In Chapter 3 we examined the linguistic basis for the hyperscape in literary terms but we largely ignored the function of talk. In this chapter I will be discussing a distinctive feature of O'Hara's poems, the way they inhabit spoken, performative and improvised modes to create ‘talkscapes’. These modes are often marginalised in poetry, but they are quite central to O'Hara's hyperscapes where casual conversation and literariness, informality and formality are threaded together. Consequently most poems slide imperceptibly between spoken and written modes.

Talk, improvisation and the performative are not identical but they often stalk the same space. In O'Hara's work the confluence of these modes relates to the poet's commitment to the immediate, the transient and the provisional; his desire to present rather than represent; and his need to transmit an embodied presence in language. A style emerges which challenges the limits of the poem-as-text but does not supersede it. An O'Hara poem is not a multimedia event or a slice of a chat show, and O'Hara is not a talk-poet who improvises in performance like contemporary talk-poet David Antin (Antin 1976; 1984). But O'Hara's work can be seen to be a precursor to some of these other modes, to point towards creative processes and modes of production beyond the purely literary, while negotiating, simultaneously, a high degree of ‘literariness’.

This chapter analyses the role of talk in O'Hara's poetry, and also contextualises it in terms of community, camp, gossip and gayspeak. But it also links the talkscape to O'Hara's creative process, his mode of writing, through the concept of improvisation. The way writers write is often neglected in studies of their work, as if the product could be completely divorced from its conception. But even where the creative process is heavily concealed, it still has a graphic effect on the end result. In O'Hara's poetry the connection between product and process is overt, but has usually been discussed in terms of his relationship to Abstract Expressionism.