Personism (4. 25.18)

I asked the Wednesdays@One group to write "personist poems," or rather, poems in the Frank O'Hara style of "personism."  This project turned out to be more complicated than I imagined, given the straightforwardness and surface qualities of many of O'Hara's poems.

I began with this summary of the style, culled from various sources:

From Personism: A Manifesto[1]

“I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make?  They’re just ideas.  The only good thing about it [writing the so-called open or ‘naked’ poetry] is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.[2]

But 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 middle-aged potatoes with drippings (tears).  I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not.  Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete).  Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. . . [regarding technical matters] 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.  There’s nothing metaphysical about it. . . .

Abstraction in poetry, which Allen [Ginsberg] recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing.  I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary.  Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet.  For instance, the decision involved in the choice between ‘the nostalgia of the infinite’ and ‘the nostalgia for the infinite’ defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction.[3]  The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé).  Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry.  Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to Béranger.  Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art.[4]  It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it!  But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.  That’s part of Personism.  It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka] on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (no Roi, by the way, a blond).[5]  I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person.  While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and Personism was born.  It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents.  It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified.  The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.  In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.  While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did.[6]  Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. . .

What can we expect of Personism? . . . Everything, but we won’t get it.  It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything.  But it, like Africa, is on the way.  The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.”

─ September 3, 1959

This famous manifesto I supported with an analysis of an O'Hara poem and discussion of the style from Stephen Burt.  First, the poem:

Embarrassing Bill

              —      Frank O’Hara (1960-62)

Bill is sounding so funny there in the bathtub like a walrus

he is very talkative and smelling like a new rug in a store window

how pleasant it is to think of Bill in there, half-submerged, listening

and when he comes to the door to get some more cologne he is just like a pane of glass

in a modernistic church, sort of elevated and lofty and substantial

well, if that isn’t your idea of god, what is?

in these times one is very lucky to get a bath at all, much less

have someone cheerful come over and help themselves to one in your tub

I like to have all the rooms full and I just hope that Bill will get bigger

and bigger and bigger and pretty soon I’ll have to get a whole house

or I could always find a pedestal with central heating perhaps

in case he wants to write his poems standing up

                                                                             now, Bill, use your own towel

Then, the discussion:

“Every poem is or could be a ‘Personal Poem’ (an O’Hara title), with an ‘I’ and a ‘you,’ and a hope, not that Heaven will favor the poet, but that ‘one person out of the 8,000,000 is / thinking of me’ . . . The Personist poem . . . makes the reader a nearly intimate equal. (It’s tempting to see Personism, the style, as a reaction to Confessionalism, except that O’Hara invented his own style first.) . . . “Plenty of poets have learned from O’Hara, and they’re not shy about saying so: how to emulate the exhilarating life of happy crowds, how to make poems that sound like New York, how to make words acknowledge the accomplishments of abstract visual art, how to ‘let our guard down’ (yes, those are scare quotes), and how to emulate the energetic representational practice of post-abstract painters such as Larry Rivers.”

 —Stephen Burt, writing in www.poets.org in 2005

But everybody had problems grasping the idea of personism (acknowledged: I have always struggled with it, despite my admiration for the style and gesture of an O'Hara poem).  Reviewing everybody's contribution to this project, I tried to work out my own lack of understanding . . .

Personism Re-cap

Good morning all.  In my humble opinion, yesterday’s conversation about so-called Personism was less fruitful than other Wednesdays@One topics.  At least it left me a bit unsatisfied, and so I spent the day yesterday thinking about why.  Obviously, nobody read a “personist” effort without caveats and I think this is because none of us feels all that comfortable with our understanding of “Personism.”  I think we all have two questions about it and both those questions are rhetorical: 1) What is it? And 2) Who cares?

