"A common ear/for our deep gossip": Selfhood and Friendship in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara

A dichotomous tension between selfhood and friendship underlies 1950s American poetry. On the one hand, poets wished to partake in a larger poetic community, hence they stressed their commonalities with each other. On the other hand, each poet desired to construct a separate and visible identity, achieved by emphasizing one's non-conformity. An illustration of this sameness/difference-dynamism can be found in the poetic dialogue between Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara. The two poets bonded over a shared homosexual identity, while they differed on what 'kind' of homosexuality was to be preferred: Ginsberg advocated a rugged, virile hip-ness; O'Hara personified an effeminate, campy queer-ness. This distinction between hip and queer was laid down by Ginsberg in his early poem "In Society," and later reiterated by him in a Gay Sunshine interview. In his mock-manifesto "Personism" and the poem "Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul," O'Hara adopted the vocabulary, playing the part of the giddy queen in opposition to an uptight Ginsberg. The distinction received its fullest treatment in Ginsberg's elegy for O'Hara, "City Midnight Junk Strains," which presents a campy and chatty O'Hara, a socialite queen pur sang, who constitutes the oppositional other to Ginsberg's hip self.