Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O’Hara

Years ago when John Forbes praised my later work, he said my Problem of Evil was influenced by Tranter’s Red Movie, and being younger and furiouser, I rang Forbes and explained P. of E. was actually written first. The paper printed an apology but wicked Forbes started at once to speculate that Tranter had based Red Movie on P. of E., a claim of which I thought I’d better warn Tranter,_____who laughed: ‘Anxieties of Influence’, and that phrase came back to me recently when a reviewer said I’d learned a lot from Frank O’Hara. I explained to my daughter I’d never read O’Hara and she, the Fire Tiger, defended me on those grounds, so the reviewer professed shock that I had never read O’Hara. I wondered: am I shocked myself really that I’ve never read O’Hara? I do not miss O’Hara, but I said I would write a poem called Frank and I about us. The imaginary O’Hara would confess of course that he has not read me either, despite which we would feel quite at home. I see us relaxed on a gritty tenement balcony on a star-chilled American evening with drinks in our numb hands speculating why poetry is so much about denying what one is not, and why anxiety about influence is stubbornly so scary. ‘I’ve heard you use long lines’, I would say, and explain, ‘The longer lines in my last book were two typos I just missed and not an urge to run some novel verbal marathon.’ He might reply, ‘My long lines were a try at showing poetry is still not prose, however long the line and to avoid the slashes which Olsen thought pauses for breath.’ I nod, ‘I’ve used slashes, too, but not for that, just to intensify and quicken the pace.’ We would be getting on quite well by then. ‘Someday,’ I’d say, ‘I would like to read you, but of course now there is my current worry that influence might be retrospective, and that I’ll recognise your hand in everything I’ve written, anyway.’ He’d say, ‘I don’t think it’s likely – aren’t you more into the lyrical? You look sort of more lyrical but that might be the light.’ I would wonder: have I aged back to O’Hara’s age? He died before he turned forty and maybe one ages to the time and company. Or maybe there are such lost creatures as poets and each meeting each at first in any place is nervous and newborn, under erudite, angry cover. My daughter thought the critic was doing the haka. I might have done the haka with O’Hara had I read him, but in the ever new American night I would rather we still sat there still, regaining self- sense outside the great archives of torture.

Jennifer Maiden

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