Frank O’Hara’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: Erving Goffman and the Lyric of Social Occasion

The article locates compelling similarities in attitude and style between two contemporaries, the New York School poet Frank O'Hara and the sociologist Erving Goffman. Goffman's analysis of 'interaction rituals' and the 'gossamer reality of social occasions' allows me to expand upon and ramify Jonathan Culler's theory of lyric apostrophe as a form of triangulation to better account for O'Hara's poetry of the 'social occasion'. In drawing on Goffman's inductive terminology of 'unfocused interaction', 'footing', 'face-work', and the dramaturgical analysis of the self in everyday life, I offer a language sensitive to the description of sociality in lyric performances. Furthermore, I reflect on the lyric of social occasion as a challenge to poetic form, suggesting instead that the poem is better understood according to social interaction as a temporally bounded yet fragile and porous event. To understand why Goffman and O'Hara share a fierce acuity to social mannerisms I discuss Goffman's analysis of social stigma and of the asylum, alongside O'Hara's sexuality and support of decolonizing poets. Both figures share an acute sense of the precarity of social valuation, the intense pressures of heterenormativity, and of the energy - the 'tonus' - required to maintain social interactions.