LUNCH BOXES WITH FRANK O’HARA

for fellow Frank O'Hara feasters

I am appearing, yes it’s true

I am Gabriel (dressed in corduroy)

I am ill today but I am not,

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

I am not sure there is a cure.

I am sad. I am sober and industrious.

I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab

I belong here. I was born. I breathe in the dust

I came to you

Cento of first lines under “I” in the Index of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara

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My lunch with Frank is a conversation between reader and writer, poet and poetry enthusiast of Frank O’Hara poet and Frank O’Hara poems. Since his death at 40 in July 1966, the Maryland-born, New York School, Abstract-Expressionistic, high-stepping, run-on-sentence-making poet has been muse to a swelling tide of poets. His style does not go out of style. His style is like a distinct yet elusive aroma in the ever-expanding house of contemporary American poetry.

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My Dear fellow Frank O’Hara feaster, I send this graphic contraption in praise of Frank O’Hara, the most important and influential poet of the last fifty years, the most important poet of my lifetime. I had in mind some love for his Lunch Poems, the book that defines him and defines his era. My first thought was a play on “My Dinner with Andre,” for example. “My Lunch With Frank: Visualizing the poetry environment before, during, and after Lunch Poems.” Lunch Boxes are what’s left of My Lunch With Frank.

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The lunch conversations between poet Frank O’Hara and various American poets ran into a few challenges. O’Hara in conversation with his peers highlighted the lack of diversity in poetry throughout O’Hara’s life. This lack of diverse peers manifests itself as a lack of influence. The New York School poets share a regional bubble that shielded them from the tumult of war and civil rights.

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Though the German Rilke dies of leukemia in December of 1926, there is evidence pieces of his great reverberating soul were divided among all the poets worldwide, born that year and the next, but records were only kept for the white American male infant poets born in 1926: the baby Robert Bly, the baby James Merrill, the baby Robert Creeley, the baby Allen Ginsberg, W. D. Snodgrass, A.R. Ammons. Some of Rilke’s immense planetary soul also got to the Black baby Russell Atkins born in Cleveland with all of Rilke’s experimental moxie. We know Marilyn Monroe and Miles Davis, Harper Lee and Fidel Castro, were born in 1926. And so was Frank O’Hara.

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O’Hara’s poems delight in the music of Mayakovsky—the Russian Futurist poet; his poems delight in the sound of Mayakovsky, and the word itself. I am compelled to go just about anywhere when in conversation with or about the poems of Frank O’Hara. He is queen and king and something in between in poetry. Which is to say he is too much of any one thing to be square. He refuses to be boxed. He demonstrates how much fun can be had in a box while refusing to be boxed.

::

I cough a lot (sinus) so I

I could guide you into depravity

but I’m not sure I could lead either of us

I couldn’t kill a man when he was drunk

I dont know what D.H. Lawrence is driving at

I dont know if you doubt it

I dont remember anything of then,

down there around the magnolias

Cento of first lines under “I” in the Index of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara

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When Frank arrives at the Cedar Tavern, the knobby bridge of his nose is blushed because he’s already near-tipsy. The artists hang around like famous people framed in photographs. Moving beside Frank as he approaches is his disproportionately large silhouette in profile, the forehead like a sunbleached beach stone, all the bones of his face jut and curve like stone, in fact, so that his profile is like walking hills and waves of shadow. All subjects are absorbed and eclipsed.

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One of my many grand workshop professions is: if you can get a good ending on a poem, a reader will forget the less good parts of the poem. This is not quite true with O’Hara. It’s why I don’t teach him—he distrusts professors. He likes conversation. A good conversation does not rely on a good ending. In fact, a good conversation does not want to end. Good conversation is not ended so much as interrupted. This seems to be just as true when talking with others as when talking with ourselves. On one hand, O’Hara teaches us readers and writers how to pay attention to the things of the world. On the other hand, he teaches us how to listen to ourselves. How to be emotionally nosey with ourselves. A truly regular dynamic ending is antithetical to the impromptu pose of an O’Hara poem. Moreover, O’Hara's poems have no interest in being compared to other poems. They are in conversation with themselves.

In the rare film footage completed just after his death, there is a scene of O’Hara speaking on the phone and typing a poem at the same time. He comments to the listener on the phone and to the audience about both his feat and the film crew recording it. The poems have the same effect of listening to someone talk on the phone. He says in 1959’s “Personism” he realized “if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem.” The film captures an evolution of that desire to cast multiple lines of communication and multi-dimensional sympathies.

