Calhoun’s guide grew from an impulse to choose up her father’s deserted O’Hara challenge and carry it to the end line. Half biography, half memoir, it displays the half-spoken perception that writing concerning the issues and other people we love is commonly rather a lot simpler than dwelling with them.
What drew father and daughter to O’Hara was his immediacy—an unpretentious playfulness, which Schjeldahl in all probability summarized finest in a quick article explaining trendy artwork to youngsters: “As on the seaside, a splash is usually a very lovely factor.” Just like the summary expressionists he admired, O’Hara didn’t produce goal, scannable artwork for educated observers; he solely needed to splash round within the each day experiences of life, reworking them into public shows of affection for town and other people he liked. He wrote an enormous (presumably too big) quantity of labor in a short time, with apparently no literary self-consciousness or self-doubt; and since he died younger, he by no means acquired pulled into the late-life work of explaining his work to others or having to hear whereas others defined his work to him.
His is well one of the vital expansive, optimistic, and uncritical our bodies of labor in American poetry—transcribing the true as O’Hara noticed, heard, tasted, and felt it, scribbled off rapidly in lunchtime poems with virtually no revision. Just like the French imagists (Verlaine and Rimbaud) or the West Coast beats, O’Hara impressed readers to take pleasure in him at his personal tempo, and for his personal idiosyncratic presents—and the best of these presents gave the impression to be the flexibility to put in writing poetry that didn’t appear to be poetry a lot because the random expressions of a delighted, bemused life. As no much less a personage than the solar tells him in “A True Account of Speaking to the Solar at Fireplace Island”: “Chances are you’ll / not be the best factor on earth, however / you’re totally different.” And it was his sharing of his peculiar “totally different”-ness—in addition to his passions for Mayakovsky, Rachmaninoff, smoking, ingesting, and making love—that made his poetry really feel like sharing, as Calhoun places it, “a beautiful secret.” Like Pollock (the topic of O’Hara’s 1959 monograph for Braziller), he didn’t produce works to be hung in some impersonal museum; he most well-liked to get down on the ground and mess around with the each day expertise of manufacturing them.
