ABSTRACT
The chapter analyzes the poetry of Frank O’Hara, a queer American poet based in New York and one of the leading proponents of the New York School of the 1950s and 1960s, through the vantage points of postmodernism and queerness. Using Hazel Smith's notion of the “hyperscape” that denotes an incongruous and ever-shifting postmodern site, the chapter locates in O’Hara's poetry, both in its form and content, a radical experiment that conflates the idea of the city as well as the text. This revisioning occurs from the perspective of the queer flâneur, which reinforces a mythopoeic ethos that is at once global and local.
Further, this postmodern glocality is invoked through the subversion of spatio-temporal boundaries in order to place the “city poet” or the “poet of the city” within a historical and literary lineage. This lineage, then, engenders a necessarily osmotic transaction between material local immediacy and abstract globalism, thus (in)forming the poet's always already ambiguous identity. The chapter explores this identity as well as the poetic text through the aforementioned lenses and foregrounds the ways in which O’Hara's oeuvre can be viewed as a radical proto postmodernist experiment.
