Frank O'Hara's A City Winter (#1952Club, #Poem)

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.