"Turning, Turning, Turning" – Om Bevegelse, Stillstand og Diktets Ende i Lyrikken til Frank O'Hara

Abstract

Abstract: This thesis revolves around figures of movement and immobility in the poetry of Frank O’Hara, and explores such figures in terms of poetic form and structure. Regularly presented as as a quintessentially restless poet, whose work is characterized by movement, speed and energy, the question of immobility and stasis has received less attention in the critical literature on O’Hara. Focusing on the theoretical and formal problem of endings and closure, I discuss the ways in which O’Haras emphasis on process and immediacy creates a tension within his poems that manifests itself as a crisis at the end. By reading such moments of crisis and tension, I explore the various formal and thematic responses that O’Hara’s lyric articulates. Beginning with a reading of the poet in motion, I suggest that O’Hara situates poetic creation in the body’s internal processes, and particularly the breath of the poet. This gesture ties him to a wider discourse on poetic breath in American poetry, that situated poetic form in the immediate existential reality of the body. Moving from breathing to walking, I discuss O’Hara walk poems and questions of poetic form through the idea of a «bodily rhythm» and its relation to a social and economic order. I argue that O’ Haras restless poetry is haunted by the prospect of immobility and figures of death. This leads to an exploration of the meaning of statues in O’Haras poetic imagination. Focusing on the long poem «In Memory of my Feelings», I pursue a reading of the poem’s apotropaic images and, especially, the figure of the Medusa. By tracing its prosodic and formal strategies, I describe the enigmatic character of the poem’s ending. Finally, I discuss the ways in which O’Hara’s poetry foreground problems of endings, focusing on the relation between prose and poetry in the context of his prose poem «Meditations in an Emergency». More generally, I move toward the figure of «turning», and propose this as a way of understanding O’Hara’s relationship to figures of the end. I conclude that the sense of turning in O’Hara’s poetry allows him to mediate between the desire for movement and the fearful prospect of stasis.