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Brian Glavey on Frank O'Hara ("Having a Coke with You")
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Brian Glavey joins Close Readings to talk about one of the great love poems of the twentieth century, Frank O'Hara's "Having a Coke with You." Check out Brian's recent article on the poem in PMLA and his first book, The Wallflower Avant-Garde (Oxford UP, 2016). Follow Brian on Twitter here.
You can watch and listen to O'Hara read the poem here and find the full episode of the television series from which that clip was excerpted, Richard O. Moore's USA: Poetry, on the PennSound website.
Finally please rate and subscribe to the podcast if you like what you hear, and sign up for my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Close Readings podcast. I'm your host, Kamran Javedizadeh, and I am very excited to welcome you to the first proper episode of the podcast. My guest today is Brian Glavy. And when I first thought of this podcast, Brian was one of the first people I thought of having onto it.
00:00:26
Speaker
And I hope the reasons for why that might be will emerge and seem obvious to people who are listening.
Focus on Franco Harris' Poem
00:00:33
Speaker
Part of the reason has to do with the argument that Brian makes in an article that he's written about the poem that we'll be talking about today, which is Franco Harris' great poem, Having a Coke with You.
00:00:49
Speaker
For people who want to look at the poem as we talk about it, there is a link provided to you in the episode notes with whatever podcast app you're using, or if you have subscribed to the newsletter that I've started to go along with the podcast, you should be able to find a link to the poem there.
00:01:12
Speaker
And of course, you can just Google it having a coke with you. You'll find the poem quite easily and you might want to be glancing at it as we talk. But let me say a word about Brian before we get started.
Brian Glavy's Background and Approach
00:01:27
Speaker
Brian Glavies, an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He's the author of The Wallflower Avant Garde, which came out from Oxford University Press in 2016. And he's currently at work
00:01:42
Speaker
on a book about the poetics of oversharing, which is a delicious and fantastic topic. And I'm happy to say I've gotten to read little bits of that book as Brian's been working on them and the world needs to get ready for this brilliance. Brian's articles have appeared in such journals as PMLA, New Literary History, Criticism, American Literature, Modernism, Modernity,
00:02:09
Speaker
And I'm not going to do anything here in the standard academic model of a lengthy introduction. But one thing I do just want to say before we get going about Brian's work that I so admire is that you get the sense if you read something he's written or if you get the chance to hear him talk about poetry,
00:02:33
Speaker
that he puts two things together that I find like a very difficult needle to thread. That on the one hand, Brian is quite happy to talk about and events his own kinds of enthusiastic attachments to poems and poetry. And on the other hand, you never get the sense that you're drifting too far from the terrain of critique.
00:02:59
Speaker
and of clear and rigorous thinking. Those aren't always two things that go together. It's a way, and this is Brian's joke in his article, not mine, it's a way of having your Coke and drinking it too. I think that maybe is modeled for us by the poem that we're going to talk about today. But it's just something I really admire in Brian's work. And so I'm especially happy to have him as our guest on the podcast today.
00:03:28
Speaker
Brian Glavy, welcome. How are you doing? Oh, I'm so excited to be here. And I didn't realize that I would be the first. So it's quite an honor. And your description of threading that needle really means a lot to me because that really is the ambition that I bring to the work, which is to both, or just to the conviction, which I think is part of what this poem is about, that
00:03:55
Speaker
rigorous critique and intense attachments are not in fact in competition with one another. And a lot of the sort of theoretical discourse in the humanities in recent years has often imagined that those two impulses were irreconcilable in a way. And I think poems like O'Hara's show that that's not the case. And that's really been kind of my guiding light.
00:04:22
Speaker
Oh, well, it's something that does clearly emerge from the writing you've done about the poem and about other poems too.
Frank O'Hara's Reading and Style
00:04:32
Speaker
So I'm glad to have hit that note well in your mind. And maybe the first thing we should do is to listen to the poem read aloud and
00:04:42
Speaker
This is a fortunate case. It won't always be the case moving forward on this podcast where we'll be talking about poems from centuries ago, in some cases where such things as recordings don't exist. But in this case, we do have a recording and it's a sort of, I don't know, as poetry goes, a kind of viral recording in a way of the poet himself, Frank O'Hara,
00:05:07
Speaker
reading the poem aloud. I'll also put a link to this in the show notes so people can not only listen to O'Hara's voice if they're curious, but can see his image as well. The clip is up on YouTube.
