“It’s my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk…” You are now up to speed on Peta Lunch poemcollection half pint 1964 by melodic, uniquely unintimidating New York poet Frank O’Hara, who was born 100 years ago last week.
O’Hara was a medieval writer, but something of a Renaissance man: as a teenager he studied concert piano at the New England Conservatory before switching to poetry in college. When he moved to New York in 1951, aged 24, he got a job selling postcards at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art, in large part for easy access to the Matisse exhibition he was then exhibiting. Eventually he became a curator at Moma, championing the works of expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler, and strolled the congested streets of midtown Manhattan on his lunch break, writing poems that he loved the city.
O’Hara belonged to the New York School – a group of poets and painters in the fifties and sixties numbering among them Pollock and O’Hara’s college friend John Ashbery – in a quite literal sense. “How cute you are today New York,” skips the opening line of Step“Like Ginger Rogers in Swing time…” This is a poem with a very specific urban topography – Bergdorf, the Christmas tree on Park Avenue, the “cold graceful light” that reflects from Manhattan’s “huge glass piers” – but which is still familiar and attractive to many who have barely set foot in the city.
But O’Hara doesn’t just belong to the metropolis; he has always seemed to me to be the most genuinely American of the poets, a label he would probably have passionately denied given that he was at the center of an exuberantly anti-establishment urban art scene and spent the McCarthyite Fifties drinking, cruising (his apartment was near the United Nations building where he used to make out with one of the security guards in Slavic Beart.
not Lunch poem is at times pure Americana, from his sensual delight in the abundance of ingredients – lunch is literal: this poem is full of chocolate malted milkshakes, cheeseburgers and Coca-Cola – to his love affair with movies. “American mothers / take your children to the movies!” hollers Hail Mary. “Yes, fresh air is good for the body / but how does the soul / which grows in the dark, embossed with a silvery image…” Isn’t it beautiful how the long o-sound of “soul” echoes in “grow”, as if the very vocal of the poem is leaping and expanding from line to line like the soul of a teenage movie nut?
O’Hara’s cola-swigging, movie-loving sensibilities stem from his New England childhood in a small town called Grafton, which, with its five-cent pharmacy ice cream cone and chalkboard list of bowling scores hanging in the paper shop, sounds like pure pop art. And while pop art was one of the aesthetic movements O’Hara didn’t care much about, since it was shoved out of the spotlight of his favorite abstract expressionists, maybe it didn’t like to be born from an uncomfortable identification. Illuminated by the neon bulbs of Times Square (“Neon in the daylight is fun”), O’Hara sometimes reads like a pop art poet to me.
It’s partly about the language, which makes no sense and is barely idiomatic these days. You can enjoy musical training and a lifelong habit of sitting down at the piano to improvise in the easy rhythm of the poem; the line feels fluid and unconstricted. “I wish I was reeling around Paris / Instead of reeling around New York” he says Farewell to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul“I hope I’m not reeling at all…” Of course, the unstudied air is a hoax: he spent his college years at Harvard practicing ornate French verse forms.
For all his lightness, it would be a mistake to think that O’Hara is a twee or an easy poet. Lunch poem full of little mysteries: hyper-specific references and inexplicable imagery that refuses to reveal its secrets. Enjoy a “sausage liver sandwich” by Central Park musicthe speaker is suddenly “bare as a tablecloth . . . / Close by the fear of war and the lost stars.” Is there a touch of Cold War nuclear anxiety lurking in the liver sausage? This will sit and guess more, preferably on a park bench during a quick office lunch break. One of the great things about Lunch poemBuilt square in his red-and-blue jacket in my City of Lights edition, it literally fits in your pocket.
Like a star in musicOne day O’Hara just disappeared: he was run over by a 23-year-old driver on Fire Island in July 1966, aged 40. His funeral on Long Island was attended by a who’s who of the New York art scene. This is a tragedy that would feel out of place in his poetry, which, for all its wit and realism, never quite succeeds in dispelling the former pure Yankee optimism, which can suddenly suffocate:
Where is the evil year
when September took New York
Lunch poem by Frank O’Hara (City Lights £6.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discounts are available for Times+ members
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