Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1995) Pages 1-100 Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection September 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) Frank O’Hara “How Roses get Black”, 3 • the poem seems to contain at least two anti-heroes, the violent “you”, bent on destruction of ornamentation against the modernity of the radiator, burning symbolist roses who also has some biblical precedence with reference to the burning bushes. Then the “I” who is the narrator and thus able to transform the “you” from Moses to John the Baptist by asking for the leonine head of the “you”. This “I” owns and creates the “you”, defining his heroism in the act of destruction which refers of course to the “you’s” act of destroying the roses in the first three stanzas. The line “Heros alone destroy, as I destroy” is straight out of “In Mem...” • what is of issue here is the d...
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By the way I am updating my Ashbery material on the blog. Take a look some time I started today with re-annotating "Two Scenes".