00:05:23
Speaker
and is available in other places. And Brian and I were talking about this before we started recording. Neither of us is entirely clear on all the details here, so our bad. But the recording that you're going to hear comes from shortly before O'Hara's untimely death by accident and
00:05:49
Speaker
and is part of a television series on poetry that appeared in the late 60s, I guess. So without further ado, let's listen to Frank O'Hara reading today's poem for us. The poem's called Having a Coke with You.
00:06:13
Speaker
It's even more fun than going to St. Sebastian, Irun, Ondaad, Biarritz, Bayonne, or being sick to my stomach on the Traversera de Grafia in Barcelona. Partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better, happier St. Sebastian. Partly because of my love for you. Partly because of your love for yogurt. Partly because of the fluoresce and orange tulips around the birches. Partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people in statuary.
00:06:39
Speaker
It is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still, as solemn, as unpleasantly definitive as statuary, when right in front of it, in the warm New York four o'clock light. We are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles. And the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint. You suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them.
00:07:07
Speaker
I look at you, and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish rider occasionally, and anyway it's in the Frick, which thanks heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time. And the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of futurism, just as at home I never think of the nude descending a staircase, or at a rehearsal, a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me,
00:07:32
Speaker
And 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? Or for that matter, Marino Marini, when he didn't pick the rider as carefully as the horse. It seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience, which is not going to go wasted on me, which is why I'm telling you about it.
00:07:56
Speaker
Brian, I just love that recording. And I'd be very curious to know, just to invite you to say a word or two about what you think about when you listen to O'Hara read the poem. What are you noticing in his voice or in his way of reading? Or even given the fact that you've seen the visuals as well about the visual impression he gives when reading the poem?
00:08:24
Speaker
Yeah, as you said, we're so fortunate to have this recording. And I show it to my students quite frequently. And I think they're often taken with it for lots of different reasons. This is something I literally had never noticed before just now, but I think only listening to the audio and not seeing the visuals. I don't think I'd ever heard the car horns that you can hear in the background, which is such a, I don't know, moving
00:08:50
Speaker
a little detail that sort of connects this reading to a specific moment in time and to New York City and to all the things that O'Hara is beloved for celebrating.
00:09:05
Speaker
But you can sort of see on the one hand the casualness of his reading in a way. He's not declaiming this poem. He's not really performing it exactly. I sort of was thinking about talking about this poem and imagining how I would read it. And it's sort of a struggle because I feel like I'm tempted to perform it a little bit more
00:09:29
Speaker
dramatically than he actually does in this particular reading, which is an interesting thing. It's a poem that's so much about enthusiasm. And it's not that it's an unenthusiastic reading, but it's not a poem that is
00:09:53
Speaker
as jazzed up as he reads it, as you might anticipate that it would be. And I think that that's sort of an interesting thing, both about this poem and about O'Hara's persona. And it speaks to, I mean, not to get into the philosophical quandaries of the poem. Let's get into them. Yeah, so it's a poem that is, that really raises a lot of questions. I mean, not to explode your podcast, but that was
00:10:19
Speaker
Sort of just thinking about the idea of close reading and one of the reasons why I'm so interested in this particular text is that it really highlights a lot of problems about what we do when we close read a poem and about what kinds of scrutiny are sort of necessary in order to understand a poem or appreciate a poem or critique it or what have you.
Poem's Relatability and Audience Engagement
00:10:41
Speaker
And what's remarkable about this poem is that it's a love poem. And as a love poem, it's directed to a very specific person that lived and breathed and is no longer with us and is in a really real way the you of this person. It was a young dancer named Vincent Warren who O'Hara had met the previous year and fallen deeply in love with.
00:11:09
Speaker
And as a love poem, it's a certain kind of linguistic act, but it's also a text that's written for an audience. And trying to figure out how we relate to this poem that is, you know, that is on the one hand directed to someone other than us, but also is clearly directed to us as well.
