On Frank O’Hara’s ‘Meditations in an Emergency’

When Frank O’Hara moved to New York in 1951 he must, at first, have seemed quite the anomaly to many of his peers. Indeed, even on the eccentric Manhattan art scene, no-one with the same sense of aesthetic wonder as O’Hara; no-one with the same Harvard background in music and literature; no-one with the same credentials of having served as a sonar-man in the South Pacific during the War; and no-one with the same critical understanding of the aesthetics of both Abstract Expressionism and European symbolism, came close to approximating O’Hara’s unique sense of urban bohemianism.

Of course, the likes of John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, both of whom attended Harvard and the latter of whom served in the South Pacific during the Second World War, are probably the most comparable of his contemporaries. However, unlike O’Hara, neither Koch nor Ashbery had the same intimate experience with the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism. Nor again did they place the same emphasis in their poetry as O’Hara did on the documentation of everyday experience. The idea that by contrasting the impressionism and colour of Rimbaud and Verlaine with the photographic imagery of Williams, the music of Hart Crane and the “All-American” romanticism of Walt Whitman, the complexity of human experience would reveal itself in the language of the poem.

Indeed, the Whitman comparison seems particularly apt in ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ when we take into account what seems to be the central consideration of the poem: identity. It echoes with Whitman’s credo ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself’ and aches throughout with a desired move toward some kind of resolution; a resolution which, ultimately, never presents itself. But there is also departure from Whitman. O’Hara is not writing to “celebrate” his loss of identity nor even to accept it as someone who is “large” and “contains multitudes”. For O’Hara this vagueness is something to be struggled against. The search for identity is a “meditation” and the very fact of its loss in the first place is an “emergency”. This is an identity crisis. A crisis perpetuated, it seems, by the end of an affair.

‘Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?’

O’Hara begins, as if the “emergency” is already well underway. There is no explanation as to why these questions are being asked. ‘Blondeness’ and ‘French’ are simply presented, at a distance, as fluid oxymoronic paradigms, somehow stable in the labels that they wear, but also completely devoid of the characteristics normally associated with either one. Of course, the irony inherent in the ‘profligacy’ of someone with blonde hair or the ‘religiosity’ of the (normally) secular French is clear, but it must be remembered that the poem is beginning, right away, on a note of resignation; a resignation specific to some compromise within his own identity and his failure to be recognised and understood.

In fact, in the line that follows: “Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous”, O’Hara posits that the reason for his compromised identity – and by extension the “Emergency” referred to in the title of the poem – is the end of an unspecified love affair. “What greater emergency is there?” the poem seems to ask, since human relations always depend upon an element of personal connection to give them some meaning. What greater loss is there than the compassion of the “other” in relation to the self? Whether “self” refers to the individual experience of the situated being, or to the communitarian “self” of the city, country or continent, loss of compassion is emphasised as being of the utmost importance. After all, here it has led to the individual pain of the poem’s “broken heart”, but also – if one considers the international situation of the period – Cold War paranoia and violence overseas.

“What is identity then, but mere context?” the poem also asks us. Indeed, O’Hara is only facing into this crisis as the result of having been wrenched away from the stable confines of a relationship. Without such a situation to keep a person grounded, O’Hara becomes restless, contradictory and myriad. Therefore, in a statement like “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.” He at once implores his lover with the “boundless” scope of his desire, whilst at the same time reducing the gravity of his request with absurd qualifiers like “all I want” and “I am the least difficult of men.” Opposites exist in a state of flux and swap; humour always undercuts the seriousness of the poem’s “coming to terms”; and often, O’Hara flatly contradicts himself, as though his multiple selves are all vying for position.

In fact, it is when O’Hara is “confined” in the poem – almost trapped within the claustrophobic familiarity of New York City – that he begins to stabilise and return to something like “himself” again. The context that New York gives him is comfortable, stable and like a relationship, gives him the courage to feel there is no need for him to wear any of his innumerable masks; the masks which allow him to come to terms with the rest of the world. He is free, as when he writes “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.”

