"And if Frank O'Hara seems the antithesis of academic work, Ashbery is, in his own way, its epitome," McGann writes, in "Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes." Not sure specifically what he means by Ashbery seeming the epitome of academic work, but I DO know precisely what he means by O'Hara seeming the antithesis. You won't go wrong reading O'Hara, N. I sometimes think that he's my favorite, ever "the reliable," among New American Poets. "Reliable" in the sense that I can find pure fun and pure pleasure (I guess I'll have to call that aesthetic pleasure, fwiw to you) whenever I pick up one of my O'Hara books for a lonely read. In fact, there's something about the pure spirit (on the surface, carefree--deeper down, rock solid, mature, vulnerable, and courageous), the bold nonchalance not because he's trying to make a point of it or affect that spirit, but because he is sincerely and amply imbued with it. He exudes it, in other words, because it is real within him, and every word he touches, I think, has it there. And nothing is programmatic or exceptionally ambitious. And when he's funny, which he is quite often, it's real. It comes out of life, his writing, not ambition or plan. That's been my impression.

If I'm implying that when various L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers/poets are "funny," their humour is more self-reflexively filtered or screened, and thus loses some "spontaneity" by maintaining "tighter control," I do not mean to imply that they are less funny, that they won't make you laugh out loud, or split your guts. However, they won't make you cry and then two pages later relieve all the tension with gut splitting humour, the way the novelist Joseph Heller does in Catch-22, for example.

I say "filtered" or "screened" so as to have acute control over the larger gesture/work and its fit into a larger "plan," and quite often they tend to write "poetries," not "poems," whereas O'Hara tossed off his lines/poems "spontaneously," often in 1-2 hour fits of quick and angelic inspiration that must be attended to right there and then while it's happening or else there will be no poem at all. Indeed, he wrote a lot of them during his lunch breaks, hence Lunch Poems . The effect, indeed NOT affect, is that they arise out of a life being lived, and in my opinion, that's why so much natural spirit and "life" comes into them.

Later, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers/poets go to great pains to get spontaneity into their writing and most "factor in" at least some variation of "automatic writing," a la Gertrude Stein, for example. Silliman, for example, disciplined himself to write everyday, probably "very quickly," at, I believe, regular times (say, in the mornings shortly after waking, so as to catch the best of the transitional state between dreaming and everyday consciousness) and for set periods (say, 20 minutes). This, too, produces "spontaneity," of course. In fact, that precisely what it is "programmed" to do. And when you read from, for example, Tjanting in that American Tree anthology, you will laugh out loud and you will get the feeling that the text you're taking in derives from very real spontaneity. I'm just saying that it's different from O'Hara's. I think that Frank O'Hara's poems, spontaneity, and humour come out of life, his life, directly and naturally. I think the spontaneity and humour abundantly evident in many of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets' poetries is just slightly different, factored in, as it were, for the overall works from which it emanates, must control it, temper it, make it fit other concerns, ironically (or not so ironically, really), goals to free their writing from predetermined goals and prescriptions which are systematically factored in by the history of literary practice and our systems of enculturation. Of course, you also want to keep in mind that some, if not in fact many, of the things O'Hara was "doing naturally," the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets' wanted to "get in to" (and get out of) their own writing, so they upped the ante and sought "methods" for achieving their ends.