Lunch Poems: Frank O'Hara

What powers the poetry in Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems more than anything else is the charm of O’Hara’s voice, and his speed of thought. The poetry in Lunch Poems skims rapidly across images and thoughts in a fashion mirroring O’Hara’s conversational tone, and the poems often end in places far removed from where they began, such as in “Cambridge,” which begins:

It is still raining and the yellow-green cotton fruit
looks silly round a window giving out on winter trees

and ends:

Across the street there is a house under construction,
abandoned to the rain. Secretly, I shall go to work on it.

The surprise in O’Hara’s lines are what makes them engaging (and fun), the only issue I have is that O’Hara often breaks lines for no particular reason, with two notable exceptions—he enjoys breaking lines to make a pun, and in his more conversational poems, he’ll break on weak end words such as “and,” “it,” “on,” and "a," which enhances the sensation of a man thinking aloud or talking to himself—flickering from subject to subject in associative leaps.

Here’s some examples. This is from “Poem,” (pg. 19—there are several titled “Poem.”) and I don’t think the line does much:

Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond

The first line is nice, and has some good sounds, and it’s a typical O’Hara beginning of him setting the scene—he’ll often start with the exact time of day, most notably in "The Day Lady Died." But the “in it” is such an ugly beginning for the second line, and it’s a jolt against the speed of the first line—I already assumed the sour cream was in the coffee, and by adding it to the second line, the flow of the poem is interrupted. The lines sound better with the beginning cut: Instant coffee with slightly sour cream/and a phone call to the beyond. Or, maybe to keep the quick pace: Instant cofee with slightly sour cream and/a phone call to the beyond. Just a thought. As for a line break with a pun, this one is from “St. Paul and All That,” and made me laugh out loud:

such little things have to be established in morning
after the big things of night
do you want to come? when
I think of all the things I’ve been thinking of

Cheap and funny. As for the conversationally toned line breaks, they’re in almost every poem, for instance, “A Step Away from Them,” which is also loaded with little jokes and sexual puns.

O’Hara is consistently funny, for the most part his tone is light, and there’s a reflexive, self-mocking edge to his voice that adds to his appeal. There’s nothing really special about “Five Poems,” but I found the second stanza really funny:

an invitation to lunch
HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?
when I only have 16 cents and 2
packages of yoghurt
there’s a lesson in that, isn’t there
like in Chinese poetry, when a leaf falls?

That habit of not taking himself too seriously is probably one reason why O’Hara’s poetry continues to endure—he writes a lot about himself, his jaunts around NYC, and friends like Kenneth Koch—if he didn’t have a little ironic distance from himself, the poems would seem self important and obnoxious (Read: Hart Crane). Another effect of the light-hearted poetry is that when O’Hara decides to break his own mold and be serious, the effect can be really powerful, such as in “The Day Lady Died,” which has a typical (and famous) beginning:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille Day, yes

but then finds its way to an emotionally devastating ending, the death of Billie Holiday:

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

I think this is one of O’Hara’s stronger poems. The way this conversational poem runs the reader headlong into the unexpected newspaper headline and then into O’Hara’s memory and then the final five words “everyone and I stopped breathing,” sans any sort of bracing punctuation…it’s just really nice, and one of the few poems where all O’Hara’s tricks seem to cohere. There’s a smiliar effect with “Poem” (78) which is about Lana Turner collapsing, and ends with "Oh Lana Turner we love you get up," a desperate, sad line.

I don’t have much to say about O’Hara’s epic poem “For the Chinese New Year & Bill Berkson.” It’s the only poem with an epigraph (D.H. Lawrence), and the only one well over two pages, but since I just finished Lunch Poems yesterday, I still have some processing to do.

Lunch Poems was entertaining, and ironically, I read it yesterday…over lunch. I don’t think O’Hara will ever be one of my favorite poets, to be honest, I think I just like more ambition. BUT I don't mean that to be a negative statement-- I like what O’Hara did, and think he knew what he wanted his writing to be like, and for the most part, achieved it. He does a great job of capturing the tone of a place (NYC) and its artistic scene, and he made poetry that was fun to read. Still, O’Hara’s other book, Meditations in an Emergency, reigns supreme over Lunch Poems for me, and it contains my two favorite O’Hara poems, “To the Harbormaster,” and “For Grace, After a Party.”