Having a Real Day of It: Grace, Time, and Pastoral in Frank O’Hara’s Work Poems

This chapter analyses the meanings and affects of work in Frank O’Hara’s poetry, as it manifests as style, temporality and landscape. What follows is an account of O’Hara as a poet of mid-century labour, registering post-war changes in the composition of laborlabour, the transformations of lived time these occasioned, the professionalisation of the arts, and post-war New York as a city of work and an imperial centre occluding it. I begin with an account of O’Hara’s spectrum of vitality: that is, its aspirations towards energy amid a constant threat of boredom. O’Hara’s access to the former and escape from the latter is then outlined as a poetics of effortlessness, of a particular kind: a studied nonchalance achieving its transcendences and effortlessness through work, as encapsulated in the Italian Renaissance’s concept of Sprezzatura. From here I move to the temporal rhythms of O’Hara’s energies: on the one hand, the alternations of labour and leisure found in the working day and the working week; and on the other, the tendency of new work practices to blur these alternations, as post-war labour draws more and more of non-work life into its orbit. Finally, I examine O’Hara’s presentation of the labour of others in these contexts. Here I judge O’Hara’s landscapes against William Empson’s definition of pastoral as a process of simplifying and beautifying economic power relations.