SOURCE: Lowney, John. “The ‘Post-Anti-Esthetic’ Poetics of Frank O'Hara.” Contemporary Literature 32, no. 2 (summer 1991): 244-64.

In the following essay, Lowney explores O'Hara's utilization of parody, appropriation, and allusion in his poetry and addresses his treatment of the “issue of cultural memory in postwar America.”

It's so original, hydrogenic, anthropomorphic, fiscal, post-anti-esthetic, bland, unpicturesque and WilliamCarlosWilliamsian! it's definitely not 19th Century, it's not even Partisan Review, it's new, it must be vanguard! 

—Frank O'Hara, “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's”

In “Personism: A Manifesto,” Frank O'Hara writes that “Personism” was “founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone” (Collected Poems 499). In accentuating the moment in which this “movement” was “founded and which nobody knows about,” this manifesto / “diary” (498) mocks the pretentiousness of vanguardist polemics. Similarly, “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's,” O'Hara's celebration of Jane Freilicher's impending marriage to Joe...