The Work of Frank O'Hara and Painting.

DATE June 28, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Russell Ferguson and David Lehman talk about the life
and poetry of Frank O'Hara
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

One of the most mythologized periods in American art, the New York school of
the '50s and '60s, is the subject of an exhibition that uses poet Frank O'Hara
as the focal point. O'Hara is celebrated for turning the prose of everyday
life into lyric poetry. He was also a curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
Many of his friends were abstract expressionists or figurative painters,
friends like Larry Rivers, Willem de Kooning, Alfred Leslie and Franz Kline.
The exhibit brings together paintings by O'Hara's friends, including portraits
of O'Hara and paintings that incorporate O'Hara's poetry. The show originated
at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and is now at the Parish Art
Museum in South Hampton, New York.

My guest, Russell Ferguson, is the curator and author of the companion book.
My other guest, David Lehman, is a poet, who wrote about O'Hara in his book
"The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets."

Let's start with one of the first things you see in the exhibit, the O'Hara
poem "My Heart." Here's David Lehman.

Mr. DAVID LEHMAN (Poet): `I'm not going to cry all the time, nor shall I
laugh all the time. I don't prefer one strain to another. I'd 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 "That's not like Frank," all to the good. I don't
wear brown and gray suits all the time, do I? No. I wear work shirts to the
opera often. I want my feet to be bare. I want my face to be shaven. And my
heart--you can't plan on the heart, but the better part of it, my poetry, is
open.'

GROSS: That really is a great poem. Thanks for reading it. David Lehman,
I'm wondering if you think that the poets and the abstract expressionists who
were friends were working through similar issues in different mediums?

Mr. LEHMAN: Yes, they were to a certain extent. And O'Hara was really the
connecting force between the poets and the painters. In a social sense, he
brought them together, and in an aesthetic sense. I think the idea at the
time was that you didn't subscribe to one theoretical approach and
consistently adhere to that always. You know, you were willing to try
anything and to reverse yourself. At the very moment when Jackson Pollock and
Willem de Kooning and Motherwell and Reinhardt and Gottlieb and Rothko had
sort of conquered the world and abstract expressionism reigned supreme, you
had these other painters, the ones who were really closer friends of O'Hara
and his poet buddies, who were doing something very old-fashioned and old hat,
representational figurative painting. So that was possible to do, too, and
that representational painting showed the influence of abstract expressionism.
It had been nourished by that example.

The composer Morton Feldman said that O'Hara was like a Fred Astaire with the
whole art world his Ginger Rogers, which was a really nice comparison, for
what O'Hara did personally with his energy, with his uptown job at the Museum
of Modern Art and all of his downtown buddies, getting them all to work
together.

GROSS: Russell Ferguson, do you want to add anything about the connection
between what the painters were doing and what the poets were doing, and issues
they were each addressing in their own mediums?

Mr. RUSSELL FERGUSON (Curator): O'Hara wrote a wonderful poem in connection
with his friend, Mike Goldberg's painting "Sardines." And the poem is called
"Why I Am Not A Painter." And he does get into, I think, in a very complex
way the--he wants there to be a comparison between the act of painting and the
act of writing poetry, but at the same time, he acknowledges that they are
different endeavors and that, in a way, as a poet, you're always locked into
language, which, in a way, is always going to be referential in a way that a
brushload of paint thrown across a canvas, in a way, especially at that time,
it was felt could really escape from that kind of referentiality. So there
was a close, personal connection and they wanted the same kind of immediacy
often in the work, but I think O'Hara also recognized that there are
fundamental differences, of course, too.

GROSS: Well, David Lehman, why don't you read Frank O'Hara's poem "Why I Am
Not A Painter"?

Mr. LEHMAN: "Why I Am Not A Painter." `I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well, for instance,
Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. "Sit down and have a
drink," he says. I drink. We drink. I look up. "You have sardines in it."
"Yes, it needed something there." "Oh." I go, and the days go by and I drop
in again. The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by; I drop in.
The painting is finished. "Where's sardines?" All that's left is just
letters. "It was too much," Mike says. But me, one day I am thinking of a
color--orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon, it is a whole page
of words, not lines. Then, another page. There should be so much more, not
of orange; of words, of how terrible orange is, and life. Days go by. It is
even in prose. I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's 12 poems. I call it "Oranges." And one day in a gallery, I
see Mike's painting, called "Sardines."'

GROSS: So this poem is about--in part, I think, about how the initial idea
for a work isn't finally what the work often ends up being...

Mr. LEHMAN: Exactly.

GROSS: ...that works evolve no matter what the starting point is, whether
it's a painting or a poem.

Mr. LEHMAN: Exactly. And that the end product can, in effect, erase the
origin of the poem. And the poem or the painting need not be faithful to its
original impulse. You know, we say in ethics that the ends sometimes do not
justify the means. But in art, almost always the ends justify the means,
whatever means you use to get there.

One other thing about this poem is that it made the Bohemian life of the
artist seem so glamorous that I think it single-handedly converted dozens of
younger poets in the 1960s to poetry and to the so-called New York school of
poets, in particular.

