Author: Amory Crane

If you are at all like me, gentle reader, then you will agree that there is nothing more conducive to fine and witty conversation than the taste of ice-cold gin and lit tobacco leaf. Paired with a good meal, a pretty interlocutor, or a long known and deeply beloved friend, and one can hardly keep from oneself the impression that one’s contribution to the resulting tête-à-tête is an inexhaustible smattering of bon mot. There are, of course, alternative stimulants and palliatives. But whatever they are, it would be fair to say that whether sipping macchiato with a prospective beau on the south side of the Thames, or downing flutes of champagne with girlfriends in a brunch parlour somewhere in the midlands, unwittingly reenacting scenes from The Bacchae, you are probably engaged, however clumsily, in one of modern life’s chief passions: conversation.

Doubting the extent of this point before setting it down I had only to remind myself of the number of occasions this past week where I listened or watched gladly, either walking or in repose, not to productions of the dramatic arts, but to people talking. For we have become gluttons for chit-chat, and if I need to present a single other piece of evidence beyond our mania for podcasts I could always point to the obstinate refusal of sit-coms of twenty or thirty years ago to die. Shows like Friends, or to take the point just a little further, Sex and the City, are among a number of programmes that are watched not as the cinema lover who returns again to his beloved Citizen Cane for the fiftieth time, combing the cinematography with obsessive zeal, but as extensions of one’s own living room. They play in the background of our lives, in bedrooms, kitchens, snugs, conservatories and god knows wherever else in lieu of fraternal company. In the case of a show like Friends and others similar the set is even designed in such a way so that you yourself are presented as sitting in the sofa opposite the enfolding drama. Unable to find their own company, the devotees of this mode of viewing are content to settle for a window onto a land where the wine is always Ribena, where the food is never eaten and gone cold, and where the lines are put into every one of the participants’ mouths.

If there is a hopeful aspect to all this, despite evidence to the contrary, it is that language remains a common medium, however degraded; for conversation, whatever else it is, is almost always an exercise in language. All those think pieces written ten or so years ago about the death of the novel will look foolish now if they made any reference to our distaste for language per se, because if the day ever comes when the death of literature moves from the op-ed section to the obituaries it will not be because of our failure to consume words. After all, we have an ever-lustful yearning to take part in their exchange. Certainly, after COVID, and with the disarming ease with which digital media has depleted our social relations, so that young single men and women sit alone in failed marriages with themselves, there is no greater premium placed on anything than genuine conversation. What else but irony then, that obstinate and vengeful god, and perhaps our last, could offer up podcasts and re-runs to fill this compulsive yearning? In fact, set alongside the rate of pub closures and our ever-increasing abstinence from booze, let alone tobacco, I may be too sanguine in thinking the state of conversation is far from getting its own passing reference in The Times.

Thought of in this light, our time’s prejudice for the genuine and authentic is revealed only to be a symptom of anxiety. That our tastes conflate informality, candidness, and the colloquial with authenticity, and preference the raw over the well-construed, is really only an exercise in that delicate act of placing the objects of current enthusiasm in the ennobling rays of our public pieties. No doubt these pieties have deep roots. One need only reach for Wordsworth, writing in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, to find what was among the first pronouncements of this link between colloquial language and sincerity:

Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.

The airs of an inflated language, in other words, are a reflection of the poet’s amour-propre, having less to do with those ‘common sympathies of men’ than with their common pretensions. This criticism is not so far from that levelled by Pound and Eliot on Milton regarding his inverted, fussy syntax, and whom Eliot once called ‘our greatest master of the artificial style’. All the same, the question of high art and common language remains nebulous, and the process by which the latter becomes the former belies that simple formulation of sincerity as the immediately assimilable and clear.

No poetry, no novel, and no work of drama is a simple record of words spoken. The artifice of the colloquial is as delicate as the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope. And few if any poems which are referred to as colloquial or conversational are accurate and wholly naturalistic representations of a conversation. We might point to a handful, such as in Kipling, but even there we do the man a disservice by saying he was a mere stenographer of soldiers’ gossip. He heard the untapped music of their lives and made them sing.

Today, when the values of directness, of the seeming lack of affect, of having places to go and people to see, and of the desire to include rather than critically examine are the most prized, I can think of no other poet who better embodies this state of affairs than Frank O’Hara. Born in 1926 and dying from a terrible collision with a jeep on Fire Island forty years later, O’Hara made his name as a member of the informal New York school of poets, painters, musicians, and however many other avant garde hangers on, who drew their influences from the emerging cultural energies let loose after the end of the second world war. Ever sociable, O’Hara was known to write poems at immense speed and short notice, often on notable occasions within his own circle. His milieu, in the end, was his métier. But he managed, despite deserving the too often dispensed accolade of spontaneity, a diction and cadence of conversation that is disarming until one reaches its conclusion.

Take the poem ‘Why I Am Not a Painter,’ first published in 1957:

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

The way O’Hara presents the informal relations between practitioners of art is mirrored by his own address to us, and we are brought into the composition of his poetry in a similar way to how he is with Mike Goldberg’s painting. The present tense ‘I drop in’ is of course a useful conceit to relay the story, for this is a poem that appears to address us as if in the corner of a bar, or on a bus, or as we’re walking casually along a busy street, and convinces us it fell into its telling the way one does in conversation with a friend. It also mirrors the way O’Hara presents both painter and poet falling out of and back into their subjects despite themselves. 

