'Breathing Through its Spectacles': The Queer Trees of Frank O'Hara

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines Frank O'Hara's poetry from a queer ecological perspective. Whilst O'Hara has often been framed as a city poet, such a reading of him underestimates the presence of trees and green spaces in his work. Paying attention to O'Hara's trees, as well as touching on the work of John Ashbery, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Walt Whitman, I discuss a complex relationship in which trees become coded props for queer self-revelation while destabilising conceptions of both the queer and the natural.