Poems at Lunch with Frank

I read an article in The Times a few weeks ago that suggested Frank O'Hara as the perfect poet for my lunchtime reading.

"It's my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk..." wrote O'Hara in his Lunch Poems. It's a small book from 1964. Frank would have turned 100 this year, but the poems don't read like an old man. They are un-intimidating, and feel a bit like he was writing them at the table across from me outside on this July afternoon as the world passes by my cafe table.

The small book was published by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series with their unassuming covers (as with Ginsberg's Howl) and was edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his The New American Poetry.

O'Hara studied at the New England Conservatory when he was a teen. Concert piano. But he traded that for words. He moved to New York in 1951 at 24. He took a no-pay "job" at MoMA so he could see the Matisse and eventually became a curator there. He championed Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and the rest of the Abstract Expressionists, and he was writing art criticism.

He was a lunchtime walker, and that was where many of the Lunch Poems came into being. They are formally inventive and casually composed. He wrote in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime, and on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading.

He belonged to the New York School quite literally. He hung out with painters and poets in the Fifties and Sixties. Pollock, his old college friend John Ashbery, Larry Rivers, Jane Freer and they traded studio space, gossip, and line breaks.

"How funny you are today New York / like Ginger Rogers in Swing Time..." he says to the city in begins "Steps." The poetry lesson here includes his idea of the importance of place. And specific places - Bergdorf's, Christmas trees being hauled down Park Avenue, "cool graced light" hitting the enormous glass towers of midtown. You probably haven't lived in NYC. Either have I, but I get it.

In the final scene of the opening episode of the second season of Mad Men - the TV series set in the world of NYC advertising in the early 1960s - we see the show's protagonist, Don Draper, picking up a slim volume of O'Hara's poems (Meditations in an Emergency from 1957). Don recites the final lines from "Mayakovsky." It fit in quite well.

I know so many poets who bemoan the lack of time they have to write. O'Hara says you don't have to wait for some weekend retreat or a residency in a mountaintop cabin. It happens while eating lunch, on a walk, between errands.

Reading poems on your lunch hour is a particular kind of pleasure. You've eaten, you're sated, and if the poet has done their work, you're sated in a second way too — that small, lit-up feeling that says: go write something, go read something, go look harder at the street for the rest of the afternoon.

Lunch Poems is, in the best sense, pure Americana. Lunch, for one thing, is literal. O'Hara really does eat his lunch in these poems. There are chocolate malted milkshakes and cheeseburgers and sweating bottles of Coca-Cola, all recorded with a kind of sensual delight in abundance that feels utterly American. And then there are the movies. He has a great appetite for them.

"Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies! /It's true that fresh air is good for the body / but what about the soul / that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images..." ("Ave Maria")

I wish the end of O'Hara's own story was more like these poems. In July 1966, on a dark beach on Fire Island, he was struck by a jeep. He was 40. His funeral on Long Island was a who's who of the New York art world. They gathered for their friend whose poems never really believed in tragedy.

Rather, let us end with walking with Frank at lunch.

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...
from "A Step Away from Them"