00:11:35
Speaker
is one of the sort of theoretical questions that this poem forces you to consider. So just to go back to the reading, my sense is that he's not reading this poem in the way that he would if he were speaking directly to Vincent Warren. He's reading this poem as if it were a text, as if it were a poem that he had written, that he's reading with other poems that he had written. And I think that's just really interesting that this is, you know,
00:12:05
Speaker
a text that exists in different registers for different people. Yeah, well, I have so many thoughts. But, you know, one of them is that I notice on listening to the recording this time that he, you know, the way he... So this is one of those kinds of poems whose title is its first line, right? But he's sort of funny about how he frames it. He says, well, this is a poem called Having a Coke with You and then starts reading as...
00:12:36
Speaker
which seems not, I agree with you, like the way he would present the poem to its primary recipient. It seems instead like he's sharing a poem with us and is sort of foregrounding that fact about it. But I'm curious about something you said a moment ago, Brian, because I'm not sure that I quite get it yet, which is
00:12:56
Speaker
I think I heard you connect something to do with the flatness or a word that you use or a phrase that you use a couple of times in your article about this poem, which by the way, there will be a link to that too in the show notes. And the article appeared in PMLA and it's called Having a Coke with You is even more fun than ideology critique.
00:13:27
Speaker
The phrase you use a couple of times, there's something low key about the poem and perhaps about the performance. But I thought I heard you sort of linking that aspect of its tone or of the tone of the performance of the poem to this idea that sort of is a resisting close reading or that isn't
00:13:51
Speaker
is in some kind of tension with the practice of close reading. And I wonder, was I hearing you right? And if so, could you say more about that? Like, what do those two things have to do with each other?
00:14:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I would say I actually don't think that the poem resists close reading, but I do think it foregrounds the problem of close reading. I mean, so in my article and in the book that I'm writing, I'm interested in relatability as an aesthetic category.
00:14:25
Speaker
And this is a poem that I describe as relatable in several different senses. The first way is it's relatable. And this is the way my students respond to it. And it's also the reason that I love this poem so much. It's relatable in the colloquial sense that
00:14:42
Speaker
You know, it's a poem that's very easy to sort of get on an emotional level. It's talking about, I think, a kind of excitement and infatuation, a feeling that many, many people are able to identify with, and that's part of why it's had this viral success.
00:15:01
Speaker
But it's also a poem that's relatable in this older sense, which really means relatable as something that you are able to relate, or maybe to use a word that you brought up to be able to share it. And I think it's a poem that's asking a fundamental question about poetry, about art, which is just how much of our experience are we able to share with other people?
00:15:29
Speaker
And I think it's a poem that's worried about that. And I think just sort of in general that there's a great deal of poetry, especially lyric poetry that is sort of obsessed with that question. But finally, it's relatable in the sense that it's about the way not just that we might relate to a text, but the way that the text might relate to us or the way that a work of art might relate to our lives or to other works of art. And in general, I also think that poetry like this
00:15:57
Speaker
is a poem like this is like a machine for generating relationships or for sort of connecting things. And it's I think that kind of complicated relationality that's one of the things that
00:16:11
Speaker
makes I don't mean this in an ontological sense, and I'm not dogmatic about it, but I but I do think it's part of what's sort of special about literature or maybe special about the way we pay attention to literature. So the difference between, you know, reading something as a love letter, and reading it as a love poem,
00:16:29
Speaker
is a difference in how we think about the relationship between that text and the rest of the world or life or our lives. And so when we think of it as a love poem and not just as a personal love letter that was for one person, the question is or the issue is that like everything about how that poem relates to anything else is sort of up for grabs. So it's like an open question how much
00:16:56
Speaker
The poem really is dependent upon that occasion in which it was written and which it was originally read and distributed, et cetera.
00:17:04
Speaker
And that holds not just for the fact that it was written for a specific person, and there were specific details in this poem that ostensibly would mean something to Vincent Warren in a way that they don't mean to us. But it also resonates on a level that's a little bit maybe one step removed from that, which is that this is also a poem that's filled with lots of cultural references.
00:17:28
Speaker
that are specific in some sense to O'Hara's life and his own kind of milieu. He worked at the Museum of Modern Art. This poem is really directly tied to the work that he was doing when he wrote it. And these are things that you could go look up. And the question I think is, do you have to look them up, right? So does this poem, like, do you need to know who Marino Marini is in order to really have understood this poem?
00:17:55
Speaker
And I could absolutely see a case that would say, yes, absolutely, you need to like really do your homework and try to reconstruct these references in order to really get to really understand the meaning of this work. But on the other hand, I think that there's a compelling case that says that, in fact, that's not necessary. And so it's worthwhile to close read this poem in that sense and to pay very close attention to what the details of this poem are doing.
