Posts Tagged ‘Frank O’Hara’

“Here” by Wislawa Szymborska

Saturday, December 21st, 2013

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The slimmest of slim volumes of poetry, “Here” by Wislawa Szymborska contains 27 pieces for our delectation. The page count is 84, half filled with the poems in the original Polish language and half in fine translations by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak.  The book was published in English just two years prior to the poet’s death at age 88 in 2012.

The writer and critic Adam Gopnik says the effect of a typical Szymborska poem is like encountering a “happy collaboration between Ogden Nash and Emily Dickinson.” Gopnik’s one word for her work is “charming.”

Through the lens of “Here” I see things differently. Although consistent with her body of work, there’s something especially attractive about these late-in-life poems. The word I myself would attach to the dominant strain in these poems is “whimsical” — playfully quaint and fanciful, especially in an appealing way. In choosing that word I also have in mind the phenomena of “whims,” those odd ideas that take over the brain and imagination very suddenly.

So Szymborska begins a poem with the question, “Me — a teenager?” and speculates what it would be like to meet her own seventy-year-younger self. (For a similar conceit, deftly executed, check out the YouTube video, here.) Then she begins another poem by blurting out, “Why not, let’s take the Foraminifera” — and proceeds to wonder whether those tiny limestone-shelled sea creatures were/are, ultimately, dead/alive. Later, confident that nothing’s lost by revealing the name of the game, she titles a new poem, “Thoughts That Visit Me On Busy Streets.”

Szymborska and Frank O’Hara could have been pals.

This may sound odd, but instead of Nash and Dickinson, the voice I hear in “Here” is a kindred spirit to the sharpest of our contemporary stand-up comedians, the men and women who mix biting social/political commentary with quotidian observational humor, acolytes of the late George Carlin, not just on subjects of pain, death, and war, but in the category of material Carlin called “the little world.”

Among Szymborska’s favorite words are “astonish” and its variants, applied to this world, this life.

Astonishments are what she itemizes in the poem whose title she also attached to the volume as a whole: “Here.” One of its 51 lines is a neat summary of the whole poem: “Life on Earth is quite a bargain.” Like a Philadelphia attorney she argues the case point by point. Her brief includes this deadpan observation —

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“Like nowhere else, or almost nowhere,
you’re given your own torso here,
equipped with the accessories required
for adding your own children to the rest.
Not to mention arms, legs, and astounded head.”

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The American comic and actor Louis C.K. occupies the same ground, albeit more profanely. Here’s an observation he makes in his 2013 comedy album. “Oh My God,” —

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“I like life. I like it. I feel that even if it ends up being short, I got lucky to have it.
Because life is an amazing gift when you think about what you get with a basic life.
Here’s your boiler-plate deal with life — this is “basic cable, what you get when you get life:
You get to be on earth.
First of all, Oh my God, what a location! …
You get to [#%@!]; that’s part of the deal.
Where else are you going to get that deal?”

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By the end of her life Szymborska had armed herself with a ready answer to the rude question many interviewers posed: Why have you written so few poems? She replied:

“A poem written in the evening is read again in the morning. It does not always survive.”

Now, once you’ve read “Here” or another collection of her work, your perception is likely change in a way that allows you to understand how Szymborskiac this seemingly tossed-off response is. It reveals one writer’s writing habits, of course. But listen to it again. How much contingency it contains, how much a reminder of love (passion expecting to last … ) and death ( … yet only to disappear).

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[Note: A version of this review appears on Amazon, here.]

“Meditations in an Emergency” by Frank O’Hara

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

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This slim volume contains 30 poems, short to medium in length. Thirteen are one-pagers, twelve are two pages, five are three.

Some of the poems in MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY are opaque. An exuberant talker, O’Hara on occasion goes on auto-pilot erudition spills, and when this is applied to a subject of limited interest the result can be a poem that may not speak to most readers, especially those of us not thoroughly tutored.

Yet I think I am like most of his readers who forgive him this, knowing that with the next poem or the one after the next he will return to his naturally communicative, pleasure-giving mode.

What the American poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth once noted about O’Hara is right on the money: Each of the poems has the air of a “fresh start.” When encountering the best of them it is as if your eyes, long occluded, open suddenly onto the world.

This being O’Hara, there are newly-coined and revived words and phrases (cupiditously; buttered bees); thoughts of suicide, express and implied, and premonitions of violence; paeans to pop culture icons (“For James Dean”); a campy fandom of Hollywood (“To the Film Industry in Crisis”); tossed off witticisms (“It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so”); a devotion to New York (“I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life”); and, finally, intimate love poems that draw us near.

