’s urban culture,
and analyzing the role and impact of O’Hara’s urban poetics upon New York
culture. To grasp a clear understanding of the significance of his poetics, one
must delve into the reciprocity or, rather, interaction between O’Hara’s poet-
ics and the urban culture in New York because his urban poetics is deeply
immersed in and constantly energized by the development of the postmodern
culture in New York. In turn, it has exerted a great inspiration for a new wave
of literary innovations among writers and artists whose avant-garde work in
different creative and artistic forms brought new attributes and glamours to
the urban culture in the City. Therefore, investigating the interactive dynam-
ics between O’Hara’s poetry writing and the new urban culture he had helped
to establish in New York could be a very feasible approach in the study of his
urban poetics, and it might work well as a new starting point in studying the
literary representations of European and American urban culture. Hopefully,
this book, the first monograph on the New York School poet Frank O’Hara,
written by Chinese scholars, will inspire Chinese literary critics, master’s, and
Ph.D. students of literature in China, and literary scholars in the West to pay
more attention to O’Hara’s poetry and other uncultivated areas of contem-
porary American urban poetics as well.
With the above considerations in mind, the authors conducted the research
on O’Hara’s urban poetics based on the experience and expertise gleaned
from our teaching and studying American literature and culture in the last
two decades in order to present, a systematic and in-depth understanding of
the significance of O’Hara’s urban poetics. This eight-chapter book starts
with a review of the relationship between O’Hara and the evolution of New
York’s urban culture. The first chapter summarizes the ideological origin and
the connotation of O’Hara’s urban poetics; the second chapter explores the
theoretical construction of O’Hara’s urban poetics, and defines the concept
of the literary theory of O’Hara’s “Personism”; the third chapter analyzes
Preface ix
the interactive relevance of Frank O’Hara, New York’s urban culture and
popular culture in America, plus the artistic strategies with which O’Hara
integrated poetry, painting and music in writing; the fourth chapter studies
the aesthetic principles of O’Hara’s urban poetics based on the three-dimen-
sions of urban consciousness, the aesthetic characteristics of urban writing
and the other odes to urban experience; the fifth chapter analyzes the philo-
sophical heritage of O’Hara’s urban writing; the sixth chapter focuses on
urban ethics and morality, reveals the urban ethical culture reflected in
O’Hara’s urban poetics; the seventh chapter discusses the artistic context of
multi-dimensional space, urban stream consciousness and urban illusions
presented by O’Hara’s urban poetry; the eighth chapter examines the repre-
sentations of modernity and postmodernity in O’Hara’s urban poetry. The
“last words’’ in this chapter summarize the artistic characteristics of O’Hara’s
poetry writing and cultural practices in connection with the literary theory
and development of postmodern urban culture. We try to show the common-
ality between O’Hara’s urban poetics and the current stylistic innovation
theory, namely, dynamic balance, mutual penetration, and time–space exten-
sibility. Since the translation of O’Hara’s poetry had not been published in
China, the Chinese version of all the lines quoted from O’Hara’s poetry in
this book is translated by the authors. As widely acknowledged, poetry trans-
lation is a tough job, whereas it is even tougher to understand and translate
O’Hara’s poetry due to its extensive and highly experimental postmodern
features. Evidently, it is still a daunting challenge to produce an ideal transla-
tion. To this end, this book aims to inspire more young scholars and transla-
tors to translate O’Hara’s poetry and study his urban poetics.
The study of O’Hara’s urban poetics is an extremely ambitious proposi-
tion. Its occurrence and development are influenced by many different fac-
tors such as the derivation of the theoretical framework and the play of the
cultural functions run through all aspects of Frank O’Hara’s poetry; it breaks
through the conventional boundaries of poetry writing as a traditional
medium for narrow moral preaching and entertainment. It goes without say-
ing, though that this book is far from flawless and, therefore, needs to be
supplemented by valuable contributions from more writers and scholars. We
wish it could serve as a modest spur to induce more meaningful engagements,
in multidisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives, with the aesthetic prin-
ciples of O’Hara’s urban poetics.
This project is the result of collaborative innovations by Wang Xiaoling
from Shanghai International Studies University (China), Wang Yuzhi from
East China Normal University, and Zheng Mingyuan from North China
University of Water Resources and Electric Power. Wang Xiaoling is responsible
for the overall thinking of the book and the preparation of the outline,
references, and the revision and final validation of the book. She wrote the
preface, the first, second, the third, seventh, and eighth chapters, and c ooperated
to complete the writing of the fourth, fifth, sixth chapters, the ‘‘last words’’ in
the eighth chapter, translated some of O’Hara’s poems, and compiled the
appendix. Wang Yuzhi collaborated on completing the second, third, eighth
