Poet of Pepsis and burgers Posted on May 3rd
Selected Poems
By Frank O’Hara
Edited by Mark Ford
Alfred A. Knopf. 265 pp. $30
Reviewed by Frank Wilson
The poet Frank O’Hara died on July 25, 1966, a day after being struck by a Jeep on Fire Island. He was 40.
O’Hara was extraordinarily prolific. As Mark Ford wryly notes in his introduction to this volume, O’Hara’s 1971 Collected Poems weighs in at well over three pounds. O’Hara is perhaps best known for what he called “I do this, I do that” poetry, collected in his very popular Lunch Poems, which City Lights published in 1964.
Many of the poems in that collection were typed up after O’Hara returned to his office following a lunch break. “Les Etiquettes Jaunes” is typical:
I picked up a leaf
today from the sidewalk.
This seems childish.
Leaf! You are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!
O’Hara’s often breezy style seems easy (”Now I have taken down the underwear / I washed last night from various light fixtures / and can proceed”), and maybe for him it was. But it is also inimitable. Try doing it, and what you’ll end up with is cheap imitation Frank O’Hara.
That conversational tone - and to really appreciate it, you have to hear a recording of O’Hara reading his work - is characteristic of O’Hara. So is the attention to such ordinary things as Pepsis and cheeseburgers and how a pigeon veers upward “when a car honks or a door slams.”
It may seem lightweight, but it is also remarkably tensile, an unbreakable thread holding his often startling imagery tightly together. So we can see how “the fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer’s ankles” and recognize immediately “the flushed effulgence of a sky Tiepolo / and Turner had compiled in vistavision.”
The style derives, it would seem, from the method of composition: “I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures,” O’Hara wrote. “I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve.”
For all the style on display in O’Hara’s poems, style is not what they are about. They’re about what “is found at the crossroads where what I can know and can’t get meets what is left that I know and can bear without hatred.”
O’Hara was a broadly cultured individual. He studied piano privately as a child and went on to study piano and harmony at the New England Conservatory. After serving in the Navy as a sonarman in World War II, he went to Harvard and later got an M.A. from the University of Michigan. His friends included not only poets such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, but also artists such as Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers, and composers Ned Rorem and Morton Feldman. At the time of his death, he was an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
O’Hara’s poems, in other words, are the products of a deeply informed sensibility concerned with capturing experience in all its wondrous immediacy (it’s what gives you the feeling, after you’ve read only a few pages, that these poems could only have been written in Manhattan). In “Poetry,” he sums up his aims precisely and succinctly:
All this I desire. To
deepen you by my quickness
and delight as if you
were logical and proven,
but still be quiet as if
I were used to you; as if
you would never leave me
and were the inexorable
product of my own time.
In his poems, O’Hara’s experiences “are just there in whatever form I can find them.” Which makes them particularly worth reading as National Poetry Month draws to a close, because poetry is really about experience - “rhythm, assonance, all that stuff” have value only to whatever extent they serve experience. After all:
It’s . . . pretty hard to remember life’s marvelous
But there it is guttering choking then soaring
In the mirrored room of this consciousness.
Frank Wilson recently retired as the books editor of The Inquirer. E-mail him at PresterFrank@gmail.com or visit his blog at http://booksinq.blogspot.com.
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