Although O'Hara is a city poet, his poems also involve dislocation, even disintegration, of the cityscape. On the one hand, O'Hara's are the most topographical of poems and represent a highly delineated locus. The grids, landmarks and routines of New York become the poem-as-map filtered through the consciousness of the poet. On the other hand, O'Hara's poetry also involves a radical questioning of place through a decentred subjectivity. At the basis of this location/dislocation of the city is the poet's simultaneous celebration and repudiation of its values. He aestheticises and eroticises the everyday aspects of the city and turns them into sites of meaning, but also suggests that these shining surfaces repress other spaces.

This chapter will argue that this simultaneous location and dislocation of the city in O'Hara's poetry opens up a radical reformulation of the cityscape as hyperscape. This reformulation occurs through the interface between the embodied subject and the city, in which each continuously remoulds the other, revealing new political and subjective spaces. It is possible because neither embodied subject nor city is static, unified nor impermeable. The result of this reconfiguration, in its most radical form, is the hyperscape. This is the term I used in the introduction for a postmodern site which is discontinuous, contradictory, heterogeneous, economically uneven and constantly changing. In the hyperscape time and space are compressed, and both subject and city are continually dismembered and reconstituted.

Negotiating the hyperscape adroitly requires what I will call ‘hyper-grace’. Grace is an important and recurring concept in O'Hara's work, epitomised in the phrase ‘Grace/to be born and live as variously as possible’ (‘In Memory of My Feelings’; O'Hara 1979, p. 256). It invokes Christian grace, while at the same time challenging its religious and transcendental connotations by emphasising bodily rather than spiritual grace. It implies bodily and mental composure, mediation between emotional intensity and campy self-irony, and a feminised conception of movement which relates to O'Hara's own gay sexuality.