Rain dogs.

After picking up around the house and laying the Africa map flat under the books of O'Hara criticism I will never read, after making the brown-bag lunch, knocking back the coffee and realizing I've gone past the cramping up stage of loss onto denial, the if-it's-meant-to-be-it-will-happen stage, after moving the car from one side of the street to the other, parking for free in front of the cheap for New York garage, sitting in the car in the rain with the engine off singing my head off to the Housemartins' "Five Get Overexcited," I got on the subway and read most of the complete transcript of the Edward Lucie-Smith interview with Frank O'Hara, as collected in Standing Still and Walking in New York. What comes through is his rejection of the codifier approach to an art life, that he distrusts the kingmaker impulse as bullshit, and that bullshit is the biggest shame in art. A totally hot Dominican (I think) woman with long nails and blonded hair glanced at me laughing a couple of times, which was fun, both the laughing and the glances.

O'H: ...I think the example of certain of the abstract expressionists in particular and then later other artists in New York and in Europe gave me the feeling that one should work harder and should really try to do something other than just polish whatever talent one had been recognized for, that one should go further.
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...it's very hard to codify the art as it emerges anyway, so that your participation is really your interest in a sort of emotional way which leads you perhaps to understand a little bit better than the general public at the time the work is appearing. And then you're either right or wrong later.
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You know everything gets so codified here, too. That is, certain people seem to think of cubism as if it suddenly sprang from the head of Zeus and it wasn't called Minerva. Therefore, there were no fauves, there were just the cubists. There were no synchronists. You know, nothing else was happening at the same time. And then the relations between the things changed too.
...
L-S: ...do you think American art has separate characteristics which make it American?
O'H: That's a horrible question.
L-S: I know but it's difficult to put it any other way.
O'H: I know. Does one think that Tapies' paintings are that way because he's Spanish?
L-S: No, that's not quite it. Even more than that. Do you think of Tapies as a kind of provincial in relationship to New York?
O'H: Oh no. Not at all. No, I think the work of Tapies in New York, as in France or in Spain or in Italy, is an absolute fact of contemporary art. See, the general mistake, I think, is in thinking of these things in terms of nationalities. There is modern art.
L-S: But you don't detect a specifically American flavor, not even an American tradition?
O'H: I think Pollock was absolutely right when he said, and I don't remember it exactly, but he said there is no such thing as American painting or any other kind of painting. There is good painting. Or something like that, he said it during the text of the movie that was made of him, in his own voice. And I can't remember it exactly and I don't have it here. But I do think that's a very important point. That there is good painting and there's bad painting and there's indifferent painting and there's superficial painting and there's frivolous painting. This also goes for sculpture, poetry and anything else we are all involved in. You know. And I don't think that the Americans or anybody else has any option, it depends on the individual artist.
...
I was going to say there would be no necessity for Andy Warhol to decide to devote himself to films. I'll put it more positively -- he would not feel that it was OK for him to devote himself to films. But if he does so, then it must mean that he as an artist assumes that a great deal of pictorial and sculptural imagery has been dealt with adequately in painting and sculpture but not in films. I think most artists take the, most responsible artists, and Andy certainly is one -- no matter what set of rumors go around about him -- improve the medium they choose. In times of desuetude you find Rembrandt laboring over etchings because there are no great etchings after Seghers in that period and Rembrandt is taking a responsible attitude towards the medium.
L-S: You see one of the things which I talked about with Henry Geldzahler was the idea of the underground versus the idea of the avant-garde, in the sense of the need for the embattled vanguard and...
O'H: Embattled? That's interesting. There is no underground and there is certainly no embattlement. Andy Warhol gets more publicity than any other single living American artist right this minute. And if that's supposed to be underground, when you cannot even open a fashion section of the Herald Tribune without seeing his name at least once a week, then that's not being underground... I don't mean that I'm saying that it isn't a good thing; I think it's terrific. But it is not being underground; that's a lot of romantic nonsense.
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If you were an Athenian, let's say, and you saw, if you went to the studio and you saw the eyeballs being painted and the nipples being painted and so on, I should think it would be just as sensational as if you were invited to a private showing of Flaming Creatures of Jack Smith.... You know it's the same thing because it is part of your culture and its coming on with ... It is not attacking us really in a certain way, and there's no reason to attack a culture that will allow it to happen, and even foster the impulse -- and create it. Which is a change, you see, from the general idea of, that all avant-garde art has to be attacking the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie has now been so completely absorbed by the rest of society that it can't even have its prejudices anymore.
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...the avant-garde always exists in the state of idea. That is, the avant-garde has been made up, I think, completely, and all through history, with people who are bored by other people's ideas....Now, you do not have to have the Russian Revolution or the French Revolution or the Civil Rights Movement in order to get irritated by other people's ideas. All you have to do is be one individual who is tired of looking at something that looks like something else...If you're a painter, then you make it look like something that nobody saw before, if you can, if you can think it up.
