Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara began with metaphors about journeying through one of O'Hara's poems, and returned to the idea of the journey at the end of Chapter 6. In the intervening chapters we have taken many different routes through the landscape of the poetry along intersecting paths. But this book has also engaged with the transformational nature of that landscape, and the ways in which we as readers mobilise it.

The book has, in addition, participated in the changing terrain of O'Hara criticism. In order to play a part in ‘moving the landscapes’ I constructed the hyperscape, a deterritorialised territory, a site and yet non-site, the meeting place of contradictions. I have explored the spaces, time-zones, sexualities and representational modes of the hyperscape, always with the earth shifting beneath my feet. Throughout I have conceptualised the hyperscape in such terms as difference, hypertextual web, personalised hyperpolitics, morphing sexuality, complementary antagonism, semiotic exchange and textual cross-dressing. All these concepts have been a way of trying to encapsulate the co-presence of difference and identity in O'Hara's poetry, their dynamic transformation into each other, and their relevance to his significance as a postmodern poet.

At the same time I have tried to show how these conceptions of O'Hara's poetry line up with actual historical events. Frequently historicising O'Hara in terms of contradiction, I have situated his work between the uptown milieu of MOMA and the downtown avant-garde of Greenwich, between the liberal consensus and gay repression. But I have, conversely, discussed ways in which his work seems ahead of its time, for example in the adoption of a morphing sexuality, discussed in Chapter 4.

The book has also engaged with the intertextual, intermedia aspects of O'Hara's poetry. In Chapter 3 I demonstrated the textual mobility and eclecticism of O'Hara's poems and their roots in imagism, symbolism and surrealism. In Chapter 6 I theorised the intermedia aspect of O'Hara's work, situating it between the arms of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. But in order to emphasise the continuum between process and product, I also speculated in Chapter 5 on the improvisatory nature of his writing in the context of improvisation as a popular creative process and ideology during the period.