SOURCE: Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. “Frank O'Hara's Poetics of Speech: The Example of ‘Biotherm’.” Contemporary Literature 23, no. 1 (winter 1982): 52-64.

In the following essay, Blasing considers O'Hara's use of language in “Biotherm.”

Reflect a moment on the flesh in which you're mired 

(“In the Movies”)

Discussions of Frank O'Hara's technique in terms of painterly surfaces must content themselves with proposing analogies: “The surface of the painting, and by analogy the surface of the poem, must, then, be regarded as a field upon which the physical energies of the artist can operate, without mediation of metaphor or symbol.”¹ But the spatial analogy of an “energy field” is somewhat misleading, for O'Hara's surface is usually temporal. It is the line of speech that is his principle of organization, the principle determining his surface coherence. Yet O'Hara's speech cannot be regarded simply as “chatter” or “conversation,” again reducing his poems to mere surface...