“Personism”

Reading “Personism” by Frank O’Hara just made me appreciate and like the poet even more after the videos we’ve seen in class of his process of writing. In Personism, he describes the way that he writes poetry which he demonstrated in the videos, which is writing off his nerve. In the video we saw, he incorporated his phone call with James Schuyler into his poem, not stopping his writing process. In Personism, he talks about this unique approach by saying that “you just have to go off your nerve”. I also liked the way he talked about his reception reactions, saying that you “just let all the different bodies fall where they may”. His carefree, go-with-the-flow style is really refreshing in a poet, which makes his poems interesting and confusing at the same time because you don’t understand how or why he switched topics so rapidly. He even created his own writing style that he calls Personism, which challenges the conventional abstraction form of putting yourself out of the poem. Instead, O’Hara incorporates himself fully into the poem, putting his experience and stories into his poems. He creates a new style of poetry which is between two people. Analyzing his poem “The Day Lady Died” in class really helped me understand O’Hara’s style, and after analyzing the contents of the poem, I appreciated the unique form of poetry of O’Hara’s that just describes his daily routine. Even though I don’t quite understand why his daily routine is considered poetry, it was a refreshing form of poetry with a style that I haven’t seen anywhere else.