Lunch Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

Description

Essential poems by the late New York poet. Lunch Poems , first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry. Edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his monumental The New American Poetry in 1960, it contains some of the poet's best known works including "The Day Lady Died," "Ave Maria," and "Poem" [Lana Turner has collapsed!]. These are the compelling and formally inventive poems―casually composed, for example, in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading―that made O'Hara a dynamic leader of the "New York School" of poets. "O'Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few books of his era show less age."― Dwight Garner, New York Times "As collections go, none brings . . . quality to the fore more than the thirty-seven Lunch Poems , published in 1964 by City Lights." ―Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review "What O'Hara is getting at is a sense of the evanescence, and the power, of great art, that inextricable contradiction ― that what makes it moving and transcendent is precisely our knowledge that it will pass away. This is the ethos at the center of Lunch Poems : not the informal or the conversational for their own sake but rather in the service of something more intentional, more connective, more engaged." ―David L. Ulin, Los Angeles TImes "The collection broadcasts snark, exuberance, lonely earnestness, and minute-by-minute autobiography to a wide, vague audience―much like today's Twitter and Facebook feeds." ―Micah Mattix, The Atlantic "Sweet poems, funny, exhilarating, spontaneous, subversive, poignant, and sometimes―often―more deeply, even darkly moving. But above all sweet. Probably a greater proportion of O’Hara’s poems can be read for sheer pleasure than the poems of any other 20th-century writer. This slim volume is his liveliest, most distilled and delectable single collection. Quintessential O’Hara, and such a bargain!"― Lloyd Schwartz, Grolier Poetry Book Shop Review: "Now when I walk around at lunchtime I have only two charms in my pocket" - Frank O'Hara's reputation seems caught in a holding period, an awkward stage preliminary to his work becoming universal and timeless. Consider, for example, the final scene in the opening episode of the second season of "Mad Men," the cable TV series set in the world of advertising as practiced in New York in the early 1960s. We see the show's protagonist, Don Draper, picking up a slim volume of O'Hara's poems ("Meditations in an Emergency," 1957). He recites the final lines from "Mayakovsky." There is an ambivalence to the scene. Was the O'Hara poem chosen for its intrinsic merit, or was the O'Hara name used as an easy marker for the zeitgeist (the same way the show's producers highlight the period-specific cut of Draper's suit and hair and attitudes)? With friends like these, when will O'Hara escape his confinement to the mannerist ghetto of the "New York School"? And so some readers may pick up "Lunch Poems" (first published in 1964) after seeing it praised as an emblematic cultural document of mid-twentieth century America. Yet even if the time-bound aura of O'Hara is the come-on, what makes you stay enthralled is his voice -- a "thinking" voice as vitally American as Whitman or Frost. There are 37 poems in "Lunch Poems" and their quality as well as their accessibility varies. The poems span a period from 1953 to 1964. This book is not a "best of" O'Hara collection, yet it does contain what may be his most durable poem. A few of these short pieces are so recondite that they lose me. In a few others O'Hara raises an opaque scrim to suggest beauty beckoning from the other side, and these poems begin to "click" only after multiple readings. But the majority of the poems are freshly-minted coins granting immediate access to a lively, urbane worldview. While general knowledge of the New York cultural scene in the '50s and early '60s is helpful, these poems, at their best, easily communicate to us in a way undimmed by the passage of time. The poems are populated with the poet's friends and lovers, with artists and musicians, and with the conversation of meals and parties. Here are O'Hara's travel experiences and his love of foreign languages (you could write an essay on the myriad uses of French in O'Hara's poetry). The man wears his erudition lightly on his sleeve. He's enamored of both high and low American culture: "I am ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have to smile" ("Naphtha", 1959). Another poem from the same year, "Rhapsody," contains a premonition of O'Hara's early death a few years later: "I historically belong to the enormous bliss of American death." Most delightful is his man-on-the-street reportage that spins off in all directions. A typical bout of intense observation occurs in "A Step Away From Them," which begins: "It's my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs." In what I think are the best of the poems, the cityscape serves as a platform for accessible philosophizing. An enduring example is "The Day Lady Died." Is there another poem where so much meaning resides in its title? At first glance the title rattled me. In it I heard a rhythm, but an uncertain one. Then I hit upon the answer: simply reverse "Day Lady" to reveal "Lady Day," the nickname of blues singer Billy Holiday whose dark night of the soul ended in 1959. The displaced "day" (her missing day) had to be displaced (had to go missing) from O'Hara's title. The text of the poem recounts the day the poet walked the streets and avenues of Manhattan attending to errands. These everyday pleasures come to a halt when O'Hara spies a tabloid newspaper's front page announcing Holiday's death at age 44. It is the day after death, the first of many days fate denied her. In the poem's final stanza O'Hara recalls once hearing Holiday perform at the Five Spot Café, and here the poet accomplishes a wonder. He turns death into something other than displacement and omission. Memory overpowers death, conjoining time present and time past. Review: Good - I love poems. I saw this at the MOCA, but I couldn’t add anything else in my check-in luggage. Good little read for the quiet mornings.