Travelling through one of Frank O’Hara’s poems involves taking a direct route but also diverging from it. His poetry evokes a specific era and location: New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. This is a pre-computer age of typewritten manuscripts, small shops, shoeshines and lunch hours: it is also an age of gay repression, accelerating consumerism and race riots. But the poetry dislocates this cityscape into a postmodern landscape which is discontinuous, highly volatile and constantly changing. This landscape anticipates the world of multinational companies, hypermedia, and polymorphous sexual and racial identities we live in now.

In this book...

The purpose of this chapter is to resituate and reconceptualise O’Hara as a forerunner of postmodernism, whose poems are hyperscapes characterised by textual and cultural difference. Using literary and cultural theory as a springboard, the chapter negotiates the breakdown of unities in O’Hara’s poetry, the emergence of a hypertextual web, and a splintered subjectivity. The chapter also repositions the poet in terms of apersonalised hyperpolitics,postmodern eclecticism, and parallelism between real life and text life.

O’Hara’s poetry thrives on the unrestrained reconstitution of textuality, subjectivity and representation. Within the poems the distinctions between the metaphoric and the metonymic, the...

Although O’Hara is a city poet, his poems also involve dislocation, even disintegration, of the cityscape. On the one hand, O’Hara’s are the most topographical of poems and represent a highly delineated locus. The grids, landmarks and routines of New York become the poem-as-map filtered through the consciousness of the poet. On the other hand, O’Hara’s poetry also involves a radical questioning of place through a decentred subjectivity. At the basis of this location/dislocation of the city is the poet’s simultaneous celebration and repudiation of its values. He aestheticises and eroticises the everyday aspects of the city and turns them...

In Chapter 1 I argued that the intensification and proliferation of difference within O’Hara’s poetry produces a metonymic web of association which is hypertextual in essence. This hypertextual/metonymic network is the ground of the hyperscape discussed in Chapter 2. In Chapter 1 I also discussed the way the hyperscape engages modernist innovation and postmodern appropriation so that O’Hara adopts genres, and then extends them beyond their apparent limits. This chapter will amplify and cohere both of these lines of inquiry. It will analyse how O’Hara’s poems explore difference at a structural/technical level to such an extent that they produce intricate...

In Chapter 2 we saw how sexual difference and sexual adaptability are important components of the hyperscape. In fact, sexual identity in O’Hara’s poetry is characterised by difference: it loops, bends and splinters but never crystallises. In this chapter, I propose that O’Hara is a non-essentialist gay poet whose work presents a ‘morphing’ sexuality, in which one type of sexuality continuously turns into another.¹ This produces an ongoing reworking, fundamental to the hyperscape, of the ontological categories masculine/feminine, friendship/sexuality, sex/gender, homosexual/heterosexual.

These reversals are constitutive of an adaptive sexuality which inhabits unusual spaces and is a form of the hypergrace...

In Chapter 3 we examined the linguistic basis for the hyperscape in literary terms but we largely ignored the function of talk. In this chapter I will be discussing a distinctive feature of O’Hara’s poems, the way they inhabit spoken, performative and improvised modes to create ‘talkscapes’. These modes are often marginalised in poetry, but they are quite central to O’Hara’s hyperscapes where casual conversation and literariness, informality and form-ality are threaded together. Consequently most poems slide imperceptibly between spoken and written modes.

Talk, improvisation and the performative are not identical but they often stalk the same space. In O’Hara’s...

So far the concept of the hyperscape has been mainly restricted to the verbal landscape (whether spoken or written), but here I want to expand it to embrace visual media. That is, I want to move from the concept of hypertext to hypermedia, for the hyperscape is both visual and verbal and involves the hybridization of forms which is characteristic of postmodernism. In this chapter I will be arguing that in O’Hara’s hyperscapes text and image, poetry and painting, and representation and abstraction do not simply coexist but also cross over or ‘cross-dress’. This, like O’Hara’s adoption of the talk...

Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Harabegan with metaphors about journeying through one of O’Hara’s poems, and returned to the idea of the journey at the end of Chapter 6. In the intervening chapters we have taken many different routes through the landscape of the poetry along intersecting paths. But this book has also engaged with the transformational nature of that landscape, and the ways in which we as readers mobilise it.

The book has, in addition, participated in the changing terrain of O’Hara criticism. In order to play a part in ‘moving the landscapes’ I constructed the hyperscape,...