2 by Frank O’Hara

Frank O’Hara was not the first poet I read, but he was the first poet i read whom I felt was speaking directly to me in and through a world I knew intimately and in a language I knew how to speak. I didn’t need to analyze, translate or interpret what he was saying; he was writing the poetry of my every day life. And I was 17 maybe, reading 10 years after he had died. He was my father’s generation, not mine.

I am not going to blogh about Frank O’Hara right now, since I couldn’t begin to express even a little of what i have to say about ghim. Even the following is a hint of a longer piece: there are writers or artists who are formative, influential, iconic, heroic, even godlike. and then there are the artists whom one encounters when young that make it seem possible. When I was discovering Frank O’Hara I was reading Wallace Stevens and TS Eliot and Ezra Pound; Walt Whitman, Frost and Dylan Thomas. These were writers I didn’t understand, who awed me with the bits I did get or bewitched me with sounds and ideas I knew I had to understand and master but which were beyond me. Frank O’Hara was for me as a poet what Charles Willeford would be for me as a novelist. It is like when a kid hears The Beatles or The Ramones for the first time, or when a film maker first discovers John Cassavetes. You know right away that you can do that too. You stop playing air guitar or dreaming of remaking The Godfather and pick up a guitar and start to play two or three chords and sing, ‘fuck this and fuck that fuck fuck it all you fucker fucking brat’. It was many years before I understood that he was the very best of his generation, that his art, so carelessly present in every syllable he wrote, was of the very highest order.
Note: I can’t get this damn thing to preserve the proper lineation! My technical abilities are nil, so forgive me for losing the all important line breaks.

For Grace, After a Party

You do not always know what I am feeling
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn’t there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? Beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn’t
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
Just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
Is holding.

*************************************************

Drinking

This is the feared moment Light
falters because it’s been on so long
and music slips into a briefcase or
sachel hungry for breakfast My face

flushed with its wit and apprehension
begins to pale when the waitress claims

my glass. And I look at friends haltingly
And I look at strangers The dawn alone

drains the eye The dumb heart finds
no neighbor to kill its rising fever