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We find O’Hara on our own. I can remember buying The Collected Poems in a Pittsburgh bookstore my first year of graduate school. Not long after buying it I wrote “Derrick Poem.”

DERRICK POEM (THE LOST WORLD)

from Muscular Music, 1999

I take my $, buy a pair of very bright kicks for the game

at the bottom of the hill on Tuesday w/ Tone who averages

19.4 points a game, & told me about this spot, & this salesman

w/ gold ringed fingers fitting a $100 dollar NBA Air Avenger

over the white part of me—my sock, my heel & sole,

though I tell him Avengers are too flashy & buy blue & white

Air Flights w/ the dough I was suppose to use to pay

the light bill & worse, use the change to buy an Ella

Fitzgerald CD at Jerrys, then take them both in a bag

past salesmen & pedestrians to the C where there is a girl

I'd marry if I was Pablo Neruda & after 3, 4 blocks, I spill out

humming “April in Paris” while a lady w/ a 12 inch cigar

calls the driver a facist cuz he won't let her smoke on the bus

& skinny Derrick rolls up in a borrowed Pontiac w/ room

for me, my kicks & Ella on his way to see The Lost World

alone & though I think the title could mean something else,

I give him some skin & remember the last time I saw him

I was on the B-ball court after dark w/ a white girl

who'd borrowed my shorts & the only other person out

was Derrick throwing a Spalding at the crooked rim

no one usually shoots at while I tried not to look his way

& thought how we used to talk about black women

& desire & how I was betraying him then creeping out

after sundown with a girl in my shorts & white skin

that slept around me the 5 or 6 weeks before she got tired

of late night hoop lessons & hiding out in my crib

there at the top of the hill Derrick drove up still talking,

not about black girls, but dinosaurs which if I was listening

could have been talk about loneliness, but I wasn't,

even when he said, “We should go to the movies sometime,”

& stopped

Even when I'm not directly channeling O’Hara, I am channeling his great lesson: the reward of reflection, of reflective empathy, and self-reflection. He means something different to anyone who gets him. In "Okay I'll Call You/Yes Call Me: Frank O’Hara's ‘Personism’,” Stephanie Burt says: “O’Hara figured out how to get you to read his poems . . . more or less as you'd read poems by your close friends . . . O’Hara's best poems come off . . . almost inordinately sympathetic . . .” He is indeed multi-dimensionally sympathetic. He is sympathetic in a manner that reveals his great empathy and love for people.

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I ducked out of sight behind the saw mill
I get a cinder in my eye
I hate revolutionary vision, a sea of navels
I see you standing in the clear light
I shall be so glad when you come down
I sit in your T-shirt
I stagger out of bed
I stumble over furniture, I fall into a glooming hammock
I think a lot about
I think of Cairo and all tossing date palms and a girl
I think of you
I think you’re wonderful and so does everyone else.

Cento of first lines under “I” in the Index of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara

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Frank O’Hara was born into a decade of landmark poetic production. In 1922, T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, James Weldon Johnson published The Book of American Negro Poetry, and the first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry went to Edwin Arlington Robinson. The next year William Carlos Williams published Spring and All, Wallace Stevens published Harmonium, and Jean Toomer published Cane. In 1926, Langston Hughes published The Weary Blues. The Roaring Twenties roared poetry in America. Then came the Great Depression, World War II, Atomic Nuclear War, the Cold War, and, by the year of his death in 1966, the War in Vietnam. Whether his poems subvert or sidestep the cultural traumas of his day is a matter of perspective. Among his peers, I find him most natural and most strange. After service as a sonorman in the navy, O’Hara, disguised perhaps as himself, studied briefly at the University of Michigan before he moved to NYC at the mid-point of the century. In 1952, he published his first poetry collection, City Winter and Other Poems. Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems was published in a decade of landmark poetic production.

Frank O’Hara's influences were as diverse as his interests. A trained classical pianist, a museum curator, a friend and lover of dance and painters and places and people and pleasure, one can throw a dart and hit anyone as a possible influence. Perhaps the stature of Williams looms largest among the canonical poets. He was among the most visible living poets for the aspiring poet in O’Hara. His 1923 landmark collection Spring and All would hold poems O’Hara would have lived with just as you and I have lived with them. “Young Love” from the collection is a poem with radical forward influence on anyone who reads it. I declare such a ridiculous blanket statement to declare its impact on me. One line from the poem, "In my life the furniture eats me" holds a whimsy and uneasiness that foretells the anxious bounce to O’Hara stepping across the city. Ah lunch, I think I am going crazy he writes in “Adieu To Norman . . .”

