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.

 

 

 

Catullus 75 (#poem)

My beat up undergraduate text

Catullus 75

Huc est mens deducta tua mea, Lesbia, culpa

  Atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo

Ut iam nec bene velle queat tibi, si optima fias,

  Nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.

 

-Catullus

 

Yikes, Latin! Fortunately my translation of the poem appeared in a web-based magazine here just last week. 

Catullus 75

Lesbia, I've been brought so low by your wayward ways--

  I'm also by my own nice-guy-ness cursed--

that I cannot like you when you try to be your best,

  or stop loving you, when you do your worst.

 

-Catullus (tr. Reese Warner--hey, that's me!)

 

The original is written in elegiacs--alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter. I've been translating these into a syllable-counting measure with rhymes (a style Marianne Moore often used, though not for elegiacs). 

A couple of other translations I happened to have lying around:

 

Catullus 75

 

My mind has been brought so low by your conduct, Lesbia,

  and so undone itself through its own goodwill

that now if you were perfect it couldn't like you,

  nor cease to love you now, whatever you did.

 

-Catullus (tr. Peter Green)

 

Catullus 75

 

Lesbia, you are the author of my destruction.

My heart is weary and defeated at the thought of life.

I will wish terrible things for you if you become great,

But I will always love you just the same.

 

-Catullus (tr. Ewan Whyte)

 

 

Peter Green was a British professor of Classics who mostly taught in the U.S. He died last year at the good age of 99. (!) His complete translation of Catullus came out in 2005. Ewan Whyte is a Toronto-based poet and essayist. His volume of Catullus translations came out in 2004.

 

 

Richard Howard's At Sixty-Five (#poem)

 

At Sixty-Five

The tragedy, Colette said, is that one
does not age. Everyone else does, of course
(as Marcel was so shocked to discover),
and upon one’s mask odd disfigurements
are imposed; but that garrulous presence
we sometimes call the self, sometimes deny
it exists at all despite its carping
monologue, is the same as when we stole
the pears, spied on mother in the bath, ran
away from home. What has altered is what
Kant called Categories: the shapes of time
change altogether! Days, weeks, months,
and especially years are reassigned.
Famous for her timing, a Broadway wit
told me her “method”: asked to do something,
anything, she would acquiesce next year—
“I’ll commit suicide, provided it’s
next year.” But after sixty-five, next year
is now. Hours? there are none, only a few
reckless postponements before it is time . . .
When was it you “last” saw Jimmy—last spring?
last winter? That scribbled arbiter
your calendar reveals—betrays—the date:
over a year ago. Come again? No
time like the present, endlessly deferred.
Which makes a difference: once upon a time
there was only time (. . . as the day is long)
between the wanting self and what it wants.
Wanting still, you have no dimension where
fulfillment or frustration can occur.
Of course you have, but you must cease waiting
upon it: simply turn around and look
back. Like Orpheus, like Mrs. Lot, you
will be petrified—astonished—to learn
memory is endless, life very long,
and you—you are immortal after all.

-Richard Howard

Richard Howard (1929-2022) passed away last week, a favorite as a poet and an important translator from the French.

As a consequence there have been links: the NY Times obituary, an article, emphasizing his Jewishness in the Forward, a conversation at a Pen event between him and Susan Sontag. That last, from which I lifted the poem, also has an amusing anecdote involving Hermann Broch: it seems Broch, assisted in his emigration from Europe by Howard's adoptive mother, flirted with her, bringing on young Howard's jealousy. To no avail. (The romance didn't come off anyway.)

I also learned that Howard's husband insisted that one book leave their New York apartment every time a new one came in. The horror! There was generally large stack of books by the door to be schlepped down to the Strand and sold.

The poem uses a syllable-counting pattern. Ten syllables in each line, though it's not five accents, and so it's not blank verse.

For Howard, at sixty-five, next year wasn't yet now. He went on well past that. But 'you are immortal after all.'

Gwendolyn Brooks (#NationalPoetryMonth)

 

a song in the front yard

I've stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley,
To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say it's fine
How they don't have to go in at a quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George'll be taken to Jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate.)

