Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara

Frank O’Hara’s poetry evokes a specific era and location: New York in the fifties and early sixties. This is a pre-computer age of typewritten manuscripts, small shops and lunch hours: it is also an age of gay repression, accelerating consumerism and race riots. Hazel Smith suggests that the location and dislocation of the cityscape creates ‘hyperscapes’ in the poetry of Frank O’Hara. The hyperscape is a postmodern site characterised by difference, breaking down unified concepts of text, city, subject and art, and remoulding them into new textual, subjective and political spaces. This book theorises the process of disruption and re-figuration which constitutes the hyperscape, and celebrates its radicality.