Frank O'Hara's “Meditations in an Emergency,” published in 1954, was originally titled “Meditations on Re-emergent Occasions” (echoing Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624)). The collection in which it was ultimately published, in 1957, took its name from “Meditations in an Emergency,” and, as way of conceptualizing O'Hara's poetics, was subsequently held to be characteristic of the work of a spontaneously minded urban poet for whom, in Kenneth Koch's words, “it was always an emergency because one's life had to be experienced and reflected on at the same time.”Footnote ¹ Nonetheless, the notion of “emergence” or “reemergence” underpins both the poem and the collection (more obviously, perhaps, than the notion of “emergency”). This suggests that we might read these poems as meditations on the process of becoming – of emerging, or reemerging – in the context of the emergency of the period in which they were written (an emergency comprising government surveillance of queer and black bodies, in addition to what Benjamin Lee, in Poetics of Emergence, frames as “the rhythm of military–industrial development and nuclear threat” (2)).

Meditations in an Emergency is not the subject of Poetics of Emergence, nor does this particular collection make a direct appearance within its pages. But O'Hara himself is a major figure in the book, and Lee's project is engagingly predicated on a shared desire to meditate on the problems of registering history and experience in poetry – or what he posits as “the experience of the present, ongoing and emergent” (21). Lee takes four postwar experimental poets as his subjects – O'Hara, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, and Allen Ginsberg – in order to challenge the view that their work is emblematic of “a wish not to know about” what Christopher Nealon calls “the looming catastrophes and conflicts” of their era.Footnote ² These are not poets, Lee contends, whose writing was merely “providing accompaniment for the expansion of markets abroad, the intensification of consumerism at home, the consolidation of corporate privilege,” or who can be “overheard channeling the market or preparing the ground of the advertising strategies of Nike and Coca-Cola,” as work by scholars including Jasper Bernes and Michael Clune has argued (2). Rather, Lee persuasively suggests (via some gorgeous close reading, particularly of O'Hara), that their poetry and related cultural endeavours (“the hipster sketch, the ‘I do this I do that’ poem, the postindustrial jeremiad, the lyric of Black bourgeois dissatisfaction and critique”) makes legible “the everyday qualities of historicity that pulse continuously beneath events we later come to think of as significant” (107–9).

With a winning lightness of touch, Lee draws on Walter Benjamin's work on Baudelaire, Raymond Williams's concept of the “structure of feeling,” Jonathan Flatley's description of the process of “affective mapping,” and theories of affect as explored by Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, in order to argue that we can rarely understand “at the moment events occur how meaningful they will be” (5). Consequently, he frames the poetry of O'Hara, di Prima, Baraka, and Ginsberg as pivoting and shifting between “the immediate textures of urban life and memory for a single speaker and the suddenly collective, explicitly historicizing perspective” (9). Their work, he observes, registers history as unsettled, responding to it “as it emerges and makes itself present … not as a discrete and verifiable set of systems or events, but, rather, as a quality of experience, mediated by affect, perpetually updated and emended” (9, 14). In other words, in their quest for and employment of new forms, alternative perspectives, and emergent vernacular praxes, including versions of camp, cool, hipsterism, and a kind of goofy utopianism, these four poets “orient themselves, historically and aesthetically, in relation to events whose significance is not yet clear” to them (3), and which they feel or perceive spontaneously. For Lee, as for Williams, Flatley, Berlant, and others, and, indeed, for the four subjects of Poetics of Emergence, taking feelings seriously is integral to navigating and meditating on history as “something we both experience and remember” (4) (and, vis-à-vis Koch, must reflect on at the same time), something we are personally enmeshed with but that we also share with others, “a set of problems and potentialities that have yet to be resolved, and that are felt as vividly as they are thought” (14).