Many of his most famous compositions depict the poet hurrying through a list of tasks creative and banal; they hum with a frenetic intensity that is counterbalanced but not abnegated by their insistent sprezzatura.

Advertising work is also, like these face-to-face services, fundamentally oriented toward consumption, part of the production of consumption. This is one reason why O’Hara’s poetry and Mad Men would seem poorly matched if Draper were an insurance executive (like Wallace Stevens) or a banker (like T. S. Eliot), and it is likewise hard to imagine the O’Hara reader instead holding a copy of Harmonium or Prufrock and Other Observations (and not just for reasons of anachronism). Advertising and poetry share a secret affinity, so much so that advertising is often held up as an example of what poetry becomes when rendered entirely mercenary. Ezra Pound, famously, in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” exhorts his contemporaries to “consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.”8 His manifesto ran in one of the very first issues of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry; thirty-three years later, the magazine published an article by semanticist S. I. Hayakawa, “Poetry and Advertising,” that makes explicit Pound’s aesthetic hierarchy. Hayakawa defines advertising as the “poeticizing of consumer goods” and is quick to note that, at a technical level, advertising and poetry are largely identical in the way that they use language.9 The difference between the two obtains only at the level of intention. Implicitly drawing on Kant’s distinction between a “free art . . . agreeable on its own account” and a “mercenary art . . . that attracts us only through its effect (e.g., pay) so that people can be coerced into it,” Hayakawa defines literary poetry as “disinterested poetry” and advertising as “venal poetry.”10 In the age of advertising, he argues, venal poetry is omnipresent, “written by the highest paid writers in this country, organized into companies of poets, rhapsodists, sub-poets, and sub-rhapsodists.” As a result, modern literary poets are forced to distinguish themselves through an abandonment of the poetic altogether: “In a world so filled with the clamor of venal writing . . . all poetry has come to sound suspicious, so that disinterested poets are practically compelled not to sound poetic.”11

Paradigmatic here are Wieden+Kennedy’s memorable Nike advertisements, which eschewed all reference to particular qualities of the shoes and instead imbued them with various aspirational meanings, breaking with even the most “radical” advertising strategies of the 1960s and 1970s. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank advanced an important argument about how the touted “creative revolution” of 1960s advertising depended on an alliance between the 1960s counterculture and dissident fringes within the corporate world.15 Agencies such as Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) broke with the established practice of distinguishing commodities according to what Rosser Reeves (advertising guru of the period) called Unique Selling Propositions, plying the consumer with qualitative claims that differentiated their product from those of their competitors. Instead, advertisements by DDB and its fellow travelers made fun of the grandiose claims of their competitors, turning to minimal and understated declarations. These so-called revolutionary ads still made reference to particular features of the products they were selling, however. The famous “Think small” advertisement for the Volkswagen Beetle emphasized, through its use of white space, the car’s departure from the giant sedans of the time and the bloviating ad copy that sold them. But this modesty was associated with particular values: gas mileage, sturdiness, a distinctive look. Read as advertisement, O’Hara’s poem makes only one mention of the product. The Coke enters only as part of the grammatical subject of the first few lines, separated from the poem proper by the title, but quickly displaced by the welter of comparative predicates it spawns, predicates that have nothing to do with the propositional qualities of Coca-Cola itself but pertain rather to the singular experience that the drink enables. Compare this to the advertisement that introduced the famous “Just Do It” slogan, still in existence almost thirty years later. It begins with an establishing shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, then an image of the elderly running-community icon Walt Stack jogging across it, who we learn, through intertitles and voice-over, is eighty years old and “keeps his teeth from rattling in the cold” by leaving them at home.16 We find out that it’s an advertisement from Nike only in the final shot, when the tagline appears. Other advertisements, such as the famous pair-up between Michael Jordan and Spike Lee, might highlight the shoes only to point out how little they have to do with true athletic (or human) achievement, with Lee asking Jordan repeatedly and ridiculously, the wide-angle lens exaggerating the physical difference between Lee’s nerdy ungainliness and Jordan’s muscled poise, “Is it the shoes? Is it the shoes?”17

The postmodern advertisements of Wieden+Kennedy and their imitators introduce a commodity-without-qualities, a commodity whose power to segment markets and differentiate itself from competitors is not a design feature but a rhetorical—or dare I say, poetic—one. They do this by following their antecedents in the 1960s and parodying the comparative structure of advertisement—as in the Lee/Jordan ad—but unlike those early ads they do not reintroduce comparison; comparisons are impossible, so the logic of the ads would imply, in light of the unique values that individuals bring to the items on display. Nikeism is a kind of Nietzscheanism for the rabble.

To be clear, O’Hara’s aims were very different from Nike’s (or Wieden+Kennedy’s). O’Hara had little desire to reform the strategies of Madison Avenue or the fortunes of capitalism. Rather, he was eager to show how, through the poem, the commodity could be emptied of its content and made into a vessel for human interconnection, erotic or otherwise. As José Muñoz asserts in his exemplary reading of the poem, treated as a signal instance of queer futurity, for O’Hara “the quotidian act of having a coke with somebody . . . signifies a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, a utopian potentiality.”18 But this dereifying maneuver, dissolving commodities back into the human relationships whose place they have taken, is itself rather easily reified and, in the course of the last several decades, has become a highly effective technique for corporations, using human desire for meaningful engagement as a way to sell commodities, not as commodities per se but as relationships, as experience. The transformation of objects into experience has also helped firms avoid the problems caused by mass production of standardized goods, whose actual differences from the commodities of competitors are often negligible and whose generalization, standardization, and mass availability can run the risk of making the good in question seem prosaic, dull, and uninteresting. The jargon of experience allows the same commodity to be addressed to each person uniquely.

This becomes obvious once, in lines 3 through 6, the poem begins justifying its comparative claims through anaphoric “partly because” clauses

O’Hara’s use of exclamation and apostrophe, performing an attitude toward proper names, toward celebrity and brand, anticipates particularly well the new affective grammars and styles of interactive service work as they have developed in the half century since the publication of Lunch Poems. O’Hara immerses himself in the space of exchange, modeling a pure enthusiasm, an enthusiasm of entirely nominal rather than descriptive contents that offers a particularly salient prefiguration of the affective labors we encounter in today’s service workers, who must at every turn simulate the intimacy, familiarity, and warmth that have fled the icy calculations of the cash nexus, a rapport in the absence of true relation. [...]

For instance, in his prose poem “Meditations in an Emergency,” after submitting various lyric gestures and attitudes to his bathetic reconstructions

there was no need for the US state or the CIA to distort or falsely represent this art, since the abstract expressionists and their critical epigones