But I say it's fine. Honest, I do.
And I'd like to be a bad woman, too,
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

'a song in the front yard' is from Gwendolyn Brooks' first book of poems A Street in Bronzeville. Brooks was the Poet Laureate of Illinois from early in my childhood until her death in 2000 at 83. Bronzeville is a Black neighborhood on the near south side of Chicago. 

She's always been a favorite of mine.

Poem For A Thursday is a meme created by Jennifer at Holds Upon Happiness. 

Robert Hass (#NationalPoetryMonth)

 

Fall

Amateurs, we gathered mushrooms

near shaggy eucalyptus groves

which smelled of camphor and the fog-soaked earth.

Chanterelles, puffballs, chicken-of-the-woods,

we cooked in wine or butter

beaten eggs or sour cream,

half expecting to be

killed by a mistake. "Intense perspiration,"

you said late at night,

quoting the terrifying field guide

while we lay tangled in our sheets and heavy limbs,

"is the first symptom of attack."

Friends called our aromatic fungi

"liebestoads" and only ate the ones

that we most certainly survived.

Death shook us more than once

those days and floating back

it felt like life. Earth-wet, slithery,

we drifted toward the names of things.

Spore prints littered our table

like nervous stars. Rotting caps

gave off a musky smell of loam.

'Fall' is from Robert Hass' first book of poetry Field Guide (1973). It won the Yale Younger Poets prize that year. One could cook from it for weeks, eating well the whole time. The younger Robert Hass from the back of the book:

He looks like he just came back from mushrooming. Or maybe it was something else that 'late at night' messed up his hair.

Poem for a Thursday is a meme started by Jennifer at Holds Upon Happiness. Brona has a poem by H.D. this week.

Robert Frost (#NationalPoetryMonth, #1936Club)

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be--
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

-Robert Frost 

Robert Frost's book A Further Range came out in 1936. 'Neither Out Far Nor In Deep' is from that book. 

In a rather click-bait-y essay 'The Other Frost', Randall Jarrell calls it one of Frost's ten or twelve best poems; he doesn't include the ones you might guess. Is it better than 'The Road Not Taken' or 'Stopping By Woods'? Hmm, I don't know, but I do like it.

Jarrell goes on to say, in a different essay, 'To The Laodiceans':

'It would be hard to find anything more unpleasant to say about people than that last stanza; but Frost doesn't say it unpleasantly--he says it with flat ease, takes everything with something harder than contempt, more passive than acceptance. And isn't there something heroic about the whole business, too--something touching about our absurdity?'

The Poem For A Thursday meme was invented by Jennifer at Holds Upon Happiness; she, too, has a shore poem this week, by Emily Dickinson. Brona has a 1936 poem, Parrots by Rex Ingamells.

 

George Starbuck (#NationalPoetryMonth)

 

Last Straw

IHaveNoTimeFor
BanterSirIAmAn
AncientMariner
MyShipWentDown
ICausedItsLoss
TheyTiedMeToAn
AlbatrossItIsA
BigPelagicBird
QuiteWholesome
IfAdministered
InternallyLike
ChickenSoupNot
TopicallyLikeA
StupidPoultice

-George Starbuck

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: the condensed version.

I'm showing it in Courier, a monospace font, to emphasize the lines. Starbuck wrote a series of poems like this, called SLABS, Standard Length And Breadth Sonnets. He wrote a number of other shaped poems ("Sonnet In The Shape of A Potted Christmas Tree") and light verse. And maybe some serious poems, too...

Annoyingly the editors did not actually include this in my selected Starbuck shown above; I have no idea where I first came across it; it's written in an old commonplace book of mine. In googling to check the text, I found it difficult to come by on-line. (Googling "Starbuck Last Straw" turns up worthwhile initiatives about plastic. I had to include a line to get anywhere. And the last few lines I couldn't find at all.) But it seems it appeared in his final collection, Visible Ink, 2002, after his death in 1996.

Bonus Poem: this *is* from The Works and is one of my favorite double dactyls:

High Renaissance

"Nomine Domini,
Theotocopoulos,
None of these prelates can
Manage your name.

Change it. Appeal to their
Hellenophilia
Sign it 'El Greco.' I'll
Slap on a frame."

It's National Poetry Month in the Canada and the U.S.!