*Apr 04 2026 | Frank O'Hara - On Seeing Larry Rivers’ 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' at the Museum of Modern Art

Hi folks and happy National Poetry Month! Debi requested I share another poem by Frank O'Hara after she did so in February. This is one of my favorites of his.

O'Hara was a poet, an art critic, and worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a docent. In this piece, all three identities collide. It's a poem that ponders patriotism and the national character with a satiric edge; it's a legitimate piece of art criticism; and it's a promo for Frank's work place! Frank was good friends with the artist, Larry Rivers, and I love that he is also hyping up his friend here on top of everything else. Speaking of promos, if you're interested in more heady stuff you can find new poems every Friday on my Journey page, Constantly Risking Absurdity: https://www.librarything.com/topic/378830#n9169504

If you'd like to see the painting Frank's writing about, here's Larry Rivers' painting: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78504

And for reference, Emanuel Leutze's iconic original: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11417

Funny that both paintings live within a couple mile of each other in Manhattan...

On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art
by Frank O’Hara 1955 (1926-66)

Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.

To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile
and pull the trigger. Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding

on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract,
the robot? They’re smoke, billows above
the physical event. They have burned up.
See how free we are! As a nation of persons.

Dear father of our country, so alive
you must have lied incessantly to be
immediate, here are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate’s flag, bravely specific

and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
Don’t shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.

Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara

>1 doctorofphysick: Thank you Nick!

I'm definitely going to have to come back to this one. A quick read, twice, is not enough. I must go just now. But I'll be back.

So different from the other O'Hara I shared and few others, too. More traditionally structured here.

Your selection interesting too, now that we are in another war, I don't care what they call it.

Like the poem I shared in February--even more so--this evokes feelings that are emotionally complicated for the reader. Perhaps because feelings were complicated for O'Hara as well? Or was he quite clear-eyed?

Here's where I'm at with this one, feeling a tad provoked but justly so.

Like River's painting, in O'Hara's poem we are presented with a different side of the well-established history of the crossing of the Delaware, especially as depicted by the iconic Leutze painting. The river wasn't nearly so treacherous, the white pants were ridiculous, and war? War isn't "beautiful." War is hell. War is "intimate." War is "trembling." War is a "robot" of ideas of "smoke." War is men killing other men while close enough to see their eyes.

The mention of a pirate flag is interesting. Washington et al were renegade traitors to King George. One might say they were stealing the land from England after the Royal coffers had spent a ton to steal it for themselves. Washington would have been hanged if captured.

The mention of Washington's lies would harken to every 1955 American's memory of their grade school history class, learning that Washington chopped down his father's cherry tree and when asked if he did it, he responded, "I cannot tell a lie," admitting to its wanton destruction.

"To be more revolutionary than a nun" is a hoot of a line. War is not selfless purity and Christ-like poverty, especially if you consider the Continental Army (such an "in your face" name to provoke the "island") was conducting a nighttime sneak attack on the British forces, the night of December 25!

This line, though, to me is the most profound satirical take on our worst myth-making,

See how free we are! As a nation of persons.

In 1776? How laughable, as O'Hara surely meant it to be. All Hail our Founding Fathers. Which persons exactly will enjoy that "freedom," dear sirs? The same ones that do now.

This poem kind of fired me up. Did you expect this kind of response, Nick? What is your own response?

For something completely different, here's a Frank O'Hara poem read by an ordinary guy, a glass blower, Richard Samuel, as part of the Favorite Poem Project.

I was half expecting it would say, "Read by Nick..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QZ_Cl_KDMc&t=205s

>3 DebiCates: I was definitely thinking about the current political climate when I selected this, and I hoped the pieces would provoke just this sort of analysis! Sometimes our most sacrosanct images benefit from reinterpretation and satire, and I feel like O'Hara is processing these ideas on multiple levels. He is commenting on Rivers' choices in the painting, including giving Washington the anguished face of a sketch by Da Vinci (Ferguson 1986) and the whorls of paint that suggest mists or smoke (which he personifies as the emotions of bygone wars so beautifully). There's also his attempts to divine Washington's mental state and leadership in that past, but what I hear most is a personal meditation on what it means to be an American in 1955 and how art can help process such a state of being.

Reading the introduction of the anthology of his I own, I learned for the first time that he served in the Navy during WWII, and of course, he was an out gay man living in the Eisenhower era (in perhaps the only corner of the US one could freely at the time, downtown NYC). This poem seems like a means to process and digest that strange mix of wartime fervor that drove thousands to enlist, and the post-war reality of his fundamental othering. One can understand in this context why he might want to raise the Jolly Roger and take potshots at the Founding Father.

