1956–57 were good years for literary revolution. That is when Meditations in an Emergency and Howl appeared on opposite coasts, two of the most important first books of poetry to be published in America since the war. O'Hara like a violin, Ginsberg like a waterfall, let loose the flood of deep associations. They created a torrential rhetoric that literally washed away the poetry of the "silent generation." Certain texts in Meditations in an Emergency are clearly imitations of the French …, [when, for example, the] packaging of [a] poem into five line stanzas is not so much evidence of formal intention, as a joke about literary form. The language slips and leaps and interrupts itself with the limberness of the surreal countervoice. The text has no real subject matter; it is what it means: an incoherence of rhythms and images that is oddly seductive. Although passages like this are not the best part of Meditations in an Emergency, they form the bedrock of pure style from which the book emerges. O'Hara himself describes the paradox of his poetry: "I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department …" The will that makes meanings struggles bravely with a flood of surreal associations, and the will loses; but the failure is a victory. The poem knocks down the retaining walls of form and meaning. Ordinary situations and rooms and streets become Rimbaudian voyages…. More than a decade later, Meditations in an Emergency remains a moving book, perhaps because O'Hara understood the risks, as well as the charms, caused by his "mysterious vacancy of the will." O'Hara was fascinated by the eternal youth of the psyche; but he was elegiac too, in mourning for the drabness of the "logical" world which would never be changed by literature. (pp. 275-76)
Paul Zweig, in Salmagundi (copyright © 1973 by Skidmore College), Spring-Summer, 1973.
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