00:18:25
Speaker
But it's not self-evident that that's the only way to relate to the poem or the best way to relate to it. And I think O'Hara is really, like I think he's really interested in that. And so much of his poetry is about kind of playing with this relationship between a specific occasion in which a poem is initially written for a particular person, you know, included in a letter to a particular person.
00:18:51
Speaker
up against this other context where he's also imagining it as a poem. And so the fact that he does pause that way after he says, well, this is a poem called Having a Coke with You before running into the poem, like that's clearly the title of the poem. It's not just that this is like it's the first line and he's just sort of hit the ground running.
00:19:10
Speaker
You know, he wrote many, many poems that he just titled poem, and there's nothing that says a poem needs to have a title. So this is like not just a, you know, an expression of love. It is a work of art, I think, in his mind.
Personal and Public Expressions in O'Hara's Work
00:19:23
Speaker
And as such, like we have to ask all these questions about how the details work together, how it fits into his life, and then ultimately how it fits into our lives.
00:19:32
Speaker
Presumably, though, it seems important to your sense of the dynamic that you just described that it is also a love letter, or rather that it does also have a you who is being addressed in the first sense.
00:19:58
Speaker
the poem would be different in other words or we would be missing something about it if we treated it as though it were a dramatic monologue or something. A poem invented a kind of speaker inventing a situation in which he's addressing some beloved and the kind of familiar way we're sometimes taught to read poems in that sense that
00:20:24
Speaker
that in other words, the claims the poem makes on us or the way it relates to us, as you put it, has something to do with that other thing that it's doing, which is talking to Vincent Wright, the first intended recipient of the poem.
00:20:49
Speaker
And I was struck, or I've always been struck in looking at the clip of O'Hara reading this poem too, how he looks up into the camera at the very end of it. As he reads the lines, it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience, which is not going to go wasted on me, which is why I'm telling you about it. And as he says that, he sort of looks square into the camera, it seems.
00:21:13
Speaker
And one feels addressed by O'Hara in that moment as the sort of primary addressee in that moment. So do you feel like the U in that final line is the same as the U in the title? I mean, I could imagine one way of
00:21:34
Speaker
understanding what happens in this poem would be sort of for the transformation of the you from Vincent Warren to Vincent Warren and others looking on or Vincent Warren and readers of this poem hundreds of years into the future, that sort of it could be, you know, beginning in a really specific way and then getting sort of, you know, Whitman-esque at the end.
00:21:57
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know, at least I tend to feel that the you at the end of the poem is me and maybe not when
00:22:14
Speaker
maybe not all of us, which is plainly ridiculous. But the excitement the poem makes me feel is the excitement of being addressed directly at its end, even though I don't quite at its beginning.
00:22:31
Speaker
I want to, well, shift gears slightly, but it's a related question just that in your article on this poem, Brian, you talk about your classroom experience teaching O'Hara where you had sort of one kind of ambition pedagogically in the classroom and that you found that your students were more interested in something else. And I wonder if you wouldn't mind telling our listeners something about
00:22:55
Speaker
what teaching O'Hara has been like for you and what surprises there have been for you in that experience, which I'm sure you've done many times.
00:23:07
Speaker
Yeah, the experience I describe in that article was an experience teaching a class that was called the Poetics of Oversharing a number of years ago at a moment when I hadn't really figured out what I meant by that phrase. And what I was really interested in in that class at that point was sort of thinking about whether confession was still the right way to think about
00:23:34
Speaker
the way that people talk about their experience and certainly the way that they write poems about it. It felt for a long time like even when poetry wasn't explicitly confessional poetry, the kind of conceptual model for just understanding what it meant to share aspects of your
00:23:53
Speaker
personal life in a public way was modeled on this idea of confession. And my intuition was that just in general, confession doesn't resonate the way that it used to for my students, say, in part because of things like social media, which are predicated on the constant sharing of
00:24:15
Speaker
private aspects of your life in a model that I don't think is well described by the kind of ethical or juridical or sort of religious discourse of confession.