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Frank O’Hara is more than our Everyman of modern living, he is our king, our queen, and something in between the boxes of work and pleasure, power and vulnerability, levity and gravity. His sexuality is trumped by the immediacies of his desire; his background is trumped by the immediacy of his surroundings. So “present” is his “Frankness,” we need no markers of “identity.” Instead of sex, background, race, we get lust, urbanity, and personhood. O’Hara gives us personality. He gives us one of our most round and foresighted visions of America and American poetry starting at just about the year of his death in 1966.

In graduate school, I found a copy of his chapbook Second Avenue. I can only remember a jumble of impressions from that book, which O’Hara conceived as a kind of Abstract Expressionist painting in words. In his notes to the poem, he writes:

Just as Mayakovsky made a poem as big as a city, here we have a poem as big as an avenue with “Second Avenue” standing in of course as a particular synecdoche for New York as a whole. This confluence of signifier and signified is in accord with the relation between surface and meaning that is the surface is the meaning.

I thought I might absorb O’Hara's style in a loose improvisational essay, but when I went to my Collected Frank, I was thoroughly sidetracked by the index of first lines—the cento-inducing first lines. He is master of the declarative eye. His first-person openers ring as mottos and decrees, proclamations. I like to give first and last line frame assignments sometimes. Really great opening and closing lines can be like training wheels for drafting a poem.

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I doubt there would be a New York School without him and his overlapping ties to poets who are his peers in the school: John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler—there are others but these men appear most often in O’Hara's poems. All of them write in a fashion influenced by French Surrealism, Modernism, and Abstract Expressionism, all of them with the exception of Ashbery, who lived for a time in Paris, lived and worked and wrote often about New York. But O’Hara most embodies what Baudelaire called the flaneur: someone who experiences a city by walking through it. O’Hara was the Contemporary American Flaneur buzzing from café to soirée, from the Ballet, which he loved, to the cinema to the Cedar Tavern with cigarette and liquor on his breath. His job at the Museum of Modern Art—where he began as a desk clerk in 1951 and was an associate curator when he died in 1966. This rise speaks to his charm, his brilliance, his legendary personality.

::

I understand the boredom of the clerks

I wanted to be sure to reach you

I was musing over the king my father and the beer

I watched an armory combing its bronze and bricks

I will always love you.

I would attend your pleasure’s picturesque remorse

If, jetting, I committed the noble fault.

If you discard me, too late

Ill fate? no! In fainting you volunteer your tears

I’ll skin you alive for this.

I’m getting rather Lorcaesque lately

I’m getting tired of wearing underwear

I’m glad that rock is heavy

I’m having a real day of it.

I’m not going to cry all the time.

Cento of first lines under “I” in the Index of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara

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If you’re a poet you have probably attempted some manner of O’Hara poem. He famously called them his “I-do-this-I-do-that” poems. And it seems fairly easy to go about doing this and that—as everyone does in New York. There’s always something to do. There’s too much to do. One can be, as I have been, easily overwhelmed by the thisness and thatness of the city. But you don’t need to go to New York to have that happen. One can be, as I have been, overwhelmed sitting on a park bench absolutely anywhere on the planet. One finds a wealth of details everywhere—being in the world is nothing if not being in constant detail.

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Because he’s many things in conversation at once, he’s many things to many readers. O’Hara’s influence on readers is transmitted through dialogue. I've tried word clouds to get poets directly inside his diction. Who could resist a writing prompt called “A Cloud of Steps?”

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For New York School poetry students such as myself, some of the conversation with Frank is about the urbanity and immediacy of New York City. O’Hara channels all the real and exaggerated charm of all New York in little more than a lunch date with an artist or dancer or another poet in the village. In "Personal Poem," it’s the poet formerly known as Leroi Jones, Amiri Baraka. For the non-New York School poetry student the conversation with Frank is a lesson in having a conversation with one's self. The immediacy associated with New York City becomes a kind of psychological “presentness” at work wherever O’Hara moves.

Moreover, the presentness is divided against itself. This is the case in “Adieu” as a Frank character struggles with the jolts of change: the changes brought on by the hustle and bustle of friends; the changes associated with old age; the changes that induce existential dread. O’Hara captures a ubiquitous yet ephemeral quality of modern motion sickness. He feels it discreetly in 1959, sitting with friends. The end of an era. The beginning of an era. He only has time to mull it over during lunch breaks every now and then. The rest of the brilliant poems are scattered throughout his books. But Lunch Poems is one of a few landmark books of the century. It is the most quintessential psyche of the era. So thoroughly, O’Hara becomes our modern Everyman. Queer, impish, tough, feminine, says Ted Berrigan in his own brilliant O’Hara imitation. We are imitating him because he was anticipating us.

