SOURCE: Elledge, Jim, editor. “‘Never Argue with the Movies’: Love and the Cinema in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara.” In Frank O'Hara: To Be True to a City, pp. 350-57. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.

In the following essay, originally published in 1988, Elledge investigates the influence of the cinema on O'Hara's poetry.

No poetry has been more influenced by the movies than Frank O'Hara's. Many critics have noted that O'Hara employed cinematic technique throughout his work, pointing out, as Marjorie Perloff has, that his images “move, dissolve, cut into something else, fade in or out” as scenes in films do.¹ Others, such as James Breslin, view O'Hara's consciousness as “moving, taking in things … with the speed and precision of a movie camera.”² However, O'Hara's use of film goes beyond technique per se.

In his long poem “Ode to Michael Goldberg ('s Birth and Other Births),” O'Hara recalls...