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.”

Dancing in Odessa: Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky is a bit of a young gun, born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1977 and winning the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize (among others) in 2002 for Dancing in Odessa. The book is organized into six major sections, the shortest of which is only a page (Author's Prayer), but most of which contain several poems, such as the title section. Kaminsky usually chooses to write in loose, self-imposed forms such as couplets or quatrains, and internal and end rhymes knit in and out of the stanzas, carrying the reader through the music of the poem. But what sets Kaminsky apart is his consistent use of repetition, which adds a highly lyrical, musical quality to his verse, while presenting his surrealistic subject matter in a slightly nostalgic, often haunting tone. Some of these qualities are evident in the first two stanzas of “In Praise of Laughter,” from the second section, Dancing in Odessa:

Where days bend and straighten
in a city that belongs to no nation
but all the nations of the wind,

she spoke the speech of poplar trees—
her ears trembling as she spoke, my Aunt Rose
composed odes to barbershops, drugstores.

While the easy rhyme of “straighten” and “nation” in the first two lines comes across as mildly cheesy, there's a brilliant thread of assonance in the last two lines of the second stanza. “Spoke” leads to “Rose,” “composed,” and “odes,” and the heavy 'R' is emphasized in “barbershops” and “drugstores.” Both stanzas evidence Kaminsky’s signature word repetition, which occurs in almost every poem: “nation” in the first stanza, “spoke” in the second.

Kaminsky is an Orphic poet, and just as his Aunt Rose sings of the everyday—barbershops and drugstores—Kaminsky often focuses on life in communist Odessa. He assumes the role of namer from the very first poem, “Author’s Prayer”:

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body

Kaminsky speaks for others, affirming a reality that resembles life in Odessa, and at the same time creating an alternate reality (here's where the surrealism comes in) through his use of image and narrative.

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever we say

It's clear from the line breaks ("speak," "say") that Kaminsky is emphasizing the role of poet-as-prophet. He goes on to create an alternate version Odessa, and the poems often cohere (even across some sections) as a narrative. "Aunt Rose" is mentioned multiple times, and the image of tomatoes reoccurs through the text. It should also be noted that Kaminsky's Odessa breathes the air of magical realism--it's a place populated by images that usually correspond to emotion rather than logic. The question "what does it mean" should be left outside Kaminsky's reality, and the reader should instead be prepared to enter a world one step off from ours, where Kaminsky speaks in coded images the reader learns to translate, much like Wallace Stevens and his use of images like "green," ("green freedom," "green sun") "portals," and "wells."

In the prose poem "Musica Humana" (Kaminsky blends form in a variety of ways, including a series of poems beginning with epigraphs, and another which include footnotes.) the speaker's uncle is dying, so the uncle's brothers ask the neighbors to donate a few days of their life to the uncle. A woman who is secretly in love with the uncle donates the rest of her days, and when the uncle suddenly gets better, the woman dies. But for the rest of his life, the uncle hears the woman's life overlapping with his own: he hears her sing in church, he hears her when she gives birth (Aspects of female sexuality work their way into many of the poems, from the rape of the speaker’s grandmother to references to sex) and one day he hears her die: He sat down on the pavement, whispering that he suddenly heard someone's sickening scream. We understood.

Or, here's a section from the long poem "Natalia." It's a striking example of what I'm trying to explain--the irregular rhyming, the consistent repetition, the sexuality, and also something I haven't touched on yet-- the pervasive religious atmosphere that the poems are seeped in. The old-world Russian-Judaism is a major part of what gives these poems their character. From "Natalia":

On the night I met her, the Rabbi sang and sighed,
god's lips on his brow, Torah in his arms,
—I unfastened her stockings, worried

that I have stopped worrying.
She slept in my bed—I slept on a chair,
she slept on a chair—I slept in the kitchen,

she left her slippers in my shower, in my Torah
her slippers in each sentence I spoke.
I said: those I love—die grow old, are born.

But I love the stubbornness of her bedclothes!
I bite them, taste bedclothes—
the sweet mechanism of pillows and covers.

A serious woman, she danced
without a shirt, covering what she could.
We lay together on Yom Kippur, chosen by a wrong God,

the people of a book, broken by a book.

Dancing in Odessa is a pleasure to read. Kaminsky writes about men and women living in Odessa during a time of love and strife, and he focuses as much attention on the physical reality (lemon trees, tomatoes, sex) as the spiritual (birth, death, religion). Readers may also be interested to know that Kaminsky has published excerpts from his forthcoming book, Deaf Republic, and it seemed more focused and refined than Dancing in Odessa. Deaf Republic appears to be one long narrative as opposed to a number of sections. Some of Dancing in Odessa was released at separate times as chapbooks, and at times the volume as a whole lacked cohesiveness. Readers of Dancing in Odessa will see that in his new volume, Kaminsky is simply taking his ideas and inclinations in subject matter to the next level, one that seems more liberating for him in terms of imagination and ambition.