SOURCE: Bredbeck, Gregory W. “B/O—Barthes's Text/O'Hara's Trick.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 108, no. 2 (March 1993): 268-82.

In the following essay, Bredbeck considers the role of homosexual semiotics in O'Hara's poetry, utilizing Roland Barthes's theoretical writings.

Give yourself over to absolute pleasure.

—Frank N. Furter, The Rocky Horror Picture Show

In 1977 Marjorie Perloff proclaimed her “growing conviction that [Frank] O'Hara is one of the central poets of the postwar period, and that his influence will continue to grow in the years to come.”¹ Well over a decade later the prediction remains largely unrealized, and it is still “assumed that his poetry is trivial and frivolous” (preface). O'Hara's poetry has not entered tradition and current critical practice precisely because of critics' inability to recognize the epistemological importance of triviality and frivolity. For it is within the most flippant and campy moments of O'Hara's poetry...