Having a Real Day of It: Grace, Time, and Pastoral in Frank O'Hara's Work Poems

Abstract

© 2023 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System ork is at the center of Frank O’Hara’s poetry. Frenetic but graceful, cynical but utopian, crafted but casual, routine but bohemian―the distinctive tensions of O’Hara’s writing are illuminated by, as they illumine, midcentury American labor. That is, they shed light on the period’s most novel form of labor: whitecollar cultural work, whose rise represented a new peak in wage labor’s colonizing power over life. Exploring O’Hara’s poetry after 1955, the beginning of his professional career at the Museum of Modern Art, this essay examines how O’Hara’s poetics of work articulates effort, time, and pastoral. These are not new categories to apply to O’Hara, as I will explain. However, brought together, this unwieldy trinity can help explore the vital dialectic of his later life: his job as an art professional and his restlessness to elude its limitations. Effort and effortlessness concern style and how O’Hara’s poems labor to hide labor. This dialectic of work and naturalness, craft and artlessness, marks modern artistic production, since it concerns art’s critical distance from everyday processes and the fundamental nature of artifice itself. O’Hara’s performance of it, however, is unique. Like the historical avantgarde, O’Hara seeks movement over monuments, process over product. In his poetry, however, there is a conscious staging of the work that goes into such graceful ease. A tenacious attachment to everyday life and the search for sublimity beyond the quotidian are in tension in O’Hara’s poetry; when it comes to work, his straining for grace seeks spaces beyond labor from within its processes. O’Hara’s work poems, that is, leap B E N H I C K M A N