Catullus in the Playground

Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry … its continual labour of reassembling what has been scattered. John Berger. In his manifesto Personism, Frank O'Hara celebrated his own work with the announcement: ‘the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.’ In fact, he says, he was about to write another poem when he realised he could just pick up the telephone instead. Perhaps it is lucky telephones had not been invented when Catullus was writing his poems, which also seem to belong between two persons instead of two pages. Yet despite the address to a ‘you’ that characterises many of Catullus’ poems, readers do not, as they do when reading a letter addressed to them, typically place themselves in the position of the person addressed. Rather, readers identify with Catullus himself.