Frank O'Hara and New York: Seeing the City from a Poet's Eyes

 

“It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs”

-from “A Step Away From Them”

 

      It seems like I know Frank O’Hara, but he died the year I was born.

      Yet I get the sense that I can see the New York of a certain time through his works; I can shake hands with the people he introduces me to; I can smell the coffee he drinks, taste the food he eats.
      And I’ve never met him, only read his work. And the New York I know is a vastly different one from the New York O’Hara knows, as he wrote there until his death from a freak accident in 1966.   
      O’Hara is very personal in his work. In Lunch Poems, his 1964 collection that contains poems dating back to 1953, O’Hara seems to take readers on a stroll through Manhattan, and we get to know the people he name drops. In “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul,” (1959) the first stanza reads:

It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering

if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch

ah lunch! I think I am going crazy

what with my terrible hangover and the weekend

coming up.

Here, we get a snapshot of what Lunch Poems is all about. (Apparently, lunch was O’Hara’s favorite meal of the day. The title stems from his mid-afternoon breaks from his job as curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. He’d take walks and bring his notebook with him, jotting notes and ideas for poems as he walked, stopped to eat, and returned back to work). I assumed the “Norman” referenced above was Norman Mailer, as Mailer was a New York contemporary of O’Hara’s and was a co-founder of the Village Voice newspaper. In “Adieu,” a very apprehensive speaker – throughout this work, you clearly get the vibe that every speaker his O’Hara himself – is preparing for a trip to Paris while trying to wrap up loose ends in New York first. While he wishes he was staying in town “working on my poems at Joan’s studio,” he knows he must first check in with “an excitement-prone Kenneth Koch,” as well as noting that “Allen (obviously Ginsberg) is back talking about god a lot,” “Peter (I assume Orlovsky, a poet and long-time Ginsberg companion) is back and not talking very much.” He also writes of  a “Joe,” but I couldn’t figure out who Joe was. Also mentioned in this poem are Charles de Gaulle, Albert Camus, Shirley Goldfarb, Jane Hazan, Jane Freilicher, Irving Sandler, Rene Char, Pierre Reverdy, and Samuel Beckett. Honestly, I’ve never heard of most of those people, but O’Hara makes it seem like they are part of my circle, too, not just his.

      While O’Hara is associated with the New York School movement, I discovered a curious link with the Beat movement that preceded it, a movement that also had its start in New York. In much Beat literature, the writers all write about each other, albeit under fictional names. For example, in John Clellon Holmes’ Go! (1952), which is considered to be the first beat novel, Jack Kerouac is referred to as Gene Pasternak; David Stofsky is Allen Ginsberg, Holmes himself is referred to as Paul Hobbes. This same practice appears in many Beat books, most notably Kerouac’s On the Road.  In Lunch Poems, however, O’Hara doesn’t bother to change the names.
      Other pop culture mileposts of the time appear regularly. Lana Turner, a sultry and glamorous movie star of the 1940s and 50s whose career was basically done by 1960, appears in a couple of different poems. In “Steps” (1961) O’Hara writes, “where’s Lana Turner she’s out eating and Garbo’s backstage at the Met.” Turner is featured more prominently in “Poem” (1962). The opening line, “Lana Turner has collapsed!” sets the tone for this frantically paced poem, in which the speaker screams “LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!” again 10 lines later, about half-way through the poem. As the poem seems to slow down, the speaker finally concludes, “I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up.”
       From a style standpoint, O’Hara is clearly a free verse poet. While many of the poems are presented in fairy traditional verses, some of them appear jagged – a line might be indented in an exaggerated way, maybe right before the end of the next line. The appearance seemed a little disjointed, which made me wonder if there was a little edginess underneath some of the seemingly free flowing words. As far as capitalization goes, it seems like his standard practice is to capitalize the first word only; pretty much everything else is lower case. As a far less seasoned poet than O’Hara, I can see a lot of similarities between his work and mine. First, I think there is a very strong sense of place in his poetry, and that is something that I strive for. Also, I like his language choices; I think his word choice is fairly simple, but he’s able to create a lot with them, another thing I aspire to. One thing I take away from O’Hara is the pacing. I think each of his poems has a tempo to it, like AM radio songs of the time. Some are fast and some are slow, but they’re all pretty catchy. That’s something I need to work on.

      I’m not sure why, but my whole life I have had this odd feeling that I was born roughly 20 years too late. I’ve always felt that I’d have fit in more coming of age in the 1960s instead of being born then. Lunch Poems played into that. It was incredibly fun to read, and I connected with a lot of his New York references. I could see myself in some of those places, taking the subway or the bus to get there, trying to squeeze in a quick meal before scurrying off to the next thing, afraid of missing something.