L-S: This is a kind of dynamic of impatience which you're proposing.
O'H: Yes, and boredom. Western civilization, however, has really put a, laid an awful load on tat thing because so many things have already been done. What would you do that would be different and not boring?
L-S: You think it's important to be new then?
O'H: No, I think it's very important not to be bored though.... I think that if de Kooning says that, then what he really is interested in is Poussin; that's his way of not being bored with Kandinsky, or by Kandinsky.
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It seems to me that in the 30s and 40s there were an awful lot of dicta laid down by everybody about what was good and what was bad without any consideration of what was valuable.
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I think that Olson is -- a great spirit. I don't think that he is willing to be as delicate as his sensibility may be emotionally and he's extremely conscious of the Pound heritage and of saying the important utterance, which one cannot always summon up and indeed is not particularly desirable most of the time. And I think Lowell has, on the other hand, a confessional manner which [lets him] get away with things that are really just plain bad but you're supposed to be interested because he's supposed to be so upset....I don't think that anyone has to get themselves to go and watch lovers in a parking lot necking in order to write a poem, and I don't see why it's admirable if they feel guilty about it. They should feel guilty. Why are they snooping? What's so wonderful about a Peeping Tom? And then if you liken them to skunks putting their noses into garbage pails, you've just done something perfectly revolting. No matter what the metrics are. And the metrics aren't all that unusual. Every other person in any university in the United States could put that thing into metrics. So I don't really associate very much with it. I would rather be the sort of poet who would do, you know, the great thing of, you know the story about Max Jacob leaning out his window when Picasso is passing by the Bateau-Lavoir and Picasso calls up and says, "Max, come out." And he says, "I won't." He says, "Why won't you?" And he says, "Because I'm in search of a style." And Picasso walks down the hill and, as Max Jacob pulls his head back, says, "There is no style." That is the sort of thing that is, you know, like living and interesting.
L-S: Well what you're advocating then is something which is detached, self-contained and self-respecting, and therefore free.
O'H: Well, it's hard to respect yourself, but i would like to be free. I mean I don't know what there is to respect, but let's not get into that.
[Laughs]
L-S: No, what I'm talking about is that your poems seem to have a kind of urban wariness. Wariness or weariness. Not a cynicism but a kind of self-containment. And what you've just said about Lowell is in fact very characteristic, it seems to me, of your own verse.
O'H: Yeah. I really dislike dishonesty [more] than bad lines, in a certain way. Because I don't think there is such a thing as a bad line if it's true. The metrics make it, you know they get there themselves. If you really are being honest about something, then the metrics just devour them.
L-S: Well, what's the criterion of truth in poetry?
O'H: Where you don't find that someone is making themselves more elegant, more stupid, more appealing, more affectionate or more sincere than the words will allow them to be. Now I know I do it myself, you know. I can see it when I reread some of my poems that I went overboard and that the words are showing quite clearly to anyone who's bothered to look at them closely enough: that it's bullshit, you know. And that's what I don't like. I would like to take it out of my work, and I don't like it in other people's work.
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...only recently have Americans even bothered, for instance, to trot off to Philadelphia to see the museum on a Saturday. It's perfectly available.
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L-S: But don't you think that one of the characteristics of American painting, as of American poetry, has been this business of the foreground and the background. I told you I'd just been to see Zukofsky, and it seems that in a sense Zukofsky has existed on the second plane. That the real importance of Zukofsky, up till very recently, has been the influence he has exercised over the people who were in the public eye.
O'H: Yes. He's like the Buckminster Fuller or the Tony Smith of that... you know, of the generation he's in. Now, Allen Ginsberg, for instance, ten years ago, was trying to make people pay attention to Louis Zukofsky, and nobody would. And it's partly because he was overshadowed by Ezra Pound so completely, in a way. And Pound is such a great genius that he really was associated more as a follower, you see, than as an originator. And then it's only recently... That goes for Olson too. It's only recently that young poets, who, like the young sculptors I was talking about, have made people see what there was there, or is there I should say, by their own work and by the intensity of their interest.

That last paragraph made me visibly happy, and we were pulling into 59th, so up to the street where lucky for me Lee's Art Shop hadn't opened yet, past the Argonaut, past the Briarcliffe, the long-gone Uncle Sam stick shop, last chance to see Gidon Kremer this year, doing the Berg, the cheap seats are $39 though, and a sour sad feeling past closed-up Patelson's with a picture of the Columbia crew and the transcription of Danny Boy in the window, the Air France rendezvous nosecones of Concordes, stopping in at Duane Reade for more film for today's reading, plus some woollite, fragrance free shave cream and unscented deodorant, then past the closed up Modern, the closed Donnell, down Madison then across Park, a glance at the closed Four Season, my shoes wet but at least not cold, and suddenly in the door saying hello to Wilbert again, then recording this, Qi and the intranetters surprised me but it's only a week till they launch. And now off to the BPC to see Justin Jamail, Tom Kelly, and Brian Kim Stefans.