Frank Speech

Abstract

Abstract The ornate privileges movement and animacy. O’Hara’s ornate poetics are a way to avoid the deathly statuary he abhors, to maintain mobility, and to rhetorically persuade the reader of the vividness and vivacity of his poetry, its enargeia. Rather than luxuriating in ornamentation, however, O’Hara’s poetics work by offsetting onrushing energy: lines unwind themselves only to be cut off by moments of parrhesia, of ‘frank speech’. Paul Goodman’s account of grief and anger offers one stimulus for this parrhesia, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry another. The tension between the ornate and the sudden—even the expletive—aligns with the discordia concors of Mannerism rather than the organic, folding and unfolding infinity of the ornate during the Baroque, and is the topic of Chapter 5. The tension between the ornate and parrhesiastic is discerned in close readings of ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ and ‘To Hell with It’.