3 E-Books: The Argotist Online

of emotional dispossession and image-centered “savage torpor”? I’m all for a poetry that confronts this
head-on by using some of it! The architect Robert Venturi says, “Viva Mannerism that richly acknowledges
ambiguity and inconsistency in a complex and contradictory time.” Maybe we could go so far as to call O’Hara a
“Mannerist”—his exaggerated reactions and humor, his implicit ethos of “mess is more”. McDonald’s “I’m
lovin’ it” also has the essential Mannerist hyperbolizing spirit. Wordsworth, the sober, steady philosophe, was
obviously no Mannerist—but why not keep some of his level-headed piety regarding art’s pleasure-giving,
insight-shedding mission, his emotion-cherishing mind?
To me, it’s a question of letting in. Don’t write off McDonald’s for its’ Mannerist modernity or
Wordsworth for his Romantic self-absorption—rather, let them both in equally, so that what we produce is
contemporary and durable, Mannerist and tradition-preserving, face-to-face intimate and cell-phone
expedient. O’Hara was, as far as I can tell, the greatest master at absorbing modernity-signifiers in such a
way that he represented them without condescension, and with a loving eye. This has obvious ties to
Warhol, Pop-art in general, Rauschenberg’s Combine-paintings, etc. Mannerism, however, has grounding
in tradition that Pop lacks. Pop did away with the past in embracing glossy surfaces; Mannerism wants the
glossy surface and the earthy depth. It’s an impossibly ambitious stratagem for a new urban poetics—but
why not?
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