acquaintance or inspiration

Acquaintance or inspiration? Jackson Pollock’s influence on Frank O’Hara

A comparison of Frank O’Hara’s poetry with Jackson Pollock’s drip-paintings

© Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm

Bachelor Essay of Modern English Literatureby

Stephan Raoul VegelienStudent 1614495

Word-count: 5,188

Supervisor: Dr. Jan VeenstraCourse Code: LEL999B10

Bachelor of Modern English Literature — Stephan Raoul Vegelien 1

Acquaintance or inspiration?

Jackson Pollock’s influence on Frank O’Hara

Introduction

The American poet Frank O‘Hara was unique in his generation. He was active as a poet from

his college years at Harvard (1946-50) until his untimely death at 24 July 1966, when he was

fatally injured by a beach-buggy on Firefly Island, New York. During these twenty years he

wrote many hundreds of poems. O‘Hara was one of the leading figures in the New York

School of Poets, active in New York in the 1950s. This group, essentially a group of

befriended poets—amongst which were James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery—

was interested in modern art and poetry and owed its name to the similarly named group of

painters from the 1940s and 1950s, also known as the Abstract Expressionists. This group of

painters included such artists as Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Franz Kline

and Willem de Kooning. O‘Hara met Rivers on visits to New York during his years at

Harvard and he met Pollock, Hartigan, Kline and de Kooning in 1952 at The Club of the New

York Painters and the Cedar Tavern1. O‘Hara was quite involved in the art world and was

influenced by these artists, as he says in his essay Larry Rivers: A Memoir:

It is interesting to think of 1950-52, and the styles of a whole group of young artists whom I knew rather

intimately. It was a liberal education on top of an academic one…. If you live in the studio next to

Brancusi, you think about Poussin. If you drink with Kline you tend to do your black-and-whites in

pencil on paper.2

O‘Hara moved in the same circles as Pollock, and was, through their contact and his

interest in Pollock‘s work, undoubtedly influenced by Pollock. In his book on O‘Hara, Russell

Ferguson writes:

Of all the so-called New York School poets, it is unquestionably O‘Hara who had the closest

relationship with the painters for whom the term New York School has now become canonical, …

O‘Hara wrote the first monograph on Jackson Pollock (in 1959), he was a close friend of de Kooning

1 From: “A Short Chronology” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.). Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1995: xiii-xvi.

2 O’Hara, Frank. “Larry Rivers: A Memoir.” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.). Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1995: 513.


and Franz Kline, and he organized The Museum of Modern Art retrospective of Robert Motherwell‘s

work in 1965. … These relationships with the giant figures of Abstract Expressionism remained the

foundation of his career as a curator.3

David Sweet mentions that ―[l]ike the Abstract Expressionists, O‘Hara retains an idea of form

even though he intends to make full use of chance, speed, and the kind of innate creative

energy which the Surrealists believed exceeded the bounds of controlled expression.‖4 And

John Ashbery, another poet of the New York School, wrote: ―Like Pollock, O‘Hara

demonstrates that the act of creation and the finished creation are the same.‖5 This shows not

only the social connection between O‘Hara, but also providing a comparison of their works,

showing that there are some striking similarities between O‘Hara‘s poetry and Pollock‘s

paintings, notably his drip paintings of 1947-50. These similarities can be found in a

comparison of O‘Hara‘s original style of poetry and Pollock‘s ―action painting‖ technique

and in their aesthetics of motion, immediacy and connection between artist and work.

Pollock‘s drip paintings, from the golden years of his career, made him famous. Works such

as Summertime (1948), Number 1 (1949) and Autumn Rhythm (1950) are known for their size,

seemingly chaotic drip technique and the artist‘s way of painting, being in the painting, rather

than looking at it from the outside.

In this essay, I will show the similarities in both artists‘ methods of work and their

aesthetics. There is no doubt that Pollock influenced O‘Hara. As a curator, O‘Hara was very

interested in Pollock, and this resonates in his poetry. There are several references to Pollock,

and one poem is even a digression on a painting by Pollock, ―Digression on Number 1,

1948.‖6 By examining the similarities between Pollock and O‘Hara, such as their techniques

of painting and writing, their aesthetics and characteristic features, I hope to argue that

Pollock did, in fact, influence O‘Hara‘s poetry. In order to answer these questions, there are a

couple of sub-questions to be answered: What are Frank O‘Hara‘s main influences? What

characterizes his poetry, stylistically and thematically? In what way are these characteristics

3 Fergusson, Russell. In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art. Los Angeles: The Museum of

Contemporary Art and Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999: 21.

