The Self in Scholarship

 The self in scholarship is implicit, usually. It is a vague professorial presence behind the text. Even if there is a first person, it is not assumed to be the "person" writing. Everyone knows that the "I" is a mask of a sort. Practices like anonymous peer review propagate this idea. It is not that there isn't a self, but the person must be inferred by the reader. The voice that says "I will do this, and prove that..." is not a self, but a discursive position.  

But the self in scholarship behind the scenes is a person, and the way the self is manifested is in the self's investment in the material.  

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So let's look at the self in a poem.

My Heart 

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!," all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart—
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open. 

I'm not going  to cry all the time

nor shall I laugh all the time,

I don't prefer one "strain" to another. 

Here the voice is defining what kind of lyric subject he wants to be. The tragic and comic masks. There is a subtle thing about the voice here, in the air quotes around one word. This is typical of Frank O'Hara's voice, in which the speaker takes ironic distance from certain words. This is extraordinary, because other poets were not writing like this, conversationally, at the time, late 50s or early 60s. If you did this today is would be normal and banal. 

I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie, 

not just a sleeper but also the big, 

overproduced first-run kind. I want to be

at least as alive as the vulgar.... 

Here we have the postmodern impulse to celebrate popular culture. The expensively made and exuberantly bad movies. Categories of refinement or taste come under question. 

                                                                                                            and if

 some aficionado of my mess says "that's not like Frank!"  all to the good! I

don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,

do I? No, I wear work shirts to the opera,

often. 

 The phrase "aficionado of my mess" is brilliantly witty. The poet imagines he has fans, and his work is a "mess," which sounds self-deprecating but really refers to a different kind of aesthetic, one based on the messiness of real life. The there's a bit of posturing about what kind of clothes he wears. Not just drab-colored suits that he would presumably wear to work, but work shirts to the opera, an invasion of everyday life into the realm of high culture. His readers are on a first name basis with him; there is an intimacy here. 

Note how the enjambments are working, to create "cuts" or shifts of attention. O'Hara does this better than Olson or Creeley, even. I'm counting as enjambments even lines that end with punctuation, if the next line starts with a reversal of attention or emphatic gesture, like "do I?" or "often." 

          I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart—
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open. 

Here the poem enacts the kind of openness that it advocates. 

***

Now suppose the scholar has been formed as a self by reading O'Hara. Would the same dry scholarly persona work? You wouldn't want to exaggerate it, be sloppy because O'Hara gives you permission. What O'Hara is doing is not sloppy, either! Then, to make the transition to Lorca, you would look at O'Hara's poem about Lorca, in which he wants to distance himself and associate himself with the Spanish poet at the same time. "I've been feeling rather Lorcaeque lately / and I don't like it."  It's the same thing he is doing in "my heart."