O'Hara's "Personism" and "Personal Poem"

“I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make?” In his brief essay entitled, “Personism,” Frank O’Hara claims to have “modestly” found “the death of literature as we know it.” Though intentionally humorous, Personism is undoubtedly tied to his poetry, as O’Hara ironically congratulates himself for his poetic faculties. A new style of poetry with a distinct aversion to abstraction, Personism (always capitalized in the essay) “puts the poem squarely between poet and the person…and the poem is correspondingly gratified.” However, O’Hara claims that there is no personality or intimacy involved in Personism, “far from it!” It seems to me that this essay is an attempt by O’Hara to push the progressive envelope, in a sense, experimenting with the unconventional.
O’Hara claims that Personism is his response to the trend of abstraction taking place in poetry, which Allen Ginsberg discusses in It Is. Abstraction, to O’Hara, “involves personal removal by the poet,” in order to appeal to a mass audience. O’Hara, on the other hand, doesn’t “give a damn whether they eat or not,” using the metaphor of a mother force-feeding her children. By making his references so specific, and so personal, O’Hara’s poetry can only to be understood by a select group of people of his choosing, particularly the New York School of intellectuals with whom he associates. Thus, O’Hara’s poetry is decidedly esoteric, and personal, though “far from” being intimate, “evoking love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity.” Of course, O’Hara gives only a “vague idea” what Personism is actually about, perhaps to prevent his poetry from abstraction, and appeal to a mass audience.
It is clear that O’Hara’s “Personal Poem” is closely tied to this idea of Personism. For one,
O’Hara makes references to “LeRoi” in the poem, and to be sure, it seems as though the speaker, O’Hara, is meeting LeRoi for lunch. In the essay, O’Hara mentions having written a poem for someone whom he was in love with after having lunch with Leroi Jones, the Black Arts poet. In “Personal Poem,” O’Hara makes a reference to “one person out of the 8,000,000,” perhaps the person with whom he is in love, out of the entire population of New York City. In reading “Personal Poem,” this idea of connecting directly to an audience without being intimate, seemingly contradictory ideas, is more easily understood.
I don’t know how many readers come across O’Hara’s poetry and understand all of his personal references, specifically “Lionel Trilling” and “Don Allen,” but if I were to guess, I’d imagine it’s a small group of people. This being the case, perhaps this poem is directed only to one person, that person being the only person to understand able to understand what exactly is going on in this poem, that person being the person with whom O’Hara had fallen in love.