00:24:29
Speaker
But still, for the most part, I was interested in confession and in confessional poetry and sort of thinking about O'Hara in relationship to confession. And so I had picked out these poems that I wanted to talk about that really were linked to those kinds of issues. And on one day, a student sort of staged a mini coup and instead of writing response papers on the poem I had assigned,
00:24:54
Speaker
So everyone in my class wrote a response on this poem, which I had not assigned and which I had sort of no plans of talking about despite the fact that I loved it dearly. And I learned a lot of things from that shift. But one of the things I realized was that the Frank O'Hara that I had kind of grown up studying
00:25:20
Speaker
was not the same O'Hara that my students were encountering. The O'Hara that I had kind of learned to read and think about was a poet who
00:25:35
Speaker
you know, was a charming but also difficult experimental poet, you know, surrounded by other charming but difficult experimental poets. And the version that my students really responded to was in some ways a much more straightforward, like love poet, a poet who wrote really gorgeous expressions of love and desire and happiness and heartbreak. And
00:26:06
Speaker
This had sort of, this shift had happened and I hadn't really noticed and I was sort of embarrassed to realize that this was the case. And I think there were lots of reasons why that shift had happened. But one of the things that it signaled was that that version of O'Hara would have been unthinkable, I don't know, maybe just 20 years ago because of O'Hara's queerness. And again, for lots of complicated reasons,
00:26:34
Speaker
His homosexuality wasn't a bar to his being kind of taken up as a universal kind of figure. And so I was just really interested in that transformation in which a certain sensibility, which had at one point been marked as being specifically the kind of property of a specific gay male subculture in mid
00:27:03
Speaker
20th century becomes appropriable in this way and sort of what happens when that transformation occurs, what's lost, what's gained, etc.
00:27:17
Speaker
Right. I know you had the question as your students sort of testified to finding the poem so relatable. You had a kind of question about, well, what is it exactly that they're relating to? And I want to talk more specifically about moments in the poem and sort of lines in the poem.
00:27:37
Speaker
in this next part of our conversation, the poem begins with a kind of rapid list of place names. And then by its third line, we begin this sort of anaphoric section where we get a number of lines that begin with the word partly. And one gets the sense in reading the poem or in hearing O'Hara read the poem,
00:28:06
Speaker
that at its beginning in particular it's just sort of chock full of specific things that
00:28:15
Speaker
presumably are not places that most readers have been to or even know about or could identify on a map, that the stuff in all the partly lines just as likely don't apply or aren't sort of furnishing my room or environment as not.
00:28:37
Speaker
apart from your students own experience of all of that, I mean, I'm just curious to hear you, Brian, talk about what all of that specificity and the sort of way that it's rendered in the poem is doing in the opening lines of what I think you and I both agree is like,
00:28:58
Speaker
a really hot love poem. Why all these places and names and why all this, what do you make of that partly, partly, partly rhythm at the beginning?
Influences on O'Hara's Poetry
00:29:11
Speaker
Could you say something about those things?
00:29:15
Speaker
Well, again, the details are tied in a very direct way to the situation in which he is writing the poem and tied very directly to his relationship with Warren. So just to sort of take us maybe a brief detour through biography, O'Hara met
00:29:36
Speaker
Warren in I think August of 1959 and sort of immediately just fell rapturously in love with him. They had I think encountered one another a few times in the months running up to that but this particular kind of intersection of their lives was one of those events that really just sort of changed everything for O'Hara. It was a relationship that really I think
00:30:05
Speaker
It certainly changed the kinds of poems that he wrote and sort of surprised him in that regard. But over the next two years or so after that moment when they met,
00:30:17
Speaker
O'Hara wrote probably 50 phenomenal poems, many of them very directly love poems for Warren. And the occasion for this poem, as I said, O'Hara worked for the International Program for the Museum of Modern Art.
00:30:36
Speaker
And the itinerary, those specific details in the first two lines are connected to a work trip that he had just come back for. He wrote this poem on April 21st, 1960, and had just returned to New York from a tour of Spain, where he was working on a show of Spanish painting and sculpture for MOMA.
00:31:02
Speaker
And during that trip, he met up with his good friend, the poet John Ashbury, and they followed exactly the itinerary that the poem lists in that first line.
00:31:16
Speaker
And it was a kind of, in terms of their relationship, I think the trip was a big deal because Warren was a dancer and he traveled a lot. But this was, I think, the first time that O'Hara sort of left. And he was, I think, anxious about being away for an extended period. He also, during that trip, and Warren knew this, was planning to meet with an old lover. And so there was, you know, there's lots of complicated dynamics here.
