Frank O'Hara's Open Closet

Abstract

This essay explores the relays of publicity and privacy structuring Frank O'Hara‘s “Personism: A Manifesto” and his personal poetry. Though these works have recently been celebrated for their candid expression of homosexual desire during a cultural moment set on silencing queer voices, I argue the inverse. Focusing on O'Hara‘s ambivalent relation to a calcified poetics of impersonality promoted by New Critics and confessional poets, I suggest that O'Hara does not simply reject the New Critical creed of public poetry. He instead reformats New Critical tenets to create a fantastic space of closeted openness that successfully depersonalizes himself and his audience. Apparent in poems such as “Poem” (“Lana Turner has collapsed!”) and “Personal Poem,” this project enables the poet to fashion an intimately imagined queer community that facilitates impersonal identifications. Through personism, that is, O'Hara fabricates an alternative public sphere in which public individuals paradoxically become visibly invisible.