4 Sweet, David. “Parodic Nostalgia for Aesthetic Machismo: Frank O’Hara and Jackson Pollock. Journal of

Modern Literature, 2000, 23.3-4: 378.

5 Fergusson, Russell. In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art. Los Angeles: The Museum of

Contemporary Art and Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999: 27.

6 O’Hara, Frank. “Digression on Number 1, 1948.” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.).

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995: 260.


comparable to Pollock? It is important to show what stylistic and aesthetic similarities there

are between O‘Hara and Pollock, in order to draw a conclusion about the degree of Pollock‘s

direct or indirect influence.

O’Hara’s influences

One of the main influences in O‘Hara‘s poetry is the New York art scene of the 1940s and

1950s. But how did O‘Hara become so involved in the New York art scene? In 1951, O‘Hara

moved to Manhattan, where he got a job at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art.

Poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and O‘Hara—close friends of O‘Hara,

who he met during his college years—came together in the Cedar Tavern in New York City.

This bar was a popular bar with the Abstract Expressionists. In Larry Rivers: A Memoir,

O‘Hara says semi-jokingly.

An interesting sidelight … was that for most of us non-Academic and indeed non-literary poets in the

sense of the American scene at the time, the painters were the only generous audience for our poetry….

The literary establishment cared about as much for our work as the Frick [a New York museum on

European art] cared for Pollock and de Kooning.7

During these years, O‘Hara became involved in the art world, giving and taking lectures on

Abstract Expressionism and related topics at The Club, writing reviews for Art News, and

spending much time with painters. Although O‘Hara was not as close friends with Pollock as

he was with, for instance, Rivers or Hartigan, he was well acquainted with him. Through his

work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Art News, he became interested in

Pollock‘s paintings. In 1959 he was the first to write a monograph on Pollock‘s work, three

years after Pollock‘s fatal car accident.8 In the acknowledgements, O‘Hara writes: ―Through

the years of my acquaintance with Pollock‘s work I have absorbed, consciously and

unconsciously, many insights of artists and friends.‖9 In the monograph, O‘Hara explains

Pollock‘s influences, his strengths and some of his works. The depth of his arguments show

that he had thoroughly studied Pollock‘s work.

7 O’Hara, Frank. “Larry Rivers: A Memoir.” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.). Berkeley:


8 O’Hara, Frank. Jackson Pollock. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1959.

9 O’Hara, Frank. Jackson Pollock. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1959: 7.


Cathedral is brilliant, clear, incisive, public—its brightness and its linear speed protect and signify, like

the façade of a religious edifice, or, in another context, the mirror in the belly of an African fetish, the

mysterious importance of its interior meaning.10

At the time of his death in 1966, O‘Hara was working on a retrospective exhibition of

Pollock, which indicates how evident Pollock was in O‘Hara‘s professional work. There is a

good chance that Pollock had a similar influence on O‘Hara‘s poetry.

It is not only modern art that had a great influence on O‘Hara‘s poetry. An explanation

for his highly individual style is that he is a poet with a development different from many

other American poets of his generation. He had long studied music and had the ambition to

become a concert pianist, but switched to studying English as a student at Harvard. Music is

an important influence on him, as is evident in some of his early poems, ―Quintet for

Quasimodo,‖ multiple poems ―On Rachmaninoff‘s Birthday‖ and his poem ―Music.‖ Besides

music O‘Hara was influenced by French poets such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cocteau and

Lautréamont, while most other student poets were inspired by poets such as Yeats, Hopkins,

Eliot, Frost, Tate and Ransom.11

Together with the musical influence, this created a highly

individual style, unlike his contemporaries. O‘Hara did share an ―informality of both tone and

structure, an idiomatic lack of pretension, and a self-conscious, often playful, spontaneity‖12

A final important influence and recurrent theme throughout his poetry remained New

York City. To O‘Hara, New York City is the perfect place for poetry, as it is full of motion, in

contrast to the static nature his predecessors enjoyed. According to him, photographs and

other ―static memories‖13

have no place in the world of the poet. It is the motion picture and

action painting that is interesting as they, according to Marjorie Perloff, ―capture the present

rather than the past, the present in all its chaotic splendor.‖ In this spontaneity and controlled

chaos, New York City played an important role. For O‘Hara this meant that New York City

was his main influence. The city‘s streets, cars, buildings and people resonate throughout his

poetry. New York was an interest shared by Pollock, for whom the city also meant more

stimulus and more influences. In a questionnaire answered in 1944 he said: ―Living is keener,

10 O’Hara, Frank. Jackson Pollock. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1959: 23.

11 Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1977:

34.