GROSS: Russell Ferguson, some of the paintings in your exhibition are
portraits of the poet Frank O'Hara. I'm going to ask you to describe one of
them. Larry Rivers did a nude of O'Hara. Describe it for us.

Mr. FERGUSON: That painting was done in 1954. It's an over life scale,
full-length portrait of Frank O'Hara. He's completely naked except for a pair
of leather work boots, and he is holding his hands clasped on top of his head.
It's, in some ways, a shocking portrait. It shows Frank O'Hara in his
personality as a supremely self-confident Lower Manhattan Bohemian, who has
nothing to hide, who can be up front about everything, including his own
nakedness in this portrait.

But it also, in terms of what Larry Rivers is doing with it, I think you can
see an artist who's looking for other ways around painting out of the triumph
of abstract expressionism. He's looking at older artists. He's looking at
Gericault or Delacroix. Sometimes I think he's even looking at Anthony Van
Dyck in the huge scale of this, in a way, quite formal painting.

But at the same time, it's, inescapably, a painting of its moment, which is a
representation, in a way, of a New York art world that was feeling supremely
self-confident. There was a feeling that they could take on any artist in the
world and any artist from any period, even.

GROSS: I want to add, too, that you could see in this photo that O'Hara looks
like a very attractive man and a very sexual one.

Mr. LEHMAN: There's a kind of macho edge to the painting, also. I mean,
O'Hara was a very cocky and confident person, individually. And in that way,
he was also representative of the group of painters and poets and composers
near the center of which he stood.

GROSS: My guests are curator Russell Ferguson and poet David Lehman. More
after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: We're talking about poet Frank O'Hara and the New York school of
painters with curator Russell Ferguson and poet David Lehman.

Now there's another portrait, actually a double portrait I want to ask you
about, and this is Wynn Chamberlain's 1964 double portrait of a group of
painters and poets, including Frank O'Hara. Would you describe this double
portrait?

Mr. FERGUSON: Yes. That double portrait is a very amusing diptych. It shows
O'Hara and some of his friends. On the left, they look very serious and
they're all wearing, more or less, the uniform for men at that time--white
shirts, ties. And in the second version of the portrait, they're in the same
pose but they're all naked. And it's quite noticeable that in the second one,
they all have big grins on their faces and they look a lot happier with their
clothes off.

Mr. LEHMAN: And the grin is like being, not only happy, but gay. I mean, the
diptych is a kind of unmasking picture.

GROSS: Unmasking?

Mr. LEHMAN: Don't you think, Russell?

Mr. FERGUSON: Yes, I think...

Mr. LEHMAN: Well...

Mr. FERGUSON: ...three of the four people in that portrait are gay, I
believe. One, to the best of my knowledge, is actually not, but I think,
especially looking at it now, it's kind of inescapable to read a gay context
into it.

GROSS: Well, would you say that homosexuality was expressed in many of the
paintings of that period among O'Hara's friends or in O'Hara's poems?

Mr. FERGUSON: Homosexuality is definitely a theme in the poetry. It's quite
striking how open he is in some of the poems about what we would now call the
gay lifestyle. In the paintings, I think it's a little bit less evident,
though certainly in that portrait of him by Larry Rivers, I think there is
definitely an erotic element.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. David Lehman, why don't I ask you to read one of Frank
O'Hara's poems with either a gay theme or a gay subtext?

Mr. LEHMAN: Well, certainly. He did write about gay themes long before that
taboo ceased to be as strong a taboo. And he wrote love poems to various of
his lovers. One poem is called "Having A Coke With You." It was written in
April of 1960 upon O'Hara's return to the United States from Spain, where he
had gone with John Ashbery. And he wrote this love poem for a dancer he was
in love with called Vincent Warren. This is how the poem ends, and it's full
of paintings and references to paintings.

`I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the
world, except possibly for "The Polish Rider" occasionally, and anyway, it's
in the Frick, which, thanks heavens, you haven't gone to yet, so we can go
together the first time. And the fact that you move so beautifully more or
less takes care of futurism, just as at home I never think of the "Nude
Descending a Staircase" or, at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or
Michelangelo that used to wow me. And what good does all the research of the
impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the
tree when the sun sank, or for that matter, Marino Marini when he didn't pick
the rider as carefully as the horse? It seems they were all cheated of some
marvelous experience, which is not going to go wasted on me, which is why I'm
telling you about it.'

GROSS: Now that poem was part love poem and part art criticism. I'm
wondering if you think that this period, in the '50s and '60s, is the period
where poets and painters interact more than they do in the average period and
use each other's work as the subject of their own work more than is common?

Mr. LEHMAN: Well, one difference between that period and today is that at
the time, there weren't the kind of class and money distinctions and
discrepancies between painters and poets as obtains today. The painters and
poets and composers in New York in the post-war era, you know, lived in the
same neighborhoods, and rents were cheap. There was a kind of general
optimism and confidence in the air. And there was a huge amount of
collaboration between poet and poet, poet and painter, poet and composer.
They hung out together. It was before--fame was general. It was before the
avant-garde had triumphed so utterly that everyone wanted to be avant-garde.
It was a time when to be avant-garde really meant something because you were
taking a terrible risk.