The problem, as O’Hara sees it, is in the false vision people have of themselves. That, like him, everybody is struggling to maintain a stable set of ideals and to live autonomously in a universe that is indifferent and, by extension, cruel. O’Hara posits that the only way to respond to an ever-changing universe is to be fleeting: “It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass.” Here, indeed, is where O’Hara begins to move toward resolving his identity crisis; the “emergency” brought about by the sudden wrenching away of context. His floundering despair morphs into a kind of freedom where now, instead of lamenting the former “self” who dwelt within the boundaries of a love affair, he compares himself with “the least sincere”. Like the clouds he “continues to pass” but remains forever within the confines of a wandering existence which, for him, is enough to be satisfied, as when he tells us: “My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me.” And then explains that he continues in this way because: “…it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth.”

To the “you” of the poem then; to the person who dragged him to this dreadful self-realisation in the first place. What of them? Well, naturally enough, it is here that he empowers himself. “Destroy yourself, if you don’t know! It is easy to be beautiful, it is difficult to appear so.” In other words, O’Hara’s living with the knowledge that one is unstable by virtue of the fact that existence is unstable, is more challenging than the great vice of the beautiful – namely, their ignorance. O’Hara accepts his mask, proud of the fact that it is “difficult” to wear whilst at the same time baffled by the irony that the very person who brought him to this point is unaware of their own mask: “I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.” Beauty, like the clouds he mentions, is fleeting – temporary – but caught in the self-perpetuating vice that it will never fade nor pass on to someone else. Hence, why it is “easy to be beautiful”. Ignorance is bliss.

Thus, for the O’Hara in the final stanza, stability is no longer stable; comfort, no longer comfortable. “Identity” has now become something to escape from and the romance of life – the “adventure” alluded to in the second stanza – has become the hunter/hunted pursuit between the “settled life” and freedom: “I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans.” And yet, the poem seems also to come full circle, as when O’Hara immediately undermines his seriousness in tone by contradicting it in the next line: “I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to.” Here, of course, O’Hara is once again channelling his inner Whitman. “Do I contradict myself?” O’Hara challenges us “Very well, then I contradict myself…”

Short Story: ‘BYOB’

The town below was laid out before them in pink and granite; the sky, cloudless and filled with the scent of myriad barbeque smoke.

Peadar felt the weight of a second night beginning to take its toll. He looked out over the town from the safety of his back garden and wondered why he’d invited anybody over at all. There was no such thing as hair of the dog.

People stood in clusters of two or three chattering about the weather and by five o’clock the fridge had already been liberated of most of its beer and the fire was beginning to ebb. Somebody was telling him not to worry.

‘There’s only one thing for it’ he was saying, ‘Go out for pints with your friends, bitch about the person you’re secretly still in love with, come home and listen to Wicked Game, cry yourself to sleep.’

Someone else joined in. ‘You forgot to mention one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Repeat until you’ve moved onto somebody else.’

These were his two best friends, Paddy and Jem, and he was out with them the night before doing the very thing they were stood here now suggesting. Jem had spent the evening chopping out thick lines on the back of his iPad and blowing cigarette smoke into the screen of the TV. Paddy encouraged him over a tuneless made-up song on a stringless guitar and pointing out the girls with no tits. Then they went to the pub.

‘I’m not going out again.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m hungover, I’m broke and I couldn’t be bothered.’

Jem chimed in. ‘You’re a faggot.’

‘Oh yeah? And what does that make you?’

Jem smiled and licked the back of his hand. ‘Horny.’

It had been his friends’ idea to stage this barbeque in the first place and as a result, Peadar didn’t know who most of the people in his house were. There were three girls sitting on the grass with their backs to the fence, drinking wine. He thought he knew one of them from work but he couldn’t put a face on the other two. They might have been hairdressers or bar-girls.

‘How are you enjoying the party?’