12 Ferguson, Russell. In Memory Of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1999: 20.


21.


more demanding, more intense and expansive in New York than in the West [where he grew

up]; the stimulating influences are more numerous and rewarding. However, he had not been

interested by the city as O‘Hara had been. In 1945 he moved from New York City to The

Springs, New York, where he bought a small studio and spent the rest of his life. For O‘Hara,

New York is essential. ―I can‘t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there‘s a subway

handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life,‖ he said in

―Meditations in an Emergency‖14

. And New York is also one of his most recurring themes. A

few examples: ―and posters for BULLFIGHT and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which

they‘ll soon tear down,‖15

―Only you in New York are not boring tonight,‖16

―as under New-

Yorkless Paris‘ night a nude falls open to fire‖17

Not to mention the countless references to

New York‘s traffic, people, buildings, neon signs and most importantly, its artists. O‘Hara‘s

poetry is filled with references to Pollock, de Kooning, Hartigan, Lee Krasner and many

others of the New York art scene.

O’Hara’s styles and methods

Due to the many influences O‘Hara had, and his wide field of interest, O‘Hara‘s poetry has

gone through a long development before reaching his golden years of 1954 to 1961. During

his college years many of his poems were imitations of the poets he read, such as the French

poets Baudelaire and Rimbauld in ―The Muse Considered as a Demon Lover,‖ and

experiments with verse forms, as Perloff shows:

There are, for example, a number of early nature poems written in quatrains…

―Portrait of Jean Marais‖ has both end-rhyme and internal rhyme… The early manuscripts contain

parody ballads… [o]r heroic couplets are used for parody effect as in ―Virtú‖18

14 O’Hara, Frank. “Meditations in an Emergency. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.).

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995: 197.

15 O’Hara, Frank. “A Step Away From Them.” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.).

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995: 257-8.

16 O’Hara, Frank. “Poem Read At Joan Mitchell’s”, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.).


17 O’Hara, Frank. “Gregory Corso: Gasoline. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.).



36-8.


These poems were merely exercises in more traditional verse forms rather than serious poems.

After this period, O‘Hara developed a two-way in style modes: ―One is the clotted, somewhat

mannered Surrealist mode of Oranges: 12 Pastorals; the other, the natural, colloquial,

whimsical, light-hearted mode of ―Les Etiquettes Jaunes‖, a mode clearly derived from

William Carlos Williams.‖19

This second poem already hints towards later style, but is also

much like Williams‘.

I picked up a leaf

today from the sidewalk.

This seems childish.

Leaf! you are so big!

How can you change your

color, then just fall!

As if there were no

such thing as integrity!

You are too relaxed

to answer me. I am too

frightened to insist.

Leaf! don‘t be neurotic

like the small chameleon.20

Here the imitation of Williams become evident. The poem has the same immediacy and light-

heartedness as for example ―This Is Just To Say.‖

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold


38.

20 O’Hara, Frank. “Les Etiquettes Jaunes” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.). Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1995: 21


They share an immediacy in their tone and voice. As the poets use the first-person singular

and a combination of the past and present tense, the poems become rather playful and

frivolous. Both are poems about something seemingly insignificant. Although O‘Hara

continued this mode of light-hearted poetry, some things changed in a later stage, as he fused

this style with the Surrealist mode Perloff described. When he had completely settled in

Manhattan, he developed a distinct aesthetics, not yet clearly articulated during his college

years when he borrowed and copied from, for instance, the French poets and Williams.

