ABSTRACT
The literary as a zone of privileged expression is pretty well wrecked, albeit entertainingly. O'Hara absorbs familiar features of narrative and essayistic prose and of lyric verse so thoroughly that they seem no longer quite transmittable, except as lingering charms. Words that function poetically don't reliably cluster where they once did, in literary forms. They tend to disport in the open air. Serious works in both traditional and experimental modes, while written and published and read as always, have ever less traction in living culture. The decay of literary conventions handicaps literature. "The Day Lady Died" poem stands in literary history somewhat as the contemporaneous works of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg do in that of visual art. Johns made material facts of immaterial signs, as by equating the American flag with paint on canvas. O'Hara's originality remains fresh because literary culture has never really assimilated its lessons.