00:31:43
Speaker
And so he returns and he writes this poem sort of immediately after getting back, I think, as a way of expressing to Warren just how much he had missed him. And again, the sort of details, there's nothing sort of overly contrived about this. Even the artists later in the poem are artists that he was working on at that moment related to the work that he was doing, the curatorial work that he was doing.
00:32:12
Speaker
So it all really is rooted in a specific way to his life and to his relationship with Vincent. And as you say, I think part of what's interesting about the poem is the way it sort of begins with this sort of hyper specificity, which if it continued in that register for a little bit longer would quickly become, I think, alienating.
00:32:36
Speaker
but because of the way it sort of switches gears, even those details rather than being bars to identification, I think, somehow, I don't know, I think part of what the magic that this poem does is it sort of recalibrates your relationship to the specificity so that you don't see the specificity as something that keeps you out
00:33:01
Speaker
but that invites you in, not because you attach to those particulars, but because you're able to see those particulars as being examples.
00:33:14
Speaker
related to the fact that you have your own particularity that you might be able to sort of catalog in relationship to someone that you might be in love with. And those partlies are important there because, I mean, there's just something like brilliant about thinking about, you know, I think this is a kind of example of the blazon or the, you know, that like love poem tradition of- How do I love you? Let me count the ways.
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah. And so in that way, it's a very traditional gesture. But the kind of idea that the way that you would explain
00:33:55
Speaker
your enthusiasm about someone would be through this enumeration of details that in and of themselves don't necessarily signify that much but when they're taken together is just I think a brilliant insight about like what it feels like to be in love with someone or maybe what it feels like to have a crush on someone where there are all of these things that suddenly might be totally mundane in other contexts but suddenly they seem imbued with a kind of
00:34:21
Speaker
like or erratic magnificence because they remind you of this person or of time that you spent with that person.
00:34:29
Speaker
I think the line, partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yogurt is just such a brilliant, like you could imagine sort of reading it out of context as indicating a, you know, like there's something amiss with this relationship. Like, like I love you. Like if you say I love you to someone and their response is I love yogurt. Like that's a red flag probably. Or if you were to say to somebody, what do you love about me? And they said to you, I love you for your love of yogurt. Maybe you'd feel
00:34:57
Speaker
funny about it, but I know what you mean, and that's maybe my favorite line in the poem too, but I'm not sure why. Tell me why, Brian. Why is that my favorite line?
00:35:06
Speaker
Well, I think that I think the cultural history of yogurt remains to be like I was sort of wondering, like, like who really eats yogurt in New York City at this particular moment, like is him being a dancer, like part of part of his love for yogurt. But but I think, you know, on a like on a basic level, it just feels right to me. It just feels true that that what it is that you love about someone is, you know, often
00:35:34
Speaker
these insignificant details that when you feel that way about them, feel so endearing and just make you happy.
00:35:48
Speaker
at a different moment in your relationship, but you might have a completely different relationship to, you know, that, you know, attachment to yogurt. But, but it's the, you know, I don't know, I think there's this Walter Benjamin quote about sort of when you, when you fall in love with a face, it's the kind of, it's like the awkward imperfection on the face. That's the sort of sight where your love attaches
00:36:11
Speaker
Yeah. And I feel like there's something, there's just something about that. This is just O'Hara kind of geeking out in a way about this person that he is just so enamored with. And every little detail about them just seems fun and great. Right. But also there's like- Yeah, go ahead.
00:36:36
Speaker
But, and also I just think that there's like the poem is so intent on deflating the kind of seriousness of poetry in general, of kind of culture in general, but specifically of love poetry, I think, that, you know, it's not really saying that there's a metaphysical kind of truth to be ascertained from this feeling he has. Instead, it's fun. And you can sort of lay out
00:37:06
Speaker
partly reasons that explain that fun. And part of the power of the poem, I think, is the sense that you could imagine he could just go on and on and on, right? That's part of the way that the anaphoric partly structure works is that it's not that this is the complete recipe for, you know, for explaining this love. These are just examples. And he could keep going on and on and on, listing other ones, which is, again, part of why it ends up being relatable, because other people like, oh, yeah, like I could, you know, I could generate a catalog.
