Mediations on Emergent Occasions: Mad Men, Donald Draper and Frank O’Hara

Kate Lilley

doi:10.5130/csr.v18i2.2770

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Published: Sep 17, 2012

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v18i2.2770

Keywords:

poetry, mediation, Frank O'Hara, melancholy, passing

Kate Lilley

University of Sydney

Abstract

Frank O’Hara’s 1957 poetry collection, Meditations in an Emergency, features in Season Two of Mad Men (2008) as a talismanic phrase and object. Pressed into service as Matthew Weiner’s valentine to his returning viewers, the circulation and citation of the book across the season, through different diegetic and extradiegetic levels, aligns poetry, advertising and quality serial television drama as textual modes intent, above all, on creating attachment through feeling. O’Hara’s book is a crucial link in a series of metonymic relays, chain effects and affects, which underwrite Mad Men’s citational poetics to assert its own cultural authority, and the mediating power of television.

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 2 (2012): Secular Discomforts and On Mad Men

Section

On Mad Men (Peer Reviewed)

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Author Biography

Kate Lilley, University of Sydney

Kate Lilley is an associate professor of English at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on poetry and poetics and is the author of two books of poetry, Ladylike (2012) and Versary (2002).

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Kate Lilley, University of Sydney