We’re reading Frank O’Hara’s Selected Poems with the poetry reading group. He was one of the New York Poets – around 1960 –, a group of poets whose work could be characterized as witty, urban and abstract expressionistic. It took me some time to get used to him, as I faithfully started at the beginning of the collection – which I assume was also more or less the beginning of his writing career, though I’m not really sure because the book doesn’t give any clues as to publication dates, nor any titles of his collections – and he was still associating very freely back then. His imagery didn’t really seem to serve to tell a story and doesn’t really pull the reader (at least not this reader) into the poems, so I thought this one was not for me. Also, his enthusiastic name-dropping and the whiff of hippiedom that emanated from his – presumably autobiographical, but of course you can never be sure – musings kind of annoyed me.
But then I skipped the first half of the volume and started reading again in the middle, where I assumed – after some googling – his most well-known collection, Lunch Poems, begins, with the poem “A Step Away from Them”, a truly beautiful poem that made me real happy. Here his approach – guy walking the streets of New York describing what he sees and feels, reminiscing about departed friends, such as Jackson Pollock, now there’s a name worth dropping – really works. It is light – despite the departing aspect – and pleasantly unpretentious and life affirming. Then I read two more rather well-known – though not outside the USA, I think – poems, “The Day Lady Died” and “Personal Poem”, that had that same hopeful, honest atmosphere.
I don’t assume that all the poems in this collection are like this, but it’s a nice idea, writing poems about what you experience during your lunch break. You could consider it as a very short vacation, with your senses even more heightened than in a real one. What better time to wax poetic?