Frank O'Hara Has Collapsed!

Abstract: Critics have noted the "cathexis" (Lytle Shaw) Frank O'Hara produces among his readers. By presenting the raw data of the self—the names of lovers, friends, artists and associates—O'Hara activates a desire to know the speaking subject, an unearned familiarity that mirrors that the poet's parasocial invocations of female stars. But our identifications give rise to disidentification: the cited names start to decohere into the discursive patter of cultural capital. Our readerly investments in O'Hara make him the poet par excellence of queer white habitus. As demonstrated though a revisionist reading of "Having a Coke with You" and an intertextual poetic conversation with Amiri Baraka, O'Hara's poetics explores the erotics of class desire. By his late masterpiece "Biotherm," O'Hara dramatizes the collapse of the bourgeois ego under the pressure to curate society and the self.