During this period, he was able to fully develop the elements of these more clearly articulated

aesthetics, such as openness and immediacy. Related to this is the informality of tone and

structure and the playful spontaneity, mentioned before. What this meant is that his poems

were written spontaneously and were hardly edited. A nice anecdote to illustrate this is one by

painter Joe LeSueur, a close friend of O‘Hara. In 1962, O‘Hara had to give a poetry reading at

Wagner College on Staten Island, New York. Introducing his poem, O‘Hara said: ―On the

ferry coming over here, I wrote a poem.‖ This poem is ―Lana Turner has collapsed!‖21

. Not

only does this illustrate O‘Hara‘s spontaneity, but also his attitude toward his poetry: one

should not take poetry too seriously. He had developed a characteristic style, not only

spontaneous and immediate, but also not very serious. These are elements that remained

important throughout his work.

―Lana Turner has collapsed!‖ is, however, a poem that is quite unlike his other poems.

It is one of a few poems found by Donald Allen, who collected O‘Hara‘s poems for his

complete works, that is hand-written. All other poems are written on a type-writer. The speed

of typing was crucial to the spontaneity of his poetry. On the other hand, using a type-writer

also undermined the spontaneity of his poetry, as he did not write all his poetry by pen on the

spot, but wrote most of his poetry on the type-writer after the event. O‘Hara became famous

mainly for his occasional walking poems, such as his Lunch Poems, written around 1959, but

published in 1964. Most of these poems were written on the type-writer, in the controlled

environment of his home or work. While they resemble original spontaneous moments during

his lunch hour or during a meeting with friends, it is oftentimes the result of these moments. It

contains the chaos and spontaneity he wished to show, but within a controlled environment. It

is like the city he loved so much, New York. New York City is controlled chaos. The sounds,

the people, the traffic—all work chaotically within boundaries. It shows the spontaneity of all

21 O’Hara, Frank. “Lana Turner has collapsed!” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.).

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995: 449,


elements, their speed, all things that O‘Hara enjoyed so much, but it is not chaos. The

boundaries are what makes the city. This is similar to Pollock. Although his work may seem

chaotic to most people, all is within boundaries, and all choices are made controlled and

deliberate.

Another thing that O‘Hara tried to illustrate in his poetry is ‗Personism‘, a theory he

developed in 1959.

One of [Personism‘s] 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.22

He argues that in this theory, poetry is no longer between the writer and the poem, and the

reader and the poem, but between the writer and the reader. In accordance with the earlier

mentioned spontaneity, poetry is not ‗made‘. O‘Hara‘s poetry does not contain elaborate

structures and metaphors, but gives you what you read. To O‘Hara poetry is as much part of

daily life as breathing. He realized that he could use the telephone instead of writing a poem.

David Lehman explains this clearly:

To conceive of a poem as a substitute for a telephone call that nevertheless resembles a telephone call is

to recognize that poetry—avant-garde poetry, at any rate—is conditioned by the most technologically

advanced means of communication of the time. Once one has made this discovery for oneself, one‘s

whole notion of writing poetry must change.… One writes a poem that is consciously not a telephone

call but something like a message left on an answering machine.23

This makes O‘Hara‘s poetry casual and conversational in style. This is exactly what O‘Hara

tried to pursue: giving the reader the idea that he is eavesdropping on a conversation between

two people, or part of the conversation itself, instead of reading a poem. By doing so, the poet

makes the act of creation and the finished creation the same. Because the distance between the

poet and the audience disappears, the audience does not read a finished poem, but reads it as if

it is right in the middle of making the poem. O‘Hara creates this sense mainly with his

22 O’Hara, Frank. “Personism: A Manifesto.” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.).


23 Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde – the making of the new york school of poets. New York: Doubleday,

1998: 186-7.


narrative style. A good illustration for this is ―Personal Poem,‖24 the poem upon which

Personism was based.

I walk through the luminous humidity

passing the House of Seagram with its wet 10

and its loungers and the construction to

the left that closed the sidewalk if

I ever get to be a construction worker

I‘d like to have a silver hat please

…

a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible

disease but we don‘t give her one we

don‘t like terrible diseases, then

we go eat some fish and some ale it‘s

cool but crowded we don‘t like Lionel Trilling 25

we decide, we like Don Allen we don‘t like

Henry James so much we like Herman Melville

…

and walk on girders in our silvers hats 30

I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is

thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi

…

These few excerpts exemplify how the narrative style shows an immediacy and speed as if the

audience sees what the poet sees at the moment and thinks what he thinks. By using little

punctuation, enjambment and the first-person singular and present tense, the poem is given its

spontaneity and the distance between the poet and the audience disappears completely. What

