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?
Personal Poem
By Frank O’Hara
Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion
but now I’m happy for a time and interested
I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a construction worker
I’d like to have a silver hat please
and get to Moriarty’s where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and
shaker the last five years my batting average
is .016 that’s that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside birdland by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases, then
we go eat some fish and some ale it’s
cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich
and walk on girders in our silver hats
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so