Abstract

Numerous recollections of the American poet Frank O’Hara take care to describe the spectacle of his walk – one that was by turns ‘light and sassy’, and like that of an ‘angel in sneakers’ – complementary to his own poems, which are often concerned with the motions of ‘standing still and walking in New York.’

This talk will explore what O’Hara’s work can tell us about the experience of waking in cities and its performative potential, both as an inscription of identity and as a contribution to the dance of the urban everyday. In his ‘I-do-this-I-do-that’ poems – as O’Hara himself named them – we find not only representations of these walks but ruminations upon their relations to personality, queerness and public space.