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I’m so much more me

In sensuality I find a harvest thought

In the deeps there is a little bird

Is it true you said poems are made of words

It is after four in my life and the salmon have ceased leaping

It is almost three

It is still raining and the yellow-green cotton fruit

Cento of first lines under “I” in the Index of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara

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When my cousin Baybay, four years older than me, retired from twenty years as a Broward Correctional officer, I gave him my actual personal Frank O’Hara daily writing exercise: a single sentence a day. I've been doing it for as long as I've read O’Hara. First explicitly in poems like “Derrick Poem” and “Morning Poem” in my first book then more subtly in a later poem like “How To Draw An Invisible Man.” I did not read my poems or O’Hara's poems at Baybay's retirement party. Still, folks’ faces, when I got up there with my index cards! I mean these are the Florida-Black friends and colleagues of Broward County Corrections officer. They are the prison-guard equivalent of the NYPD or LAPD, reputation-wise. My cousin is a retired CO. My father is a retired CO. My mother worked at the prison. The Broward County CO is considered the pitbull breed of CO. Baybay and his sisters leaned in proudly. I got up with the exact dread I felt when speaking before my mother's church.

“He sweatin’,” said the wife of one of Baybay's work friends. She was in a full, tight, pearl-white leather outfit with matching attached pearl-white nails, highlights and dyed-gray, perfectly-pressed hair, white toeless high heels, and nary a bead of sweat. “Take your time baby,” she said without sugar. It made me sweat more. Fortunately, I held a better version of myself—a writing prompt inspired, as much of my daily writing is, by the great Frank O’Hara.

An art teacher once told me Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom in Arles was about three kinds of perspective. The mirror reflects how we see ourselves, the window reflects how we see the world, the paintings reflect how we envision and revise those inner and outer visions. Much of my teaching and much of my writing tries to harmonize those perspectives. Otherwise they collide: inner doubt collides with outer bravado, private collides with public, meditation collides with emergency. In the title poem of his 1957 collection, Meditations in an Emergency, O’Hara writes:

I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—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. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass.

This seems to poke fun at Wordsworth’s famous poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;

But they share a notion of the wandering eye in dialogue with the world. O’Hara shares a Romantic Poet’s love of the world where it is found. A love of the subject and subjectivity.

This can all be exercised when one pays attention. More artists than poets come to mind when looking for predecessors and analogs to Frank O’Hara. True, he bears some vernacular ties to William Carlos Williams and I'd argue some of Gwendolyn Brooks’ local, community love, a nonpoet may see him as an urban Van Gogh or Jackson Pollock responding to the world in vivid real-time color. He may be as much that as the tinkerer recluse Joseph Cornell shaping his days into peculiar boxes. O'Hara’s poems function like Cornell’s boxes holding dates and tidbits still in a square.

I was sweating, but I didn’t care. I remembered several summers of bullying there. Not a small bit of which came at the hands of Baybay, future CO. When his sisters go up to speak all three recalled his terrible pranks, jokes, and jolly cruelties. I had only seem him truly tamed around their oldest sister, Tangie, now deceased. I mentioned her and the long summers before pulling out the index cards. She’d been a teacher. She’d always had my back. She’d been my guardian against Floridian numbskulls. Sometimes that included Baybay. He toughened me up. He suffered my idiosyncrasies. He'd watched me sneak into a corner to draw or write alone as a boy, as a teenager, as an adult, and, that afternoon, I wanted to show him what Frank O’Hara had shown me: how to shape your day,

how to see it as a form of art. I held up my shapes drawn on index cards.

The first index card had a line I'd drawn in fat magic marker. Every day begins and ends in one direction. A straight line. A single sentence: I wake and I sleep. Or it appears that way. And maybe it will stay that way if you let it. But every day has its highs and lows. What was the best thing that happened yesterday? (I should have asked for a few examples! I should have asked one of the phone-drunk young adults, or the pearl-white leather sister. Them nails.) Maybe it was a kiss, or maybe something in a conversation. Maybe it was a song you sang to yourself or something you felt or ate. Be specific. Say to yourself: that was the best part of my day. That high point no matter how high gives your day shape.