If one feels slightly lost then by the time you reach the final line it becomes clear that the poem has an internal unity of idea, with the circling of oranges and sardines, their appearances and disappearances, both as themselves in the works of art and as designations in the titles, and maintains that unity not by a hard compression but by an opening of space. In the end it is less a treatise on aesthetic concerns than a rendering of those concerns in the daily life of two artists.

Yet if the gentle flippancy of tone in that poem fails to disarm you, then I suggest you take a look at a poem like ‘The Day Lady Died’ from his 1964 collection Lunch Poems. Ostensibly a kind of elegy for the singer Billie Holiday, the poem is also a recollection of an individual as one has heard from countless friends, family members, and acquaintances in the genre of ‘I remember where I was when JFK was shot,’ or the queen died, or whomever else that grants a frisson of drama to the otherwise mundane activities of their daily life. By such means does O’Hara render the way public events weave their way into our hearts: 

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton  

This opening, with its when, where, and what immediacy, establishing itself in the present tense, has a slightly different effect than that of the previous poem. Before, where one has the distinct impression of an interlocutor almost stumbling onto an anecdote, here the register is the same but as if we are eavesdropping on the poet’s thoughts as he goes about his day. Yet, paradoxically, much of it is merely telling us where he goes, as if he is addressing us. This is the kind of inherent tension, between the supposed authenticity of common language and its application in high art. So we hear of his shopping for magazines and newspapers and books and booze and cigarettes, a little tale of consumption which is construed in such a way as to be redolent not of the excitement offered by choice, by a profusion of opportunity, whether by ‘a little Verlaine / . . . with drawings by Bonnard’ or ‘Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres / of Genet’ but of enervation brought on by what he denotes as ‘quandariness’. 

It’s this enervated indecision, along with the tension in tone, that charges the poem and leaves one reading until a very late and quite exquisite volta. For what began and continues until nearly the very end of the poem as a listless lulling rhythm, once again disarming the reader with its ubiquitous diction (‘quandariness’ being our only shock) then disturbs by that final line which seems to void our own breath as well as it is recollected:

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

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

The rhythm itself, after its catalogue and receipt of a day’s purchases and destinations, ends abruptly with a note not of acquisition but of loss, both of Billie Holiday and of the recollected lack of breath. That final line seems to imbue those previous with a kind of retrospective depth, just as wineglasses sparkle in the slanting light of a dining room. 

This is not a poetry of hard crystalline objects, of perfectly crafted, impervious and unyielding spheres. It’s a poetry open, unwound, and of surface. It is a poetry with pores.

My purpose here is not to condemn the more overtly wrought but to show how there is a mode of expression that is both serious, funny, at times very moving, and that ultimately speaks in the manner of our own prejudice. It can be no coincidence that the poet who wrote the above verse also wrote, in ‘Meditations in an Emergency’: 

One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—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.

Hard to think of a better instance of a sentiment that chimes with our own time expressed not only so cogently, but with the same blasé note by which we put down those unpopular addresses to higher things. For O’Hara is undoubtedly amusing here, but if we recall Wordsworth and his Lyrical Ballads again, the means by which this poetry can affront something as great as nature not so much by argument but by a tone of voice, is redolent of a whole culture of cynicism that began in earnest after the first world war and reached apotheosis in a pervasive mass culture by the latter part of the last century and into our own. It is the degraded journey between the narrator of A Farewell to Arms, in 1929, saying ‘Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates,’ and the youthful response to any question of those higher matters, ‘So what?’ 

We come, in a sense, full circle; for while we associate that conversational mode with authenticity today, we must remind ourselves that conversation existed long before the time of our grandparents. The salons of the Eighteenth century made an art of it, and in the drawing rooms of Madame du Deffand and Madame Geoffrin, the wit of patrons was displayed with a conscious artiface and refinement of manner. Questions of authenticity were far from anyone’s lips, but the manner by which large subjects could be handled with insouciance, learning displayed by good humour, and the ready ability to build on what one’s interlocutor said to create a delicate interplay were all prized. Today the two poles between which we find habitation are an inarticulate gargle of feeling and a deep pervasive cynicism: between a shout and a yawn. While the latter is visible in O’Hara’s poetry, it is nevertheless the case that at his best one can hear the articulation of what was once most fresh in this modern mode of expression.

It is for those lost souls then, with Friends forever on repeat, that it is perhaps worth recalling when the expression of our time was impossible to consume unthinkingly. For poetry demands attention from those who read it, and this poetry offers not a simulacrum but the charged language of what we most prize. Its rhetoric is our rhetoric. And when we recall the old yardstick by which we measure the affability of a political candidate, ‘could you go for a pint with him?’ we can see both where tone and content meet to form whole modes of propaganda. For much rests on such a person using the cadence and deploying the language of authenticity. By reading where this mode of thought is deployed at its most charged we can see through such displays, and, at the same time, we may find ourselves, at the very least, in some kind of communion. For in the little pauses between lines can be heard the chink of martini glasses, the flick of lighters, and the laughter of pretty women.

— Amory Crane

Amory Crane is Editor-in-Chief at Decadent Serpent. He covers such topics as Art, Literature, and the more broadly Cultural, reporting straight from the chamber of what Shelley once called the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. You can follow him @LaughingCav1 on X or on Substack. He also writes fiction.