Alexander Zitzner
“How can I even know what I’m doing in a poem without that other voice there?” -Matthew Rohrer Frank
Frank O’Hara would’ve been terrible at social distancing, but like us, he would’ve adapted. He’d befriended many bohemians comprising New York City’s “avant-garde” art scene in the 50s and mid-60s until his untimely death in 1966. Paging through a book of O’Hara’s will introduce a handful of these friends—John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, even Allen Ginsberg. It’s no surprise then that he loved parties—Picayunes, hor d'oeuvres, negronis, conversing & flirting over pop culture (O! it’s all so sexy!)—he just generally enjoyed company. From Bill Berkson’s A Frank O’Hara Notebook we know Koch described that O’Hara would, “become something of a germ in your life,” after befriending him (how endearing!), and that, “Frank worked every weekday at MoMA, and his friends used to drop in to visit him…”. This level of sociability would’ve run a high phone bill if he couldn’t leave his apartment.
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As I write this sentence, it’s Friday, March 27th, 4:27PM (almost happy hour!), and I am recovering from Monday’s nervous breakdown, and am about to partake in a new Wisconsin tradition: the take-home fish fry. More importantly, it would’ve been O’Hara’s 94th birthday today and I imagine how hard it would’ve been (and still is!) to celebrate such an occasion alone—especially in New York City. In two poems that come to mind he explored this loneliness —in one of his many poems entitled “Poem” [light clarity avocado salad in the morning], he addresses an “unknown” lover with, “though a block away you feel distant”, then in “Poem En Forme De Saw” he tells us that, “I wanted to be alone / which is why I went to the mill in the first place / now I am alone and I hate it.” In self-isolation I find myself experiencing these lines as if they happened to me, though luckily, O’Hara has a solution: PERSONISM: A MANIFESTO.
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Currently we can’t see our friends. Personism is then useful as a way to bridge the gap by writing poems to your friends. The last section of the manifesto is where this idea is revealed—the placing of a poem between the writer and another person—like a phone call—where the writer’s voice is conversing with that of another on paper. O’Hara did this to preserve romantic love, but to expand this idea, as my friend Katy Hackworthy has helped me understand, platonic love doesn’t hurt a poem. “What can we expect from Personism?”, he then wrote, “Everything, but we won’t get it,” and he’s correct. I subscribe to art critic John Berger’s idea that, “Poetry can repair no loss but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.” So to say we’ve been scattered. Emotionally, physically, financially, you name it—except Paul Celan once wrote, “here the distances decline,”—and my “here” is each poem written this way. The day by day, conversation to conversation attempt at reassembling hope. The strengthening of friendships through the voices of them inside my head