On the second index card was a triangle. This shape a beginning point and ending point meeting at a middle point. It will rarely be a perfect triangle. In geometry, there are six kinds of triangles: three based on the sides and three based on angles. It might be right-angled. (Could it ever be might be left-angled?) It might be an obtuse triangle, it might be “a cute” triangle. It is a series of angles, zig-zags constituting mountains and valleys between cradle and grave.)

Your day will have a start and finish if you are waking and sleeping, but what's the point of the stuff that happens in between? That's what your daily sentence is giving shape. The peak of your day gives your sentence shape. What about those days you are so distracted by something you start and finish, your waking and sleeping blur? Days and nights can be overrun by obsessions, stresses, thoughts, and feelings we can’t shake, can’t corner, can't get an angle on. Some times Love induces this. A loopiness with no start or finish. “You got me going in circles” sang the Friends of Distinction. I said showing them the card with a circle (“You got me going in circles, Oh round and round I go”), but not enough to actually be singing. I was still damp, dewy. Those days you turn the loop into a refrain, a line of a song you can just fall into. No necessary sense, no order. A natural strangeness. The wild days are expected but they are not sustainable if you want to make something of your day. This exercise helps you order your days. It develops inner vision, outer vision, and revision. Try to give your day a point. Find the point of everyday. Even a mountain made of words is a mountain you can stand on.

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Frank O’Hara is my best example. Those poems give his days shape. The Collected Poems is a testament to this, but Lunch Poems are a high point; they highlight the practice. Even the title suggests lunch may as well be the high point of every day. It has little to do with identity.

“It doesn't matter what kind of sentence you write. It will be right because your write it,” I told Baybay. In any case, I avoid writing notes and annotations on other people's poems. It feels like writing on other people's prayer. In painting workshops the teacher doesn't paint on other folks’ canvases. As in that case, I'm compelled by conversations around the work: underneath it where the id and intuition live, above it where big ideas and philosophies float and especially adjacent to the poem where the influences of fellow writers sit. When stamped on a poem, such conversations become too much like dictation, too dictatorial, too fixed, too one sided. You should hear almost all of my comments as questions. Fluid questions and dialogues for everyone rather than fixed answers for the poet. Because language in and around the poem is both intuitive and mathematical—both sound than sense—feeling as as important as thinking. Maybe feeling is tied to intangibles vision and voice while thinking to edits and logistics: order, grammar, clarity. What you trust more, feeling or thinking, is not a matter of right or wrong, but of sensibility.

A poem is quintessentially personal. Frank O’Hara calls it Personism. (“It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person,”) Personal as in personality, as in a personhood that holds all registers and interests: politics and ticks, history and histrionics, spirituality and confusion, Eros, weirdos, your momma's hairdos, it includes capital I, identity—but the notion of identity alone lacks the intimacy of personality. Personality is the domain of individuals; identity is the domain of groups, cultures, stances, theories, traditions, the social sciences—important but not vital and often not interesting, honestly. Art: Language: Poetry gives one the opportunity to shape those things that shape you. It’s not simply about shaping others. Some think this is all it’s about: but that’s a better definition of education and entertainment: the desire to persuade. Art includes significant elements of persuasion, nothing wrong with enlightening, and entertaining—but that’s all peripheral to the work of seeing both outside and inside yourself. Sounding like yourself is harder than you might imagine. Being black, for example, doesn’t give me a leg up on my me-ness. Blackness, like whiteness or yankiness or southernness, is akin to a style/spirit of being. Learned and inherited. It is a useful starting place—it’s history but not destination. You and your style may be innate, but it should be susceptible to variation. Style is enhanced by variation: diversity as well as particularness, adaptability as well as resistance. Which is all to say style shouldn’t be fixed. O’Hara shows us this and shows us how to do it. I don’t know if it is akin to the Abstract Expressionism of his era. I suspect this practice of attention suits any living. I suspect this is why he holds a conversation longer than any of his peers. Work is his subject. Work provides subject, substance; you have to have something to work for and against if your shape is to be particular. Lunch is a worker’s break in the day. It’s the worker, not the dreamer, who makes something of the day.

It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

It is your 86th birthday

It seems far away and gentle now

It’s my lunch hour, so I go

it’s night

It’s terrible under Kay Francis’s armpits

It’s the month of May in my heart as the song

I’ve got to tell you

Ivy invades the statue.

Cento of first lines under “I” in the Index of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara

Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A collection of poems, So To Speak, and collection of essays, Watch Your Language, are forthcoming on Penguin in 2023. Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University.