Franked Letters: Crossing the Bar

Abstract

The discontinuity of consciousness in Freud’s theory of memory which may lie "at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time" is manifest in Frank O’Hara’s New York poems, especially his walking lunch-hour poems. The inscription of memory traces on the unconscious at the instant of perception (the model for which is the child’s toy, the Mystic Writing-Pad) is homologous to the crowd’s inscription upon the streets, the paving stones of the city. As Paris was the cityscape of Baudelaire’s unconscious so was New York that of O’Hara’s. The paper, the poem, is the Barthesian third term: a translation of the surface of the city onto that of the page, a translation into time, measure, number: from stone/city to paper/poem. Frank O’Hara’s visible language is New York City on the page.