My own contribution, “Hiroshi: A Personism,” is highly self-conscious in a hackneyed, mimicky sort of way.  It’s trying too hard to be a personist poem.  In the end, it gives up and turns serious, dips below the surface to some more sober, deeper meaning (even if just implied) that of course is implicated in the overall failure: I mean, what else are you going to make of such criminally bad lines as “Beyond reason.  Like clay, like clay . . .”?   And so I think that’s one thing about so-called Personism that might be leaving all of us feeling a bit underwhelmed or even embarrassed when we encounter it.  It is selfie poetry, meaning, insincere.  In Personist poetry, neither the writer nor the person addressed is all that relevant; they are merely occasions for creating the Lucky Pierre of the poem itself.  If you are familiar with Action Painting—a style prevalent when O’Hara wrote his “Manifesto”—then you might have an idea about Personism and its focus.

Janet’s poem, “What’s in a name?” is not personist by any means.  This does not mean it’s a bad poem.  In fact, I think it was the best of the lot yesterday qua poem.  Had she written that for our allusion project . . .  well, let’s just say that it exhibits all the subtlety of good allusion poetry: a shared cultural knowledge that the writer can expect from her reader (Although Janet certainly didn’t get the understanding from us yesterday, that’s on us, not her poem!  And she even capitalized OSWALD THREE times!!!)  That bit about the rifle and rolled-up newspaper is brilliant.  But in the end, it’s too meaningful, with too much depth for the rococo of a personist poem, and it’s addressed to somebody she obviously doesn’t know at all, another “not-a-personism” characteristic.

Margaret’s “For reasons not worth mentioning” is, in my opinion, too sly to be “personist,” beginning with that title.  Which is not to say it’s not a poem and not a good poem, because it is a poem, and a good one.  I’ll admit right here and now that I stay clear of dog poems, for reasons which I think Margaret’s poem makes clear: the sentimental.  (A sin that Mary Oliver commits with abandon, and has built a successful career of).  But Margaret’s poem doesn’t come off as sentimental at all and herein lies the slyness, I think.  The paragraph above the separate closing line (the tail?) is so understated in its concern and worry and sorrow that I long to take on the pain and struggle of Rupert myself, so as to relieve him of it.  It’s a case of “if I could take your place . . .”  The image entailed by the one-and-a-half lines, “as his nails scraped the too-steep metal ramp,” is beyond mere sentiment and, for me at least, gets to the grim resolve to lessen someone’s or something’s burden that all people who feel any kind of responsibility and compassion must feel.  Margaret’s is one of those poems—not a personist thing, mind you—that we readers can learn from.  I think I agree with Janet, though; for this to be rendered more in the personist style, the poem would have to incorporate parts of the actual telephone conversation that its title implies.  Chat about the weather or what’s for dinner or the damn laundry or a missed movie or whatever, stuff that’s perfectly un-apropos to the subject of Rupert’s public bath. 

Bennet’s “Meeting a Roving Troubadour” is a sweet poem without being treacly, a sensitively captured moment in time that is all the more sensitive for its apparent serendipity (I mean, he was just there to have coffee . . .).  By now I think we know what Bennett is capable of in the heart department.  Those lines, “And sang to me / Because he had to” just knock me out!  These are, after giving it some thought last night, maybe another instance of what Personism accomplishes, what the “personist style” engages: bravery, courage, honesty to express the face-value of what’s right there before your eyes.  By this I don’t mean the guy with the guitar playing for Bennett, nor do I mean the fact of Bennett allowing himself to be played to.  No, the lucky Pierre of this poem is the courage Bennett summoned while drafting the poem to make that statement in the first place, right there in the poem: “And sang to me / Because he had to.”  Think about the nerve, the bravery required to say such a passionate thing in a poem!  And stating it so forthrightly, without dripping sentiment, almost as a fact of life, makes the lines all the more striking.  The other great lines?  “But I don’t have to be him,” and, now that I’ve had an evening to consider its ambiguity, the closing line “words / Waiting to become flesh” rings biblical and human and artful all at the same time.  I said yesterday that I didn’t think Frank O’Hara would have written the last line.  Let me amend that notion: I don’t think Frank O’Hara could conceive such passion or complexity in a poem.  It wasn’t his style.

