How can a poem be personal? For O'Hara's early critics, the poetry's rigorous orientation towards the trivial, contingent, private details of a particular life presents a unique difficulty. Helen Vendlerremarks of the personal poems, “The wish not to impute significance has rarely been stronger,” and Charles Molesworth writes, “They make ‘confessional’ poetry seem alexandrine or allegorical by comparison.” These writers read the exact dates, particular streets and buildings, and proper names of friends in the poems as tombstones marking the inaccessibility of O'Hara's “particular consciousness,” the “antipoetic weight” from which the “imaginative transformations” of his really poetic lines must be extracted. The particularity of reference in the personal poems, what O'Hara calls their “dailiness,” paradoxically disables the poetic persona by which the literal and particular are presumably controlled, the extraliterary processed as literature. “Mike Kanemitsu,” “a bolt-head that broke off a packing case,” “now when I walk around at lunchtime”: these details stick in the critics' prose, they are both too personal and not personal enough to count as poetry.