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    To live outside the law: Frank O'Hara

    Brooker, Joseph (2001) To live outside the law: Frank O'Hara. Liverpool Law Review: A Journal of Contemporary Legal and Social Policy 23 (3), pp. 263-270. ISSN 0144-932X.

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    Abstract

    This essay reflects on the New York School poet Frank O'Hara in terms of the idea of law. I suggest that art depends on a notion of an immanent law: that for language to become artistic is to become a meaningful part of an order which announces its autonomy from the surrounding world. O'Hara exploits this fact by making the most unlikely pieces of language into poetry, and thus giving the law to the life from which his words are taken. But he is also constantly improvising his own rules of art, drawing the law of poetry from the whim of the moment in radically individualist fashion. The gamble of O'Hara's writing is that the reader will submit to this profoundly personal law for the duration of a poem.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Art, Frank O'Hara, law of poetry, personal law
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Research Centres and Institutes: Contemporary Literature, Centre for
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 09 Jul 2014 14:01
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:35
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/10095

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