O‘Hara tried to do is place to reader directly besides the poet, walking down the street. The

reader follows him as he passes the House of Seagram, and suddenly there is a short stream of

thought: ―I ever get to be a construction worker|I‘d like to have a silver hat please,‖ which is

interrupted by the continuation of the poet‘s walk: ―and get to Moriatry‘s where I wait

for|LeRoi.‖ This is characteristic of O‘Hara‘s poetry. It is also something that he learned from

Pollock and de Kooning, according to David Lehman: ―From Jackson Pollock and Willem de

Kooning, [he] learned … that the mind of the poet, rather than the world, could be the true

subject of the poem.‖ The poem—as nearly all of O‘Hara‘s poems written from 1954 to 1961,

his golden years—chronicles the history of its making. It shows the movement of the poem

from beginning to end, from the perspective of the poet, but without excluding the reader

from this perspective.

24 O’Hara, Frank. “Personal Poem.” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.). Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1995: 335-6.


A comparison with Pollock

This is exactly what Pollock also tried to do. Pollock believed that his paintings were not

objects on their own, but chronicles of their making. The driving force behind his painting

was the contact between the painter and his work. His techniques were radically new, because

it was only this technique that there was to it. Pollock renounced all symbolism in his drip

paintings of 1947-54. This is quite like O‘Hara, who said in his manifesto that he didn‘t

believe in God and therefore did not ―have to make elaborately sounded structures,‖ such as

rhythm and assonance. However, it was not only the technique that mattered. In an interview

with William Wright in 1950, Pollock was asked: ―[I]sn‘t it true that your method of painting,

your technique, is important and interesting only because of what you accomplish by it?‖ He

replied, ―I hope so. Naturally, the result is the thing and it doesn‘t make much difference how

the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at

a statement.‖25

This is quite similar to O‘Hara saying that he could just as well use the

telephone as writing a poem. It is not the technique that matters—the styles, the metaphors,

the sound structures—but what the artist tries to accomplish.

In Pollock this is an unconscious achievement, as it might very well be for O‘Hara.

Like O‘Hara, he had a general idea of what he was going to paint and what the result would

be. It can be argued that O‘Hara had a general idea of writing about an occurrence, like for

example meeting LeRoi Jones, in ―Personal Poem.‖ The thoughts and the chronicle of the

poem‘s making that make the end result may be elements of unconscious developments. Like

the French Surrealists and later psychedelic painters, Pollock was led by his unconscious. The

drip painting technique is important in this automatic process of painting—automatism. By

pouring and dripping paint onto a canvas he resisted ―mental calculations.‖26

In other words,

he let himself be driven by something that some would call accident or coincidence, but

according to Pollock were not. ―– ah – with experience – it seems to be possible to control the

flow of paint, to a great extent, and I don‘t use – I don‘t use the accident – cause I deny the

accident.‖ He has no fears of changes or destroying the image. ―[t]he painting has a life of its

own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result

25 Wright, William. “Interview with Jackson Pollock.” In: Abstract Expressionism: a Critical Record. David

Shapíro and Cecíle Shapíro (Eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990: 358-62.

26 Rosenberg, Harold. “The Mythic Act.” In: Abstract Expressionism: a Critical Record. David Shapíro and

Cecíle Shapíro (Eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990: 376.


is a mess.‖27

This means that his paintings are painted unconsciously. He was not aware of

what he was doing, until it was finished or until he looked up after a sort of ―get acquainted‖

period.

The famous photo-series Jackson Pollock by Hans Namuth (1950) show that Pollock,

very concentrated, flings paint as if it were a dance, making motion a fundamental element of

his paintings. These photos were essential in the understanding of Pollock‘s methods and

aesthetics. It connected the painter to the painting, like O‘Hara‘s Personism. It is placing the

painting ―squarely between the [painter] and the person, Lucky Pierre style,‖ as O‘Hara wrote

in his manifesto. While that accounted for his poetry, it fits perfectly into Pollock‘s idea of

minimalizing space between the painter and the painting, optimizing contact. Thereby, the

painting process became part of the painting itself, and the energy that the painter puts in the

effort of making the painting is transferred directly onto the canvas, as the photos showed. In