I found a pretty great (and brief) scholarly article about both Rivers' painting and O'Hara's poem; I had to use my school credentials to access it, so I can't link it, but I'll put the DOI in my full citation (gotta be a good Information Sciences student and attribute correctly). The author, most likely an art historian, is more concerned with Rivers than O'Hara, but she gets to a fundamental explanation of what they're doing as Post-Modernists. I admit that I was always semi-allergic to this period of intellectual history, and I can't readily explain what 'semiotics' means, even after having written papers circling around it.

"...O'Hara finds something more amorphous, indefinable except through the residue of his images, a 'pirate' of significations, perhaps a real hero, perhaps a hypocritical buffoon, content to live out a falsely heroic posterity in the cliche-corrupted imagination of his countrymen."

"Both (Rivers and O'Hara) see that artists who wish to challenge the signification of the inherited conventions must in fact do battle, using the conventions themselves as weapons, risking defeat or ridicule, never able to win a definitive victory because of the infinity of the semiosis and the infinity of human need to represent its own ideals" (Ferguson 1986).

I must admit that this one was a real humdinger to bring to the table, but I love it. The reason can be traced to the passage about ideas becoming smoke above the celebrated historical scene. Not only can we imagine these abstractions dissipating in the collective consciousness, we can see them on Rivers' canvas:

"...Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding

on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract,
the robot? They’re smoke, billows above
the physical event. They have burned up."

Ferguson, F. (1986). Crossing the Delaware with Larry Rivers and Frank O'Hara: The post-modern hero at the Battle of Signifiers. Word & Image, 2(1). 27-32.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.1986.10435956

>4 DebiCates: That was wonderful! Love Richard's introduction and his reading. That particular "Poem" is one of the greats. I've read "The Day Lady Died" to friends in the past, and I definitely felt the same idea he expresses here about feeling the need to rush along with Frank. It's great to see his glass blowing alongside the poem; O'Hara's verses pair nicely with labor.

>5 doctorofphysick: I'm not surprised that this poem has garnered some scholarship applied to it. This is quite a thickly layered one. It has in its sights a herd of sacred cows that make up patriotism and its manipulative, stubborn psychology. It;s myth-making upon myth-making, with many moving targets. And that's exactly why it resonates still, I think. We just haven't moved very far from 1955, in truth.

Well, I suppose that's not entirely true. But we have taken all our old mementos and heavy luggage with us. I often have to refrain from interpreting just about any thing I read without seeing how it relates to the maddening casual promenade we have been taking since 1776, as if we do have infinity to solve the problem of the "human need to represent its own ideals" when we never really meant or believed in so many of them.

Is that akin to what 'semiotics' means? We use language to signify and elevate but not really do the work? It's a cheat, then.

How to beat a cheater? I think O'Hara and Rivers did. Or at least gave it a really good try.

Thank you for this poem, Nick. I'm sorry we haven't yet gotten much discourse on it here. Maybe the holiday of rebirth, the Spring time weather giddy with blooming daffodils, and a new awful war has something to do with it.

Definitely a layered poem, and just as relevant: a layered context in which the poem was written, and the present moment adds its own layer to the heady mix.

>7 DebiCates: How to beat a cheater? Love this, for many reasons.

It did prompt a response from me, as someone who (I suspect) is more generously disposed toward semiotics and the post-structural perspective!
Is that akin to what 'semiotics' means? We use language to signify and elevate but not really do the work? It's a cheat, then.

I don't disagree with that conclusion, at least not completely. It's very possible to use language that way, deliberately or unconsciously, and when we do, I'd say yes: that's a cheat. I think of that as the speaker using a tool (language) in a way that amounts to cheating, though. It's possible, but not inevitable. And, I'd argue it has more to do with the speaker than language.

And semiotics helps point out that distinction. It's not always about the cheating or the trickery of communication. It's about all the ways the tool of language works. In that sense, I find semiotics itself a very useful tool.

>8 elenchus: I'd argue it has more to do with the speaker than language. And semiotics helps point out that distinction.

Thanks E! I still don't have a crystal clear definition of semiotics, as you do, but it does interest me more now. Seems apt to be interested in it for anyone with a passion for the carefully concentrated language as is used in poetry.

Or maybe it also works the other way round, that someone interested in semiotics would find their way to poetry.

Which first interested you? And now which interests you more?

How about you, @doctorofphysick?

Ah, interesting question, @DebiCates. Certainly I was exposed to poetry for longer and more regularly, though I only brought a deliberate attention in perhaps the past decade. But when it hits, it certainly leaves an impression: I've already mentioned the lasting influence of Dr Seuss, and with that goes Shel Silverstein, and the songs of the Dwarven folk in Tolkien.

I'd say it's not a matter of one interesting me more, but the various ways these (and everything else) intertwine that interests me the most. Layers and layers.