He has an original voice, and yet I enjoy the occasions when he behaves as other poets, like Ginsberg or the Romantics, or even Shakespeare, who I swear I hear in the poem “Radio.” It begins:

Why do you play such dreary music

on Saturday afternoon, when tired

mortally tired I long for a little

reminder of immortal energy?

This shares the questioning voice found in Shakespeare’s sonnets (the constant Why? Who? What?) as well as the author’s expression of mock petulance — disappointment turning into complaint turning into self-pity — such as in Sonnet 34:

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day

And make me travel forth without my cloak

To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way?

For some reason I like to read O’Hara’s poetry while standing, or walking around a room.

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“Lunch Poems” by Frank O’Hara

Friday, August 5th, 2011

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Frank O’Hara’s reputation seems caught in a holding period, an awkward stage preliminary to his work becoming universal and timeless. Consider, for example, the final scene in the opening episode in the second season of “Mad Men,” the cable TV series set in the world of advertising as practiced in New York in the early ’60s. We see the show’s protagonist, Don Draper, picking up a slim volume of O’Hara’s poems (“Meditations in an Emergency,” 1957). He recites the final lines from “Mayakovsky.” There is an ambivalence to the scene. Was O’Hara chosen less for the intrinsic merit of the poetry than to set an easy marker for a zeitgeist, the same thing the producers accomplish by highlighting the period-specific cut of Draper’s suit and hair? With friends like these, will O’Hara ever escape the mannerist ghetto of the “New York School“?

And so some readers may pick up “Lunch Poems” (first published in 1964) after seeing it praised as an emblematic cultural document of mid-twentieth century America. Yet even if the time-bound aura of O’Hara is the come-on, what makes you stay enthralled in his circle is his voice — a “thinking” voice as vitally American as Whitman or Frost.

There are 37 poems in “Lunch Poems” and their quality as well as their accessibility varies. The poems span a period from 1953 to 1964. This book is not a “best of” O’Hara collection, yet it does contain what may be his most durable poem.

A few of these short pieces are so recondite that they lose me. In a few others O’Hara raises an opaque scrim to suggest beauty beckoning from the other side, and these poems begin to “click” only after multiple readings. But the majority of the poems are freshly-minted coins granting immediate access to a lively, urbane worldview. While general knowledge of the New York cultural scene in the ’50s and early ’60s is helpful, these poems, at their best, easily communicate to us in a way undimmed by the passage of time.

Here is an endless succession of the poet’s friends, lovers, artists, musicians, and the parties, meals and conversation they create. Here are O’Hara’s travel experiences and his love of foreign languages (you could write an essay on the myriad uses of French in O’Hara’s poetry). The man wears his erudition lightly on his sleeve. He’s enamored by both the high and the low in American culture: “I am ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have to smile” (Naphtha, 1959). Another poem from the same year, Rhapsody, contains a premonition of his early death (at age 40) a few years later: “I historically belong to the enormous bliss of American death.”

Most delightful are his street-level ruminations, spinning in all sorts of directions, nurtured during mid-day breaks away from his curatorial duties at the Museum of Modern Art. A typical flight occurs in A Step Away From Them, which begins: “It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs.”

A new survey ranking the most walkable cities in America placed New York on top. Teju Cole’s recently published novel, “Open City,” set in contemporary Manhattan, is a current example of a continuing tradition of perambulating literary protagonists. A half century ago, O’Hara was walking these same streets, looking, speculating, daydreaming about the city. A fragment in an untitled poem from 1959 asks, “Where does the evil go when September takes New York and turns it into ozone stalagmites deposits of light?”

The cityscape serves as a platform for accessible philosophizing, as found in one of his best works: “The Day Lady Died”. Is there another poem where so much meaning resides in its title? At first glance the title rattled me, threw me off stride. In it I heard a rhythm, but an uncertain one. Then came the answer hit me: simply reverse “Day Lady” to reveal “Lady Day” — the nickname of blues singer Billy Holiday, whose dark night of the soul ended in 1959. The displaced “day,” her missing “day,” had to be displaced, it had to go missing from O’Hara’s page. The text of the poem recounts the day the poet walked the streets and avenues of Manhattan attending to errands. These everday events end when he spies a tabloid newspaper’s front page announcing Holiday’s death. It is the day after death, the first of many days denied her.

In the poem’s final stanza — in which O’Hara recalls hearing Holiday perform at the Five Spot Café — he accomplishes a wonder. He turns death into something other than displacement and omission. Memory overpowers death, converging time present and time past.

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(An abbreviated version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.)