Frank O'Hara and the Representation of City Space

In a time when anti-urban sentiment dominated the American intellectual sphere, Frank O’Hara, through his Lunch Poems, highlighted the importance and beauty of social relationships that are created within city space. And pushed forward the idea that cities should encourage the building of trust between people instead of isolating and pitting communities against one another. In this essay, the poems ‘The Day Lady Died’, ‘Meditations in an Emergency’, and ‘Having a Coke with You’ will be examined in an attempt to explore the representation of city space in mid-20th-century American literature in the perspective of a city-dweller.

‘But when in American history has there not been a fear of the city…?’[1]

A powerful tradition of anti-urbanism was shared amongst western intellectuals from the late 18th century to even now.[2] American city spaces were widely viewed as dirty and disease-ridden areas of degenerate, immoral and corrupt behaviour.[3] Overcrowding, crime, and corruption thrived due to rapid industrialisation that was taking place at the time, which attracted large numbers of people to move from rural lands to the city. Perhaps as a response to the rise of automation and subsequent urban decay, the need to submerge oneself in 'nature' became a trend in American thinking — a means to combat the artificiality of an urban world that has become very market-orientated. This idea reflects the beliefs of 18th-century romantic transcendentalists, such as Thomas Jefferson, who believed that nature is the key to ‘genuine’ politics and social life.[4] Thinkers, like Jefferson, favoured a pastoral vision that resisted industrialisation. He also insisted that ‘only the proudly self-sustaining American 'cultivator' could retain his dignity in the face of the Industrial Revolution.’ This sentiment was only strengthened when people compared their gritty urban lives to the 'joys of nature and the moral superiority of rural life'.[5] American literature also tends to represent city space in a negative light. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson proposed that ‘a man is stronger than a city [...] his solitude is more prevalent and beneficent than the concert of crowds.’, he also wrote, 'uncorrupted behaviour belongs to the man who lives in the presence of nature.'[6] In essence, power should be in the 'soul'; people should not obsess over matter or material, nor should they find themselves confiding in other people. Even in Art, Edward Hopper’s urban paintings often portrayed 'isolated individuals who appear out of place, detached from the city...’ and ‘bewildered by the threat to 'nature' posed by the built environment’[7]

Frank O’Hara’s ‘The Day Lady Died’ perhaps supports the belief that the city is as depressing and artificial and as void of 'nature' as many American intellectuals felt. When crisscrossing through the busy streets of a bustling city lined with blinding billboards and honking cars, the feeling of being alienated or isolated by society is common, this was especially prevalent during the post-war American urban scene. The city was a cold and distant place to many, even though they were living, breathing, and working within it. As a result of striving for optimal economic efficiency, city space begins to operate in a mechanical and cyclical fashion that makes it seem as though the city cared not if you stopped breathing altogether. ‘The Day Lady Died’ contrasts the seemingly free-flowing movement of the individual with the strict regularity of the city. The use of run-on sentences and the lack of punctuation does not only mimic 'typical' fast-paced city life but also serves to highlight the free and unrestricted way the speaker is moving through the city. Yet, the almost jarring precision in the transportation schedule listed in the first stanza — 'it is 19:59', 'get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15', prompts readers to question the extent to which people are truly free within a place of such unforgiving and stringent mechanical regularity. The disorientating capitalisation of words dotted throughout the poem only seems to emphasise that unsettling regularity. In the city, you tend to know exactly where to go in order to get what you need. Every shop, station, nook and cranny is named and labelled and made glaringly obvious. O’Hara may have also been referencing the obnoxious fashion in which everything is advertised in the city, with big letters and flashing lights, to catch the attention of people who always appear to be in a hurry, and are too busy to allow some time for ‘quiet contemplation’ in nature. The poem ends with O’Hara finally acknowledging its title. The subtle way he reminds readers that 'The Day Lady Died' is an elegy for Billy Holiday, 'she whispered a song', only highlights how the individual is easily lost within the regularity, the cyclic nature, of the city. Her death was but a whisper that soon evaporated in the hustle and bustle of an indifferent metropolis that continues on without her. This poem echoes Henry James critique of the city that: ‘the universal will to move — to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any price’[8]

However, Frank O’Hara did not blame the city, he was simply describing what the city inevitably is — a crowded and indifferent place, but also filled to the brim with opportunities. It is important to note that if not for the city, O’Hara would not have built intimate relationships that would have eventually led to such devastation. Billie Holiday’s talents would not have gained much attention if she was not discovered by producer John Hammond while she was performing in a Harlem jazz club.[9] Perhaps in response to anti-urban biases and poor urban planning, O’Hara’s Lunch Poems is of a pedestrian aesthetic that connects sequences of images in a chain, in which the beauty of social bonding is highlighted. Continuity certainly opposed traditional urban planning, with plans such as the Garden City and Radiant City, where the focus was placed on nature as a necessity to ‘transcend’ everyday concerns, to decentralise the city, and to prevent social interaction in fear of anarchy and social chaos.[10] For O’Hara, rather than dividing city space and assigning meaning to models of dead time such as home or work, lunchtime to him became a site of meaning. It is a time and space for intimate social bonding.

