Reading “Personism: A Manifesto” by Frank O’Hara was a different experience because I thought I was about to read a dreary poetic story about a philosophy that the poet is following and one I couldn’t understand. What I actually experienced was a something more influential and humorous. O’Hara spoke of things that other poets do not really care to talk or write about. It’s as if he was trying to connect to his reader on the same level and like he was trying to get inside my head. This is partially true because I felt like he was relating to me on the topic of poetry. This is, of course, what he intended to do and is part of the central idea of the essay, the Personism of a poem. What O’Hara intends to create between a reader and the poet is a secluded and untouched connection. He goes on to say, “The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages” and that a poem is meant to be personal. If it is, the poem and the poem will be “gratified” and understood more clearly. If a poem is general, the meaning is therefore general and probably indistinguishable to some readers.
Initially, what stood out to me was when he wrote “Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to” and he was relating that to poetry. No one should be forced to read poetry like being “force fed” because it creates a negative memory of the subject and likely makes the person hate whatever it was they were being force fed. Unfortunately, nowadays the only way schoolchildren are being introduced to poetry and reading it is by force. But for someone so young, such a level of interpreting text is tough which leads to a loss of confidence in reading and understanding poetry. Fast-forward ten years and you find yourself in a situation probably like the one you are experiencing now. You find yourself in an awkward situation: being forced to read poetry in accordance to a syllabus but even after all these years you still don’t understand it and you feel like you’re being force fed again. I feel like the introduction to poetry that you receive in elementary school can make or break your experience and approach to this subject many years ahead of you.
