“Lucky Pierre Style”; or, Lyric Gratification

Frank O’Hara proposes a model of lyric relationality that is not predicated on a subjective interiority, whether as the disclosure of secrets or the overhearing of internal reflections. In “Personism,” his brief poetic manifesto, he refers to “Lucky Pierre”—the middle participant in a queer three-way sexual scenario. This essay takes O’Hara’s notion of “Lucky Pierre style” to explore poetic “gratification” as the scene and relay of pleasures, an unregulated and volatile distribution of lyrical energies. The essay explores this mode of lyric gratification through close readings of O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” and Percy Shelley’s “To Constantia,” two lyric poems written by male poets that address the voices of two nicknamed female singers—a conventional and even codified lyric conceit—in order to consider how these poems can be reopened to the distributive mode of lyric gratification O’Hara names in “Personism” and that is already legible in Shelley’s poetics.