00:37:37
Speaker
Right, yeah. I mean, it occurs to me that, you know, you have these, this series of lines, what is it? One, two, three, four of them that all begin with the word partly, but that one line is the one time, isn't it? That there is a kind of second partly within the line, right? So it's somehow like the, this catalog of
00:38:02
Speaker
attributes that the beloved has suddenly reflect back onto the speaker in some way, or there's a kind of accretive glow that's created in that moment. Clearly something different, I mean there's other kinds of stuff in the poem too and I want to bend around to it
00:38:30
Speaker
consideration of the second half of the poem briefly before we run out of time here. And it seems to me, but I wonder what your impression is, that if there's a kind of turn in the poem that comes somewhere around the line, you suddenly wonder why anyone in the world, sorry, let me get it right, you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them.
00:38:51
Speaker
I look at you and I would rather look at you in that moment where now the second half of the poem is filled not with things like fluorescent orange tulips and yogurt and so on, but great works of art.
00:39:07
Speaker
And so how do you see the relationship between the first half of the poem, and if you agree with my division of it into haves in the first place, and the second half of the poem that has these other kinds of objects in it, and a new kind of attitude or relation towards those objects, maybe?
00:39:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, the other, like I want to talk about the tree breathing through its spectacles line too, which is maybe another kind of, well, let me do the hinge that you're talking about first, because it just, I hadn't really noticed this before, but I feel like there's a way in which the logic of that second half is replicating the logic of the yogurt line too, where I think one way of reading that, the fact that there are two partlies in that one line talking about love and yogurt,
00:40:00
Speaker
is that there's this kind of I think vulnerability and sort of actually just coming out and saying my love for you in this poem that otherwise is like clearly animated by love but is sort of taking a kind of indirect route
00:40:18
Speaker
to expressing it. So I feel like there's a way in which you can imagine O'Hara writing this poem, just coming out and basically saying, I love you. And then in order to kind of, you know, keep the mood light and airy, like feeling the need to insert a joke, which is still, I think, a true statement. So it's sort of deflationary.
00:40:38
Speaker
Yeah, there's this kind of logic of self-deprecation in a way that is, I think, important to O'Hara and his peers. And you see that in that second moment too, because if the poem were to stop there, that's a very earnest thing for him to say, I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.
00:41:01
Speaker
And in fact, and to go back to the recording, I think it's interesting that he really pauses hard after I look at you, and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world. And that is a line break, I mean, for people who aren't looking at the poem right now, right? So the I look is a sort of enjambment that happens there, and you hear it in O'Hara's performance of the poem at that moment. Go on, Brian.
00:41:25
Speaker
But then immediately, except the Polish writer occasionally in any way, it's in the Frick, which is sort of backing away from this earnestness with a bit of kind of cleverness. And then the rest of that section is, again, it's doing this magical thing of both being sort of ridiculously clever in its sort of deflation of these
00:41:55
Speaker
works of art, and yet also being really earnest at the same time. And that's a kind of tonal accomplishment that I think is difficult to achieve. But part of what's significant about the fact that the details in this half are so kind of weighted with gravitas and cultural authority is the fact that
00:42:23
Speaker
like part of what makes this poem so moving is that I truly believe you would be hard pressed to find anyone in the world on April 21st, 1960, who cared more about, you know, the nude descending a staircase in Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Art and Love Interplay
00:42:40
Speaker
Like O'Hara really had devoted his life to art. And, you know, to an extent that his poet friends were kind of sort of bitter that so much of his energy went
00:42:52
Speaker
in this direction. He's not really being flippant here. He's not somebody who sort of just doesn't really see the point in any of this stuff. You know, it's more important to him than nearly anything. And so the sort of joking way that he positions all of these things as being in some ways deficient because they lack the, you know, they lack the
00:43:22
Speaker
the sort of beauty of this person that he's in love with. It's just, I think, an especially powerful thing that he's doing. Right, so do you think that Warren sort of picks up or accrues some of the loving attention
00:43:49
Speaker
that from O'Hara would, under ordinary circumstances, be directed at the art. Is this a sort of a kind of a magician's trick, in other words, in which the one thing is kind of palmed and replaced by the other, so that there's this sort of way one looks at art, and perhaps, in particular, the way one looks at art, if one is O'Hara. And by listing all of those,
00:44:19
Speaker
works of art and sort of doing so, at least for the
00:44:26
Speaker
terms of the poem in a kind of dismissive or disenchanted way, that there's a way in which Warren sort of picks up the enchantment that one has normally invested in the work of art, or is it a more subtle kind of psychological event going on at the end of the poem than that?
