Performance over being: Frank O'Hara's artifice

This essay seeks to redirect theoretical perspectives in recent returns to the poetics of affect and performance. A case is made for the critical importance of Frank O'Hara's writing of affect as performance. O'Hara's development of writing as a performance art opens up a theatre of writing between poetry and other arts, assimilating analogies not just with painting but with diverse performing arts from ballet to Hollywood. His theatre of affects dramatises the sociality involved in being a poet, performing a writing praxis that maps being a writer onto the social being of writing. O'Hara generates a poetics of informality resistant to formalism that can appear occasional and conversational. His apparent improvisation of performance over being offers intimate engagements with prescripted forms of social being. Indebted to models suggested by Vladimir Mayakovsky, O'Hara's poetics suggest new critical perspectives on the mediation of feeling through the performance of writing. This essay sketches new critical models for reading O'Hara and draws out arguments for a deeper reorientation in the poetics of affect and performance, suggesting the need for more sustained recognition of the poetics of performance culture through which 'performativity' might be recognised.