Interior (With Jane) Lyrics
be what we are afraid to do
cannot help but move us Is
this willingness to be a motive
in us what we reject? The
really stupid things, I mean
a can of coffee, a 35 ¢ ear
ring, a handful of hair, what
do these things do to us? We
come into the room, the windows
are empty, the sun is weak
and slippery on the ice And a
sob comes, simply because it is
coldest of the things we know
About
“Jane” in this poem is Jane Freilicher, a very close friend of O'Hara who Gooch describes as “A pretty twenty-six-year-old painter, with dark hair and a misleadingly serious and preoccupied demeanor, Freilicher had a campy wit and brainy zest for literature in the vein of Ivy Compton-Burnett that made her a natural focus of O'Hara’s enthusiasm” (Gooch 177). She is often grouped with abstract expressionist painters like de Koonig or Pollock, though, I think, mistakenly. Her work, expressionist and abstract in some regards, is more impressionistic and even realist.
This description was written by Mark Tursi in his analysis of O'Hara’s work called Interrogating Culture: Critical Hermeneutics in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara
The whole analysis can be read here.
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