“the assassin of my orchids”: Frank O’Hara, Mad Men, and the Reshaping of the Recent Past

Don Draper reading Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency

Note: The following post is a paper I presented at the 2011 Northeastern University English Graduate Student Association Conference. The theme of this year’s conference was “Raw Materials,” and my paper was part of a panel titled “Raw Poetics.”

In a recollection of his friend Frank O’Hara, written for Book Week less than two months after the poet’s sudden death in July of 1966, John Ashbery proposes a solution for individuals who are wary of “a supremely tribal civilization like ours, where even artists feel compelled to band together in marauding packs.” He advises: “Whatever it is, join it; you can examine it later and neutralize it, if necessary, from within” (Selected Prose 81). This talk examines one of the ways that O’Hara attempts to neutralize the conventions of reading poetry that were established by the prevailing marauders of his day. Specifically, O’Hara’s use of proper names — represented in this talk by the poem “To The Film Industry In Crisis” — raise questions about how writers and their readers approach such references in poetry. My discussion will also examine what happens when O’Hara and his work (the poem “Mayakovsky”) become points of reference for the AMC television program Mad Men. This revision of O’Hara’s work seems to evade the ways that O’Hara challenges assumptions about how to read and write poetry.