During the 1950s and 60s when the New York School was coalescing as an anti-establishment alternative, the establishment it was anti was embodied in Robert Lowell’s agonized intense confessional poetry. The New York School defined itself, therefore, to some extent, as anti-confessional—or more specifically as anti the sort of confessional that was agonized and intense.
Frank O’Hara, in particular, “couldn’t stand” Lowell’s poetry, according to David Lehman in his 1999 study The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. O’Hara sneered at what he referred to as Lowell’s “confessional manner” which allowed him to “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.”
As an example of this kind of bad taste, O’Hara singled out in a 1965 interview the poem “Skunk Hour,” in which Lowell describes/confesses to peeping on couples making out in cars by the side of the road. These are the last stanzas of the poem.
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull,
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.
A car radio bleats,
'Love, O careless Love . . . .' I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here—
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
O’Hara loathed the lascivious snoopery and what he saw as the hypocritical disavowal of the lascivious snoopery.
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.
Lehman expresses some surprise that O’Hara, who generally tried to find good things to say about other poets, was so openly dismissive of “Skunk Hour.” It’s also odd that O’Hara—who was hardly a prude—would be so put off by this kind of sexual content.
I think the subtext of O’Hara’s disdain (which Lehman doesn’t explicate) is identity. O’Hara was gay; Lowell wasn’t—but the details of the peeping are taken not from Lowell’s life, but Walt Whitman’s. As an old man, Whitman and his friend Logan Pearsall Smith would drive in the park and try to see lovers embracing.
Whitman was (and remains) a gay icon. It’s not clear that O’Hara knew where the story was from, but if he did, he might’ve objected to Lowell’s appropriation of and disgust with a gay man’s sexual interests or actions. Even if O’Hara didn’t recognize Whitman in the poem, Lowell’s narrative here of shameful sexual secrets revealed, implicating both the viewer and the person viewing, has parallels with the dynamics of the closet.
In this reading, O’Hara finds Lowell’s poem “revolting” because Lowell is framing non normative sexual desire as revolting, skunk-like, akin to sniffing garbage—and O’Hara (unlike Lowell) was someone whose sexual desire was non-normative. Lowell in the poem is pretending to be disgusted with himself, but he’s arguably disgusted instead with people like Walt Whitman—and O’Hara.
O’Hara isn’t accusing Lowell of homophobia, and Lowell isn’t consciously targeting Whitman’s homosexuality. Instead, O’Hara might be pointing out, or reacting to, the way that this kind of confession—rooting through one’s own internal garbage cans—ends up framing marginalized identity (and especially LGBT identity) as smelly, repulsively appetizing detritus. Lowell as a straight man can play with attributing to himself sexual deviance. But O’Hara, who’s not straight, is less sanguine about the results of turning identity into a commodity by exoticizing and/or repudiating it.
There are alternate approaches to confession and signaling gay identity. One example is O’Hara’s famous poem, “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” which Lehman says O’Hara wrote while traveling to a joint reading with Lowell.
“Lana Turner has collapsed!”
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
Lana turner has collapsed!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
Lehman notes that this poem is an example of camp, but he bases his analysis on Susan Sontag’s not very useful analysis of the term. I prefer Philip Core, who argues that camp is “the lie that tells the truth.”
In this case, the lie is that Lana Turner is part of O’Hara’s confessional self—he’s her, or she’s him, or she’s someone he knows who is part of his life. The poem’s fun is the way in which the gossip column headlines (“Lana Turner has collapsed!”) falls right over into O’Hara’s own gossipy journey through his non-glamorous, non-Hollywood life with all the raining and snowing and the very New York exciting drabness of the traffic “acting exactly like the sky.”
O’Hara’s jaunty voice, interrupted by the headline, skitters down the street, across the country, into his own past—“I have been to lots of parties/and acted perfectly disgraceful” is perhaps a very oblique reference to O’Hara’s alcoholism, a confessional-poetry-worthy topic treated in a very non-confessional-poetry way. And then the conclusion is a simultaneous distancing from and embrace of Lana Turner, who has (unlike O’Hara!) “actually collapsed” but who “we love” anyway.
If the lie is that Turner is O’Hara’s interior confession, then that’s also the truth. O’Hara is riffing on the way that gay men have often identified with Hollywood female stars and their performance of hyperbolic femininity. The poem too is a performance which turns the unglamorous into a virtuoso fabulousness; Lana Turner is deflated and blown up into iconic, ironic, but also celebratory love.
O’Hara’s poem is as much about himself and his identity as Lowell’s poem is about his. “Skunk Hour” explores hidden secrets and self-loathing. O’Hara, instead, defines his identity through what is visible to all—the streets you walk through, the pop culture enthusiasms you embrace. This can seem shallow or silly or less honest to some readers. But there’s something revelatory and true in a gay man rejecting shame by asking Lana Turner to get up.