order to achieve this, Pollock no longer used normal paint and brushes—during his golden

years, after 1946—but used sticks, knives and trowels instead, to drip and pour liquid paint on

the canvas in a continuous flow28

. He was able to ―gain closer touch with the medium than

was possible through applying paint with a brush.‖29

In normal paint stokes, there is a

beginning and an end. With this technique, Pollock was able to transfer motion—and

especially continuity—directly onto the canvas, with no beginning and no end. Pollock

believed this to be far more natural. He once said that when he is in his painting, he is not

aware of what he is doing.30

―I am nature‖31

, he said, being ―obedient to automatic

impulses.‖32

Another important aspect of Pollock‘s all-over drip paintings is that focus is not on

one aspect of the painting. For example, Autumn Rhythm (1950), the painting on the title page

27 Pollock, Jackson. “My Painting.” (1947) In: Reading Abstract Expressionism: context and critique. Ed. Ellen

G. Landau. Yale UP: 2005: 139-40.

28 Tyler, Parker. “Jackson Pollock: The Infinite Labyrinth.” In: Abstract Expressionism: a Critical Record. David

Shapíro and Cecíle Shapíro (Eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990: 365-7.



30 Pollock, Jackson. “My Painting.” (1947) In: Reading Abstract Expressionism: context and critique. Ed. Ellen

G. Landau. Yale UP: 2005: 139-40.

31 Quoted in: Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde – the making of the new york school of poets. New York:

Doubleday, 1998: 3.


Cecíle Shapíro (Eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990: 365-7.


of this essay, has many separate elements. The red lines on top of the black drips, some white

drips of paint on the white canvas, still visible, grey and black drips, more blurry parts due to

mixing of paint. All these elements allows us not to enter the painting ―at any one place (or

hundred places). Anywhere is everywhere, and we dip in and out when and where we can,‖ as

Allan Kaprow notes in an Art News essay on Pollock33

. An important way of establishing this

is by the painting‘s size. The painting is a rough 2.7 x 5.3 meters large. Its size ―invites the act

of seeing on the part of the spectator and yet gives his eye nowhere to rest once and for all.‖34

The size of the painting not only makes it practically impossible to focus on the entire

painting at once, but also gives the impression of a mural. His painting thereby seems to go

beyond the boundaries of the canvas, creating a continuum in which the lines go on forever.35

This continuum is one way in which Pollock shows the raw energy of motion that signifies his

painting. Like in O‘Hara‘s poetry, the spectator is taken from one part of the painting to the

next, where he is in constant motion, following the converging lines and drips of paint. In

―The Day That Lady Died,‖36

there is a similar constant motion, where the reader is taken by

the hand from one part to the next:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes (ll 1-2)

The use of time and places are especially important in this constant flow of focus shifting.

First the indication of time, 12:20 in New York, followed by

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner (ll.4-5)

It seems like a long leap from 12:20 to 7:15, but this is only a note of what will happen

tonight. The shift returns to 12:20:

33 Kaprow, Allan. “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” In: Reading Abstract Expressionism: context and critique.

Ed. Ellen G. Landau. Yale UP: 2005: 184.

34 Fried, Michael. “Jackson Pollock.” In: Reading Abstract Expressionism: context and critique. Ed. Ellen G.

Landau. Yale UP: 2005: 257.

35 Kaprow, Allan. “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” In: Reading Abstract Expressionism: context and critique.

Ed. Ellen G. Landau. Yale UP: 2005: 184.

36 O’Hara, Frank. “The Day Lady Died.” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen (Ed.). Berkeley:



I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets

in Ghana are doing these days (ll. 7-10)

Interestingly, during his walk, mentioning Ghana, he shifts focus from the streets of New

York to this African country, and back to the streets,

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do

think of Hesoid, trans. Richmond Lattimore or

Brendan Behan‘s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don‘t I stick with Verlaine (ll. 14-18)

The poem continues with realistic speed, as if the reader is there besides the poet, following

all the converging lines of the poem—the true events, looking forward to the dinner party,

buying presents for his friends Patsy and Mike, feelings—ending the poem with:

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

As this shows, O‘Hara, like Pollock, uses these converging lines and shifts of focus to make

the spectator experience the motion of the poem. It is the raw energy of the action—as it is the

raw energy of painting—that make this possible.