The blonde girl looked at him. ‘Who are you?’

‘Peadar… I live here. You?’

‘Marie,’ she said incredulously. ‘Jem told me it was a party.’

‘And?’ He said, ‘How do you like it?’

‘Not much.’

It was no secret that girls weren’t his favourite people in the world just then, and talking to these three only reinforced the idea that they never really felt much of anything.

If the female intuition was to be generalised, he thought, it’d be like a predator’s. Sometimes, when they’re ravenously hungry, they savage their prey with the same passion and malice as a lioness hunting antelope. Other times they snare, cat-like; playing games with a chosen mouse and allowing him just enough leeway to make him believe he has a chance at survival. When they’re full, they simply have no interest. They live off the meat they’ve gathered for winter and preen themselves decadently until the next hunt comes along and the cycle begins again. If there’s anything left of the prey, it’s a shell with loose strands for scavengers to pick at.

One of them said, ‘You didn’t ask my name.’

‘What’s your name?’ He sighed.

‘Cara. I work in the hotel with you. Just started.’

Of course. The girl who forgot where the kitchen was.

He said, ‘You’re the waitress, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Who didn’t know where the kitchen was.’

She smiled. ‘Till you told me.’ The other two rolled their eyes.

‘Would you like a beer?’

‘I’m not sure. Wine before beer and all that…’

‘You’ll be fine.’

‘OK.’ She said, then stood up and followed him into the kitchen.

Peadar had been tending bar that day and she’d approached him with a nervous grin, standing with locks of her hair spiralling round her fingers. He told her it was beyond the wooden tables by the fire; to look for a carvery line in front of a big set of double doors with circular windows. He hadn’t thought about her after that, though he’d thought she was pretty.

***

By eleven o’clock, the beer & barbeque embers had dwindled to nothing and most of the folks who were there earlier had left. Peadar stood by the sink with Cara’s hand on his back, looking out the window.

The sun had started to fade and set against the electric blue of near-dark, he could see bonfires sending flashes of thick black smoke into the night sky.

It was as if darkness was the result of the day’s collective fire building. An annihilation perpetrated by summer bonfires; the dark, an accumulation of smoke.

‘Any plans for tomorrow?’ Jem said.

‘Nothing except rehearsing my stratagem for wooing.’ He answered, winking at Cara.

‘No word from your Ma then?’

‘Not yet, why?’

‘Just wondering when I’ll get to lay her out.’ Jem grinned, ‘I’d set her down like ham on rye.’

‘What do you mean?’ Paddy called from the living room. ‘You mean you’d give her the once over with that spotty, thin slice of pastrami you keep tucked in the waistline of your jeans?’

‘No.’ Jem laughed, ‘I mean she’d be salty and pink by the time I’ve spread my butter.’

Peadar laughed. ‘Alright.’

He winced at the subject of his mother. He hated that she stayed out later than him, and knew that if she had been there earlier she would’ve involved herself in conversations around the garden and stolen what little beer he’d bought in for the guests.

‘Does your mum live here?’ Cara asked.

‘Unfortunately.’

She whispered in his ear, ‘Do you think she’d mind if I stayed?’

‘She might’ Peadar replied, ‘but she isn’t the one who pays the bills, so fuck her.’

Years ago, as mothers were supposed to, she’d told him that someday he would ‘find something’ and that life would be good. He’d answered that someday wasn’t good enough.

‘Because we don’t know how long we have’ he’d replied, ‘Someday could be tomorrow or ten years down the line and I don’t want to wait for it. I want it now so I can enjoy it and look back on it smiling when the time comes.’

Standing in his kitchen with a pretty waitress’s hand on his back, he felt that now was that time. Listening to his friends make wise-cracks about his wayward mother was something he would look back on; Jem saying something about most of the pubs still being open and Peadar turning toward Cara with a look of resignation. The bonfires in the distance growing sinister. A key ringing in the lock of the front door and somebody turning it.