다이어리 시학: 추상성, 혹은 프랭크 오하라의 “무엇이든”

Abstract

This essay means to offer a new lens through which we might understand the notion of abstraction otherwise. It does so by reading Frank O’Hara’s poems, best known for their attention to the particular and the personal, against the prevailing thought that posits a fatal contradiction between the concrete and the abstract. With the help of Julia Jarcho’s conceptualization of the word “anything,” I suggest O’Hara’s gesture towards the abstractness of Anything as a distinct feature in what I call his “diaristic poetics,” through which the poet shows ways of “angling” oneself for different queer contiguity and continuity to emerge. In revealing the ways in which the word “anything” evokes a masochistic attention to the unknown and unexpected particulars, this essay considers how the receptivity of O’Hara’s diaristic writing generates queer modes of relation and belonging.