All these elements are part of Action Painting, as Pollock‘s art was often called. It got

this name not only through its ability to transfer motion—or action—to canvas, but also

through its desire to be spontaneous and direct. Therefore, like O‘Hara, Pollock did not use

sketches or preliminary drawings and all of his paintings are direct and original paintings,

without a true preconceived idea. Spontaneity was an important element of Pollock‘s painting.

Like O‘Hara, he therefore did not edit his pieces after finishing. All editing he did, changing

or painting over a piece, was to him part of the painting process. Because all his paintings

were spontaneous, he did not want to be influenced by other painters. He would rather be

identified with writers such as Hart Crane, James Joyce or Dylan Thomas than with his


teachers and contemporary painters.37

This is very much unlike O‘Hara, who was constantly

influenced by painters and poets alike. Pollock‘s drip technique was not influenced by any of

his contemporaries or teachers, but rather by Oriental painters and native American sand

painters.38

Conclusion

Pollock was a major influence in O‘Hara‘s professional life as a curator at the Museum of

Modern Art. He was that much interested in Pollock that he wrote a monograph on him,

organized a European exhibition tour and was working on a retrospective exhibition on

Pollock when he died in ‘66. However, it was not only in his professional life that Pollock

was a source of influence to O‘Hara. Also in his artistic life as a poet, Pollock was evident.

Several poems contain references to Pollock and there is even a poem, ―Digression on

Number 1, 1948‖ entirely devoted to Pollock‘s painting. Through comparing many of Pollock

and O‘Hara‘s stylistic, aesthetic and thematic elements, even more can be said about

Pollock‘s influence. As so many elements of Pollock‘s work seem to resonate in O‘Hara‘s

poetry, it can be concluded that Pollock was also an important influence on O‘Hara‘s poetry.

Several striking similarities can be found when comparing Pollock and O‘Hara. One of these

elements is a shared sense of spontaneity. To both artists, spontaneity is one of the most

important elements of their work. Whether or not driven by an unconscious force, art is to

both purest when it is untouched, unedited. Art is not only a finished product, but the

chronicle of its making. Both artists seem to realise this and incorporate this into their art;

Pollock by his technique, action painting, in which he drips and pours liquid paint onto a

horizontally attached canvas in a continuous flow, O‘Hara through his continuous flow of

input—time, places, people, thoughts, daily events and the writing of poetry itself are all part

of his poems. By doing so both artists show motion, shift of focus and energy in their highly



38 Wright, William. “Interview with Jackson Pollock.” In: Abstract Expressionism: a Critical Record. David

Shapíro and Cecíle Shapíro (Eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990: 360.

In his earlier works, native American myth and ritual were important elements. His paintings as The Guardians

of the Secret, The She-Wolf and Night Ceremony, amongst others up to his Action Painting period of 1947-50

(and some later works), resemble this interest in native American culture and art. O’Hara, Polcari and

Rosenberg write quite a bit on this, but as I only focus on the Action Painting period, I will not go deeper into

this subject.


original art. Another aspect that both artists seem to incorporate in their art is what O‘Hara

dubbed ‗Personism‘. In his theory, which perfectly applies to Pollock‘s way of painting, the

artwork is squarely between the artist and the spectator. This not only enables the spectator to

feel as though he is part of the artwork—eavesdropping on the conversation in O‘Hara‘s

poem or dropping in and out of Pollock‘s painting, exploring new elements through constant

shift of focus—but also minimalizes the distance between the artist and the artwork, as though

the artist is literally in the painting or poem.

Since there are so many striking similarities it seems that Pollock is, in fact, a major

influence on O‘Hara‘s poetry. However, he is a major source of influence amongst many, and

can therefore not be seen as the main influence. Moreover, due to the enormous amount of

poems O‘Hara has written, which vary tremendously in both style and genre, Pollock does not

necessarily remain one of the major influences throughout O‘Hara‘s poetry. The restrictions

in size and time of this essay do not allow for such a thorough research that all examples of

possible influence by Pollock can be accounted for. Nevertheless, the similarities in style and

aesthetics are there, allowing a conclusion that Pollock and O‘Hara are evidently comparable

artists, and that Pollock was more than a professional inspiration to O‘Hara, but an important

inspiration for his poetry.

acquaintance or inspiration

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