Frank O'Hara wrote a manifesto of poetry titled "Personism" in response to a poet who felt that O'Hara must be confused about his own work, because his poem "couldn't be got in a single reading." The result is a brief explanation of the ideas that drive O'Hara's style, and a guide for understanding the tone and technique of his poetry.
O'Hara tells the story of how Personism came to be on August 27th, 1959, the day that fellow poet LeRoi Jones and himself "founded" the movement over lunch. On this day, O'Hara remembers, he was "in love with someone" and wrote a poem for this person after his lunch with Jones. "While I was writing it," O'Hara says, "I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem."
Specifically, O'Hara defines Personist poetry as work that "address[es] itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem without preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person." In other words, the poem preserves the casual, everyday realities of love, and balances the poet's relationship to his lover and his relationship to his work. The result is symbiotic: love propels the poem, while the poem drives its writer to love.
"Personism has nothing to do with philosophy," O'Hara writes. "It's all art." Personism "puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person," the same way a canvas stands between a painter and his model. "The poem," he asserts, "is at last between two persons instead of two pages." The basic stylistic and technical elements of O'Hara work—his clear poetic voice, the spontaneity of his verse, and the free verse form he adopts—all appeal to Personism's direct, immediate impression. But just how much can we take O'Hara at his word?
It's difficult to tell how serious O'Hara intended to be when writing this poetic manifesto. The manifesto is filled with humor and subtle jabs at the idea that art should "change" anyone or anything. At the same time, in the context of poems like "Having a Coke With You," the idea that Personism dissolves the barrier between the poem and its specified audience appears to ring true. The ambiguous "you" in the poem's last line, in addition to the speaker's preceding confession, transforms the poem from an abstract meditation on his lover to a direct address. The poem is not only "between the poet and the person," but between the poet and the reader.