In his poem ‘Meditations in an Emergency’, which followed a renewed sense of urban culture in the late 1950s, O’Hara portrays New York City as an ideal haven for the restless and the love-struck, opposing prevalent anti-urban biases. O’Hara begins the poem with bizarre rhetorical questions that implies that he is having an identity crisis. The line: ‘Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous [...] but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth’, suggests that his 'emergency' is the devastating end of a love affair. The phrase ‘nothing left’ seems to pose the question: ‘what greater emergency is there if not the end to an intimate relationship?’. By introducing an identity crisis, O’Hara is suggesting that one’s identity is closely linked, almost painfully so, with human relations and the bonds created from social interactions; not reliant on solitude or on nature to discover oneself. He stresses that human relationships always depend upon an element of interpersonal connection to give them some meaning. Without such a relationship, one becomes agitated and contradictory — 'I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.' However, this loss did not inspire in O’Hara the urge to distrust fellow humanity, nor to hate his life or the city. On the contrary, he takes a jab at anti-urban biases. More specifically, the Jeffersonian idea that nature is the cure to all ails. O’Hara lies under a tree and reflects: ‘However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life’. The word ‘clog’ suggests that the transcendentalist idea that favours rural life and nature has become, to some, a thing that hinders or blocks their critical thinking, as though one is made unable to appreciate the beauties that lie beyond nature. To O’Hara, placing the spontaneousness of city space and of human societies below the dominance of nature symbolises that people regret life.

Interestingly, O’Hara also uses the poem’s form to speak back to transcendentalist and romantic poetic traditions. Lyric poetry is traditionally known as an attempt to access the human soul by stepping outside the artificiality of the everyday world. Practitioners deemed city space and urban life as ‘beneath’ the ‘ideal’ meditative space that is nature. However, O’Hara’s lyrics are quite the opposite. In fact, the title ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ in on itself serves as an ironic jab at such ideas. He is ‘in’ an emergency, and not ‘on’ it or ‘from’ it. He is within that very space that is making him restless, and unable to differentiation his own feelings from the network of social meaning in which he lives. The emergency is taking place in the city, but so is the meditation. Sociologist Erving Goffman believed that city space is not organised and operated by external things such as buildings, architecture, or parks, that elevate or control us, but is built on the relationship between individuals and the people around them.[11]

O’Hara, in ‘Having a Coke with Me’, shows a fondness for the intimate relationships created in cities, and like Goffman, highlights the beauty of human interaction within city spaces — assigning significance to the internal rather than the external. The line ‘I would rather look at you than all the/ portraits in the world.’ is so romantic precisely because the focus is placed on ‘you’, on the person you love, instead of external things. ‘You’ are placed above all that; ‘You’ are out of this ‘world’. O’Hara further emphasises the significance of social relationships in: ‘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.’ The poem seems to say, what is the point of having marvellous experiences if you do not tell anyone about it. O’Hara strongly believed that we deepen our aesthetic experience when we share it with someone else. External things such as paintings and statues and buildings are beautiful because of the way they are woven into social relationships. This is, again, seen in: ‘the secrecy our Smiles take on/ before people and statuary’ There is something intimate about sharing a ‘secret smile’, it is like a private code of interaction that is shared between two. Symbols of high culture, like ‘statuary’, might be uplifting, but meaning is only created when it is tied with social interaction. Again, in 'Thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so/ we can go together for the first time.' O’Hara is expressing his individual desires in a complex network of relations with ‘high culture’ and with other people. In the chaos that is mid-20th-century urban planners believing that a high population density and low-level buildings lead to crime, Journalist Jane Jacobs believes city areas are unsuccessful due to the lack of social interaction and mutual support.[12] For O’Hara, life is beautiful because objects take on meaning within shared contexts like museums or galleries. And cities provide the space for that to happen.

'One’s self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.' — Walt Whitman was one of the few great American writers who saw virtue and promise in the American City and the crowd of people that comes with it.[13] He even compared Leaves of Grass to a city. Frank O’Hara represents city space in his work as a place where people form intimate social relationships not from external things such as architecture or art, or even nature, but by simply being in each other’s presence.

[1] Kazin, Alfred, 'Fear Of The City’, p. 1 [2] White, Morton, and Lucia White, 'The American Intellectual versus the American City,', p. 166 [3] Slater, Tom, 'Fear of the City 1882-1967’, p. 136 [4] Conn, Steven, ‘Americans Against the City’, p. 12 [5] Kazin p. 16 [6] Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ‘The Complete Works’ [7] Slater, Tom, 'Fear of the City 1882-1967’, p. 142 [8] James, Henry, ‘The American Scene’, p. 84 [9] Nicholson, Stuart, ‘Billie Holiday’, p. 39 [10] Jacobs, Jane, ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ [11] Goffman, Erving, ‘Interaction Ritual’ [12] Jacobs, p. 19 [13] White, p. 173