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" 

---

---

Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: On a Walk

There are a lot more places online and in books to find writing prompts than there were when Poets Online first appeared in 1998. What we hoped to offer with the website was not just a prompt and a model poem, but the possibility to publish your response to the prompt online. Twenty years ago, putting your poem online did not really count as being "published" in the eyes of journals and other print publications. That has changed. First publishing a poem on many online journals (Poets Online included) counts as publication. And a number of new and established magazines and journals have become accepted as respected online publishers. (Narrative and Mudlark are examples.)

Diane Lockward offers a prompt and craft section in her monthly newsletter, and has published three craft books full of poetry prompts.

Poets & Writers Magazine  (PW) offers prompts.  Here's one:

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk...
writes Frank O’Hara at the start of one of his lunch poems, “A Step Away From Them.”

So often, we miss out on the potential for inspiration from our daily routines, passing muses on morning commutes, lunch breaks, or evening strolls. PW suggested as a prompt that you go out into your neighborhood with no set destination, carrying a notepad, and invent background narratives, involve your senses, and record sounds and overheard phrases. For your poem, start with the time of day (“It’s eight in the morning,” or “It’s my lunch hour,” or “It’s midnight”) and take the reader through the streets with you.

And Leslie Schwartz wrote at PW  that “Mary Oliver used to walk in the woods with a notebook. Walking so inspired her that she kept pens in the trees so if an idea or thought came to her, she’d be able to stop and write it down. Like Mary Oliver, my inspiration almost always occurs while I am walking, not while I am sitting at a stodgy old desk in my messy office where the enemies of thought—phones and computers—lie in wait to distract me. It is while walking that most of my writing takes place. Something about being on the trail in the early morning with the hawks, the owls, and coyotes inspires me. "

Mary Oliver's prose poem "How I Go to the Woods" describes that walking.

This month, we ask you to literally go for a walk in your neighborhood, be it suburban or urban streets, or the nearby park or woods, in search of the figurative. Observe. Take notes. Treat it like a mini version of a walkabout or spirit walk, and perhaps you will find your spirit animal, guide or poetic inspiration.

The submission deadline for this prompt is December 31, 2018



POETS ONLINE offers you the opportunity to submit your poetic response to this current prompt. All submissions that address this prompt will be read and considered for posting on this site. Before your first submission, you should read some poems in our archive to get a sense of the types of responses people have had to previous prompts. We will only consider poems that are in response to this current writing prompt.

Lunch Poems

Burt Kimmelman

Catherine "Cat" Doty

I attended some Lunchtime Poems in Military Park (Newark, NJ) last week sponsored by the Dodge Poetry Festival. The weekly events are a preview for some of the 70 poets who will read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in October. Last week two friends were reading, Catherine "Cat" Doty and Burt Kimmelman.

People in the park on a beautiful summer day brought their lunch or drinks and took in some poems. I saw listeners making notes. People passing would slow down, stop for a few minutes and take in a few lines or a poem or two.

For those of you not near northern New Jersey, check out what is coming October 23-26 at the Festival.

But, if a trip to NJ is just not possible, you might consider Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, a collection that is now 50 years old. They were first published in 1964 as number 19 in City Lights’ Pocket Poets Series.

In an essay by Callie Siskel, "It's Cooking,"she says:

O’Hara’s poems are often compared to Abstract Expressionist paintings, but their composition is also akin to jazz. He grew up playing music. In “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday,” the speaker says he was “miserable, a grope pizzicato,” but O’Hara himself was a classically trained pianist. He studied at the New England Conservatory and entered Harvard as a music major before switching to English. He called writing “playing the typewriter,” but such a phrase downplays the extent to which his poems feel as measured as music. The syncopation that permeates Lunch Poems occurs when the time he marks at a regular rate is juxtaposed with the erratic cadences of his voice.

The collection's title refers to O’Hara’s habit of writing in Times Square during his lunch hour, and probably suggests that a reader could take the pocket-sized volume along and read it during his own lunch hour. They are often about museums, movies, and people and places of 1960s New York.

Lunch Poems includes some of the verses that made him cultishly popular - "The Day Lady Died,"  "Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]”(which we used for our gossip writing prompt) and "Ave Maria,"which begins this way:

get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
                                                              but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images 
and when you grow old as grow old you must
                                                                  they won’t hate you
they won’t criticize you they won’t know
                                                           they’ll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

they may even be grateful to you
                                                  for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
                                            and didn’t upset the peaceful home