Pollock's first, you know, abstract canvases were lampooned as, you know,
being something that little kids could do finger painting. And there was a
huge, spectacular gamble going on, and that itself generated a great deal of
excitement. So I regard that period as one in which, you know, you had a real
avant-garde and it meant something.

GROSS: Some art movements have had manifestos, and Frank O'Hara wrote a kind
of mock manifesto called "Personism," which he talked, you know, a little bit
about art. And, David Lehman, let me ask you to read an excerpt of that.

Mr. LEHMAN: OK. This is from the beginning of the poem: `I don't believe
in God, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel
Lindsay, always have. I don't even like rhythm assonance, all that stuff.
You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a
knife, you just run. You don't turn around and shout "Give it up. I was a
track star from Minneola Prep."'

GROSS: (Laughs)

Mr. LEHMAN: Another short excerpt from this: `How can you really care if
anybody gets it or gets what it means or if it improves them? Improves them
for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a
middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat and
potatoes with drippings, tears. I don't give a damn whether they eat or not.
Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness, a feat. Nobody should experience
anything they don't need to. If they don't need poetry, bully for them. I
like the movies, too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams of
the American poets are better than the movies. As for measure and other
technical apparatus, that's just common sense. If you're going to buy a pair
of pants, you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed
with you.'

GROSS: (Laughs)

Mr. LEHMAN: `There's nothing metaphysical about it.'

GROSS: (Laughs) That's really great. And it's...

Mr. LEHMAN: Well, what's great about it is also that it's sort of jokey and
amusing, but it's serious at the same time. And the thing about O'Hara's
irony and whimsy is that it's never merely irony and whimsy. He means it,
too.

GROSS: Frank O'Hara died in 1966. He was struck by a Jeep on Fire Island.
David Lehman, a little more about his death?

Mr. LEHMAN: Well, it was a freak accident. He was only 40 years old. He
had been drinking a good deal. It was a Saturday night. He was with friends.
And there's not supposed to be any traffic on Fire Island. In fact, there are
not supposed to be any cars. And he and pals were going home in a beach
buggy, aud the buggy broke down, and along came a Jeep, driven by a kind of
redneck, and hit O'Hara. And he died a day or two later in the hospital. At
the funeral, Larry Rivers said that at least 60 people in New York City
consider Frank O'Hara to be their best friend. And in the years since then,
that number has gone up by, you know, 10 times or 20 times.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. LEHMAN: It was a shocking death because we don't know what he would have
done. He was, by the way, haunted by the idea that he would die young. He
wrote many poems about Jackson Pollock, who died in a car crash in 1956. He
wrote about James Dean, Billie Holiday, Bunny Lang. Some of his most
effecting poems are elegies for artists who died young. He had tremendous
empathy for them. And in some of his poems, like the poem in which he talks
to the sun, a true account of talking to the sun in Fire Island, seemed like
premonitions of his own early death.

GROSS: Russell, were you going to say something?

Mr. FERGUSON: Yes. That's true. You can see these themes all through his
poetry, but in the end, sometimes an accident is just an accident. And I
think the actual moment of his death is just one of those horrible things that
you wish there was a more profound narrative--satisfying narrative end there.
But, in fact, he was standing on the beach late at night and someone drove
their Jeep into him. And it's just one of those inexplicable and incredibly
frustrating and tragic things.

GROSS: David, would you leave us with a poem by Frank O'Hara that, again,
kind of illustrates his connection to the art world?

Mr. LEHMAN: I'd like to read a poem of O'Hara called "Radio." He wrote it in
early December, 1955, and it exhibits his love of music, classical music, as
well as his love of painting. It ends with a painting by Willem de Kooning
that O'Hara briefly owned, on loan from Fairfield Porter. And here's the
poem.

`Radio, why do you play such dreary music on Saturday afternoon, when tired,
mortally tired, I long for a little reminder of immortal energy. All week
long while I trudge fatiguingly from desk to desk in the museum, you spill
your miracles of Grieg and Honegger on shut-ins. Am I not shut in, too? And
after a week of work, don't I deserve Prokofiev? Well, I have my beautiful de
Kooning to aspire to. I think it has an orange bed in it. More than the ear
can hold.'

One other thing about this poem is that, in its deceptively casual and simple
way, it does express the very heart of romantic ideas about poetry. That is,
mortally tired and immortal energy. The poetry or art is the agency of
redemptive enchantment. It converts the fatigue into immortal energy. So in
a certain sense, O'Hara, with all his modernisms and his colloquialism--and
nobody made poetry sound more like talk than O'Hara--he is still operating
very much in the heart of the romantic idea of the imagination as supreme.

GROSS: I want to thank you both so much for talking with us about Frank
O'Hara.

Mr. FERGUSON: Thank you.

Mr. LEHMAN: What a great pleasure to talk with both of you.

GROSS: Poet David Lehman is the author of "The Last Avant-Garde." Russell
Ferguson is the curator of a show about Frank O'Hara and American art, which
is now at the Parish Art Museum in South Hampton, New York.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

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