00:44:54
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder. I mean, my intuition is that that really what this poem is about is O'Hara's refusal of the idea that works of art are enchanted in a way that's different than the way that yogurt is enchanted or that the person that you're, you know,
00:45:15
Speaker
in a relationship with might be enchanted. That fundamentally, I think enthusiasm is enthusiasm and attention is attention. And the reason why having the good fortune to be in love with someone is important to O'Hara is that
00:45:40
Speaker
that relationship makes you all the more attentive to all the things that you were already attentive to. So even though he's sort of poking fun at futurism and impressionism, I think that his poetry, and not just his poems about Warren, also his poems about friends and other lovers too, like what it proves is that
00:46:03
Speaker
that are the love that we feel for other people or the kind of intense intimacy we have with friends, it amplifies
00:46:17
Speaker
sort of everything else about our lives in a way that is not like a, that doesn't take away from aesthetic experience. It actually sort of adds just more value. And that was an idea that, you know, it wasn't unique certainly, but it was at odds with the kind of dominant version of modernism that kind of held sway in his circles.
00:46:45
Speaker
And in which the work of art would sort of had value only on its own terms somehow and was existed in a realm that didn't have anything to do with a person looking at the Jackson Pollock painting or whatever it was. It was like the painting was its own world and was valuable insofar as it was its own world.
00:47:12
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. When O'Hara left for this trip that is commemorated in the poem right before he went, he and Warren had a goodbye kiss behind a Alexander Calder panel. And in one of the letters that he wrote during that time, O'Hara
00:47:34
Speaker
mentions this kiss and says about the work of art, well, that's what it needed, a little history. And the idea is that the experience of seeing the work of art and sharing it with someone else
00:47:47
Speaker
is not separate from the aesthetic experience in the way that you're describing, right? It's not about, it doesn't sort of detract from your seriousness if you are thinking about your boyfriend while you're looking at a painting. In fact, what makes aesthetic experience aesthetic experience for O'Hara, and I think there's actually like a long philosophical tradition of this, is the fact that aesthetic experience is shareable in its very nature.
Philosophical Depth and Shareable Experience
00:48:13
Speaker
And that's something that he's really plugging into and exploring in a way that's both really fun but also, I think, deeply philosophical in this poem. Well, you write, Brian, towards the end of your brilliant article, you write, these different forms of relatability all reflect a belief that we deepen our aesthetic experience when we talk about it. The key to not wasting a marvelous experience is to tell someone about it.
00:48:42
Speaker
The beautiful thing about paintings and statues, in other words, is the way they can be woven into social relationships.
00:48:51
Speaker
And I just think that's beautiful and perfectly put. And to be perfectly honest is part of my motivation for starting this silly podcast in the first place. And so I think that might just about be a good place to end. But before we do end today, Brian, I wonder if for the benefit of our audience having once heard O'Hara read the poem,
00:49:18
Speaker
we could end today by my asking you to read Having a Coke with You for us in your own voice. Absolutely. Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Oonday, Biarritz, Bayonne, or being sick to my stomach on the Traversera de Gracia in Barcelona. Partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better, happier Saint Sebastian.
00:49:47
Speaker
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yogurt, partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches, partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary. It is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still, as solemn, as unpleasantly definitive as statuary.
00:50:11
Speaker
when right in front of it, in the warm New York four o'clock light, we are drifting back and forth between each other, like a tree breathing through its spectacles. And the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint. You suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them.
00:50:32
Speaker
I look at you, and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world, except possibly for the Polish writer occasionally. And anyway, it's in the Frick, which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet, so we can go together for the first time. And the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of futurism. Just as at home, I never think of the nude descending a staircase, or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me.
00:51:00
Speaker
And 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, or for that matter, Marino Marini, when he couldn't pick the rider as carefully as the horse? It seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience, which is not going to go wasted on me, which is why I'm telling you about it.
00:51:23
Speaker
Brian Glavi, thank you very much for being the first guest on Close Readings. I encourage people to subscribe to the podcast so that you get new episodes as they come. We've got some exciting ones lined up. Thank you, Brian.