I agree with the general assessment of Eric’s poem, “Reminders”: the “older version” is the better.  Janet observed that there is more power in the stanza approach, and I agree with that and for the same reasons—it creates a rhythm and a kind of “return” from thought to thought that leads you through an intensely personal recall.  This intense personal recall, as I think Eric acknowledged yesterday, is not Personism per se, probably because it is so intense; there’s nothing rococo about it.  O’Hara and his crowd probably would reject the notion of poetry as personal therapy (a.k.a. 20^th Century Western catharsis, viz. Modernist angst vs. neo-Romantic individualism vs. American rococo; see below): where Eric finds meaning in every object left behind (meaning and calculation, design and message), the so-called personist poets would see, or try to see, only the object.  That’s hard to do, which I think is one conclusion we all came to yesterday.  I know that I did.  The poem contains at least some “personist” gestures; for example, the stepping-back-from-the-text gesture of “Now that’s a little bitter-- / and a little better.”  The personist thing about those lines, I think, is the role they play in the poem: the writer simply incorporates a portion of his internal editor right into the poem itself, á la Action Painting style.

Why should this particular subject feel so unrewarding to talk about?  It may be because we (I, anyway) are programmed to think about poetry as a) some sort of depth charge of meaning that explodes only under the surface, b) a shamanistic or oracular utterance whose meaning is never self-evident, c) a serious and sober use of language or engagement with experience.  I suppose I could go on, but you get the idea: the style of poetry associated with writers like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, James Laughlin and, probably most like O’Hara, James Schuyler (see his book A Few Days), we think of as “mere” surface, ever self-evident, and frivolous.  We think of it—or at least I think of it, way down deep (that’s a joke)—as American rococo.

Now there’s a thought: the rococo in America.  We (i.e., everybody attending Wednesdays@One) come to American poetry via Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Lowell, Sexton, Plath, Berryman—my shelves sag under them!—all Big Thinkers, Alcoholics, Recluses, and/or Suicides.  That’s the foundation of the American poetic voice.  World War II comes and goes and leaves America a changed nation politically, economically, diplomatically and, more meaningful to us, culturally.  New foundation called for.  The American poetry community’s response, as we discussed yesterday, can be traced through two movements.  One is the more or less neo-Neoclassicism of “American rococo” where the entire subject of discussion, poetically speaking, is a snipped lock of hair (see Pope’s The Rape of the Lock) or a shoe flying off the foot of a girl on a swing (see Watteau’s painting, The Swing).  Consider this style a rejection of the bombs and genocides and annihilation of the WWII-and-after environment.  Personism would then be a branch of that rejection. 

And the other is the more or less neo-Romanticism of American poetry throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the earth-movement poetry, the Iron John movement poetry, the poetry of an individual’s deeply personal engagement with and responsibility for experience, especially through the medium of Nature.  I mentioned Donald Hall’s famous anthology, Contemporary American Poetry, published in 1962, as the opening of the gate onto this very American world.  Margaret mentioned Hayden Carruth’s omnibus anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us, which is a continuation, I think, of that neo-American Romantic style.  But as far as Personism is concerned, the thrust (no pun intended here) is into that notion of everything is all right, even the bad stuff is all right, and the glory is in the surface, and in fact, there is only the surface.  Everything else is illusion and silly navel-gazing. 

So the questions remain, for me anyway.  Is “Personism” a legitimate thing in poetry?  Yes, I think so.  Is it a style?  Absolutely!  A movement (requiring a manifesto)?  Nope.  A literary form?  Nope.  Is sentiment allowed in it?  All too often!  Can anybody really write it?  No, not just anybody.

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[1] In The New Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms, eds. Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976.

[2] Think of “lofty” in these sense as being “beat” or “ecstatic” or otherwise engaged with the poem and its subject instead of with convention, literary fashion, academic rule, etc.

[3] A poem is a record of minute choices made by its maker.

[4] A poem is a made thing that is essentially about itself, meaning, self-referential.

[5] Likely a reference to Joe LeSeuer, O’Hara’s longtime confidant, roommate and sometime lover; also a memoirist of the two men’s lives together.  Died in 2001.  Also might be a reference to Vincent Warren, another of O’Hara’s lovers at the time around which he coined the term.

[6] French avant-garde writer.