The Aims and Argument of the Book

Travelling through one of Frank O'Hara's poems involves taking a direct route but also diverging from it. His poetry evokes a specific era and location: New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. This is a pre-computer age of typewritten manuscripts, small shops, shoeshines and lunch hours: it is also an age of gay repression, accelerating consumerism and race riots. But the poetry dislocates this cityscape into a postmodern landscape which is discontinuous, highly volatile and constantly changing. This landscape anticipates the world of multinational companies, hypermedia, and polymorphous sexual and racial identities we live in now.

In this book I will argue that this location and dislocation of the cityscape creates hyperscapes in the poetry of Frank O'Hara. The hyperscape is a postmodern site characterised by difference: it breaks down unified concepts of text, city, subject and art, and remoulds them into new textual, subjective and political spaces. I have constructed the term hyperscape with clear connotations of the visual arts (landscape), urban environments (cityscape), contemporary forms of textuality (hypertext) and new forms of virtual space (hyperspace). The hyperscape is distinguished by the co-presence of opposites: it straddles low and high culture, sexual and racial difference, the local and global, modernist innovation and postmodernist appropriation. This book theorises the process of disruption and refiguration which constitutes the hyperscape, and celebrates its radicality.

Not every O'Hara poem is a hyperscape in every respect, but they are all marked by difference. In fact, the process of difference-in-becoming is the poetry's only all-defining feature and makes it particularly relevant to contemporary readers and critics. Throughout this book, I explore difference in O'Hara's work, particularly in terms of textuality, sexuality, the politics of location and mixed-media endeavour. For O'Hara's poetry, both within his whole oeuvre, and within individual poems, is characterised by the coexistence of seemingly contradictory elements. Where this difference proliferates most intensely, the hyperscape emerges to the full. In fact, the whole body of his work is itself a labyrinthine hyperscape, in which we, as readers, continually lose and find ourselves.

Throughout the book I argue that Frank O'Hara is a forerunner of postmodernism, for the many faces of difference have been intensively theorised and actualised in postmodern theory and practice.