>8 elenchus: I think that the use of language, while sometimes a tool for cutting corners, is the foundation of how groups of people create and do maintenance on what matters to them collectively. We have these dusty signifiers of our national identity here in front of us, and artists like O'Hara and Rivers are deconstructing and reconstructing them so that they might have greater meaning in (their) present. Although there's a puckish, desultory playfulness to Frank's vision of Washington, ultimately I feel like his language is working in service of a noble, ongoing project. It's a project without an endpoint, however, and it's way over-budget!

>9 DebiCates: I'm doing a introduction to literature theory course right now and I agree with @elenchus that semiotics is about exposing the rift between language, speaker and audience to some extent. I think (although not with an abundance of self-confidence) that semiotics is primarily about challenging the idea that language is logical, fixed and complete, by revealing it to be fluid and organic and messy more than anything else — there is nothing essentially true about the signifiers, the words, we use to represent concepts, and neither the signifiers nor the concepts they represent are fixed. As you allude to Debi, this idea is used by people as an excuse to intentionally avoid the intended reading or used by artists to try and justify the meaning in messy but elevated junk.

What excites me though is the potential of applying a semiotic lens to poetry when each sign (the combination of signifier, or word, and the signified concept) is destructed to reveal how it is not solely contained to a precise definition, but in converstation with other similar words in concept and sound, and in conversation with the etymology of signifiers, and in conversation with the sliding meanings of signs that align with a particular concept. It makes poetry alive and breathing and able to adapt to modern readings rather than bound in the past, fixed and coldly logical. Taking this idea too far leads you to dangerous places (the deconstructionists went a little far killing the author and all), but a healthy perspective on the idea can make poetry really exciting.

I watched a play on Ruth Bader Ginsburg the other day (pretty phenomonal performance to be honest), and I found it interesting how this idea has a lot of relevance in practice as well. RBG talked in the play about how she saw the constitution as a living, breathing document whose language can be interpreted in a modern context, in contrast to the conservative supreme court judges who viewed the constitution as dead and its meaning fixed, its ideas eternally bound in the 1700s, including its more discriminatory ideas.

I will save my thoughts on this particular poem for another message

>1 doctorofphysick: O'Hare does a really good job at showing how in revolution, people throw away the baby with the bathwater. The lines "To be more revolutionary than a nun is our desire, to be secular and intimate," are quite evocative for me, how there becoming a 'true' revolutionary is revolting against morality, illustrated in the denial of the nun (who I typically imagine as kind-hearted and generous) and the hatred of the redcoat who is hated and dehumanised as a robot. This poem makes the American Independence messy, the same way I think about the French revolution: a mix of patriotism and oppression and comradery that morphs in a mob of hatred and dehumanisation and a desire to simply see the world burn, like the robots "They're smoke, billows above the physical event. They have burned up."

I'm thinking how the smoke and the misty glare acts as an obscuration of history, as if the modern perspective on the Independence war is a patriotic mist, smoke that is "billows above the physical event." A mist built on the lies as revealed in the 4th stanza, a mist over the water that supports "the beautiful history."

Language is paint.

>12 Interstellar_Octopus: VERY INTERESTING! Lots of food for thought in this conversation. Although there is terminology that is new to me, I can understand how language itself is often deeply layered, nuanced, contextual, and not fixed. I love how the RGB play tapped into the same subject you are pondering and studying. And it easily shoe-horns into studying poetry.

Even our pictograms can have some of those same issues.

I'm thinking right now of the first "Pioneer plaque" for Pioneer 10 (space travel is much on my mind these days with Artemis II up there orbiting our moon).

It was intended to communicate visually the beings (us humans) that sent out the spacecraft and our location in the universe! By the way, Stephen Hawking thought that was an incredibly terrible idea--who says aliens will be friendly or benign. We aren't, not even to one another.

Back to the plaque. The female figure is idiotic. It would, if successfully interpreted by another life form as representing our life form, and if subsequently compared to a real human female figure, it would reveal our inherent prudishness. Interestingly, the prudishness (sexism, too?) is certainly true but the figure a lie.

More importantly, and I think related to semiotics as I'm slowly coming to understand it, is the arrow. The arrow intended to show the direction of where the spacecraft came from in our solar system. For that to translate, the receiver of the gold plaque would have to have had the same history with bows and flint arrows we have had to understand what we think of as a universal symbol for direction. How likely is that?

It illustrates fundamental obstacles when trying to communicate precisely. Even esteemed and beloved Carl Sagan blundered here in his part of the plaque design. (The plaque that went with Pioneer 11 was revised.) If the merest basic pictures carry a lot assumptions, shared history, and current social conventions then no surprise that verbal/written language would...even more so.

I'm with RGB. Our U.S. constitution should not be static, keeping us forever stuck in the 1700s. Building in room for growth was the genius of it. And until recently, I think it did a decent job, at least of being able to grow, albeit slowly. Right now, I don't know what is happening to it, other than being ignored by those at the top. At record speed.

>14 TonjaE: In so many ways, that metaphor works perfectly!