Poem
Let's take a walk, you
and I in spite of the
weather if it rains hard
on our toes
we'll stroll like poodles
and be washed down a
gigantic scenic gutter
that will be
exciting! voyages are not
all like this you just put
your toes together then
maybe blood
will get meaning and a trick
become slight in our keeping
before we sail the open sea it's
possible--
And the landscape will do
us some strange favor when
we look back at each other
anxiously
-Frank O'Hara
A City Winter: 1
I understand the boredom of the clerks
fatigue shifting like dunes within their eyes
a frightful nausea gumming up the works
that once was thought aggression in disguise.
Do you remember? then how lightly dead
seemed the moon when over factories
it languid slid like a barrage of lead
above the heart, the fierce inventories
of desire. Now women wander our dreams
carrying money to our sleep's shame
our hands twitch not for swift blood-sunk triremes
nor languorous white horses nor ill fame,
but clutch the groin that clouds a pallid sky
where tow'rs are sinking in their common eye.
-Frank O'Hara
Frank O'Hara was an American poet (1926-1966). He was born in Baltimore, grew up in Massachusetts, was in the Navy in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific during World War II, used his GI Bill benefits to get a Harvard education and then moved to New York City where he was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and an art critic. He was gay. He died when he was hit by a (presumably drunk) driver in a dune buggy on Fire Island.
His first published book of poems, A City Winter and Other Poems, came out in 1952. (There was an earlier privately printed volume.) O'Hara is usually viewed as a spontaneous chronicler of his life in a sort of primitive poetry. John Ashbery says, in the introduction to the Collected Poems, "Dashing the poems off at odd moments--in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people--he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them." Hmm. Maybe. But I would note that 'A City Winter: 1' is a perfectly fine sonnet, and is one of five sonnets in a sequence that is the title poem, and that the first poem quoted while, not in a nameable form, has form, something close to Sapphics. Maybe he did think about them a little bit...
He's also capable of fun:
Poem
At night Chinamen jump
on Asia with a thump
while in our willful way
we, in secret, play
affectionate games and bruise
our knees like China's shoes.
The birds push apples through
grass the moon turns blue,
those apples roll beneath
our buttocks like a heath
full of Chinese thrushes
flushed from China's bushes.
As we love at night
birds sing out of sight,
Chinese rhythms beat
through us in our heat,
the apples and the birds
move us like soft words,
we couple in the grace
of that mysterious race.
-Frank O'Hara
One of my favourites from O'Hara, also from A City Winter and Other Poems.
A great discussion of what's probably O'Hara's most famous poem (but from his later book
Lunch Poems) 'Having a Coke With You'
by A. O. Scott can be found
here, though you'll need access to the New York Times to read it.
Sadly, while I put a photo of the first edition of A City Winter and Other Poems up at the top, that's not what I have. I poached that picture from AbeBooks where an autographed copy was listed for £27000. Instead what I have is 😉 this:
which is where that Ashbery quote comes from.
It's the week of Simon and Kaggsy's 1952 Club! It's also National Poetry Month in Canada and the US.