Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) was a fine poet and chronicler of New York City. I would like to have met him, and it almost happened. He was a music major at Harvard, and just as I became a music major there he switched to English. We never met.
In the 1960s I was at the Museum of Modern Art as a pianist accompanying silent films, and Frank was a MoMA curator specializing in exhibitions. We must have passed each other occasionally, but we never met. At one time I was living in Greenwich Village just west of Fifth Avenue. He lived just east of Fifth Avenue. We never met. Today, in this column, though he has long since passed on, I can say that we finally meet.
* * *
* * *
O’Hara’s poetry is almost entirely autobiographical, so we get to know New York through his highly personal observations and activities. In one of his best-known poems, O’Hara turns words around as he writes of the death of the great jazz singer, Billie Holiday, whose nickname was Lady Day.
THE DAY LADY DIED
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
* * *
O’Hara wrote this jazz elegy over his lunch hour the day Holiday died.
In fact, so striking was his ability to write finished poems on the spot that one critic called him “The Lunch Break Poet.” O’Hara later published a full volume of what he called “Lunch Poems.” There is a designated room in the newly-expanded MoMA called “Frank O’Hara: Lunchtime Poet.”
It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.
On to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
* * *
* * *
O’Hara was born in Baltimore and brought up in Grafton, Mass. After attending Harvard (His roommate was Edward Gorey) and later the University of Michigan, he moved to New York where his colleagues included poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch and painters Larry Rivers and Jackson Pollock.
Of the two professions O’Hara wrote:
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
O’Hara’s poetry is conversational and captures the immediacy of what is happening about him. He said that poetry should be “between two persons instead of two pages.” As for the formality of poetic writing he noted: “I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, “Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.”
O’Hara had many skills and originally intended to be a concert pianist. So not surprisingly he often wrote with references about music. But then, it is often the music of his city.
MUSIC
If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian
pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s
and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.
Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.
I have in my hands only 35c, it’s so meaningless to eat!
and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves
like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you
to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world,
I must tighten my belt.
It’s like a locomotive on the march, the season
of distress and clarity
and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter’s
lightly falling snow over the newspapers.
Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet
of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.
As they’re putting up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue
I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,
put to some use before all those coloured lights come on!
But no more fountains and no more rain,
and the stores stay open terribly late.
* * *
Poets have died in unusual circumstances: drowning (Shelley), suicide (Sylvia Plath) . But none stranger than Frank O’Hara, who died as a result of being run over by a dune buggy on Fire Island. He was only forty.
* * *
* * *
VIDEO. Our Video begins with Frank O’Hara reading his love poem “Having a Coke with You” with its inviting opening line, “is even more fun than going to San Sebastian.”
Then we hear an upbeat song-setting of his poem about a movie star of the time, “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!”
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
Finally, a dramatic moment from the television series “Mad Men” when Don Draper recalls the words of Frank O’Hara.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: FRANK O’HARA
