Excessively present: What we can learn from Frank O’Hara

by Arya Sharma

Original video from <https://www.frankohara.org/video/> Uploaded to YouTube by @Modo de Usar <https://youtu.be/YDLwivcpFe8?si=65aSI0_jlnGbNfgp>

‘Subways are only fun when you’re feeling sexy’, a line that makes me laugh as I flick through my pocket edition of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems on the tube. The hustle and bustle of the London underground serves to amplify O’Hara’s vibrant vision of New York city, bursting at the seams of his free-floating lines. It seems, to me, that O’Hara sought a sense of transience through his work, aiming to create a moment, a perpetually present instant - suspended and let go, just like that.

Somewhat paradoxical, the way he carefully cultivated his carefree image. Just think of how John Ashbery described O’Hara’s artistic method:

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. [1]

This is exactly the spirit Lunch Poems encapsulates, as its title evokes O’Hara’s habit of scribbling poems down in his lunch breaks. It also encourages us to read his poems in casual, fleeting moments, perhaps over lunch! Undoubtedly, O’Hara was careful with what he wrote - his style is too distinctive, his voice too clear, for us to believe there was so little thought put into their production. But it was important to him that they be perceived as these instinctive, uncontrollable moments of artistic resonance. And perhaps there is some truth to this method, revealing itself through his more random, sporadic poems.

Dan Chiasson suggests, in The New Yorker, that O’Hara’s first real accomplishment was his personality, reminding us that he was famous for his personality before his poetry:

But his personality was always a brilliant contrivance, practically a work of art: improvised, self-revising, full of feints […] Someone with O’Hara’s presence could afford to regard the writing of poetry as a secondary act, a transcript of personality. Transcripts aren’t generally thought of as art in themselves, which may explain why O’Hara was so reckless with his poems once he got them down on paper, jamming them in his pockets or in random drawers. [2]

Fragments of self, so easy to capture and dismiss as his own personality shifted and morphed. Perhaps this is something we can learn from O’Hara: how to be, and how to change constantly. I recall Virginia Woolf’s line, ‘I am rooted, but I flow’. Can we learn so much about ourselves that we can freely change without losing our selfhood?

Rapid syntax, his lines slip over each other hurriedly; New Yorkers running through their morning commute. But still, these moments capture his attention. ‘It’s my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk among the hum-colored cabs’, he writes in ‘A Step Away from Them’. He takes us with him, ‘First, down the sidewalk / where laborers feed their dirty / glistening torsos sandwiches / and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets / on. They protect them from falling / bricks, I guess’. A professor pointed out to me how O’Hara playfully objectifies the workers, fixating on their ‘glistening torsos’ in his subtle admiration of the men. That short, three-word line also makes the word ‘sandwiches’ seemingly apply to their bodies, emphasising their physicality by connoting a sort of closeness, a sense of squeezing together, being between their bodies. And then the afterthought, they wear helmets to protect them from falling (and here, the line hangs for a moment, as though they are the ones falling) bricks, ‘I guess’. It’s quite beautiful, this stream-of-consciousness style of poetry, where the speaker gives you glimpses of these streets and mutters about what might be going on behind it all. It is as though they are writing poetry in front of us, imbuing image with narrative as the poem goes on.

This sense of the poem creating itself is supported by O’Hara’s use of present tense. Chiasson discusses O’Hara’s use of tenses in detail and, on this poem, he writes:

[His] real wish is somehow to stop time in its tracks. Time, inscribed upon O’Hara’s brisk syntax and jaunty prosody, hastens every poem of his forward, but the world arrests him with marvels: a liver-sausage sandwich, or the “glistening torsos” of workmen on their lunch hour […] Nobody is quicker than O’Hara, but nobody wishes more to linger in those experiences - sensual, aesthetic, intellectual - which carry their own serene time signatures.

Another paradox, then. The poem’s very title captures this desire. Consider the restraint in the words ‘A Step’, singular, a small movement. Yet the poem tumbles through his walk, ‘First, down the sidewalk’, ‘Then onto the / avenue’, ‘On / to Times Square’, ‘I stop for a cheeseburger’. He is away from ‘them’, whoever he works with, whoever he escapes on his lunch hour - but moving away leads him to more people, more of ‘them’, as he observes life as it happens around him, letting himself be pulled into its rhythm and flow.

I love this movement in O’Hara’s poems - it is exactly what drew me to him when I first read his work. I don’t even remember what poem of his I first encountered (and I think that’s the way he would want it) but I remember thinking, ‘huh, that’s pretty simple’! There is something very refreshing about O’Hara’s colloquial, carefree style, so averse to explicitly Poetic technique. When I tutor GCSE students, I like to show them the popular poem, ‘Having a Coke with You’. It almost always throws them off, with its details and names and references to things they don’t know about, and no clearly signposted marks they can grab by identifying structural points or langauge devices. I tell them it doesn’t matter, to just read and tell me what they feel. Typically, the response to the first half is, ‘I don’t get it’. But, as they keep reading, a few lines jump out to them. ‘I look / at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world’, and ‘what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them / when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank’. As I explain a little bit about the poem, they affirm that they got the sense that all these names, all this listing, is in fact inconsequential. It doesn’t matter! Not to them, and not to the speaker. I often show them a clip of him reading the poem. Partly because I think it is good for them to remember that poetry is not just words on the page, partly because of how simply unaffected O’Hara’s mannerisms are in the video. He reads as though he has told you all this before, as though you should know what he means and ‘why [he is] telling you about it’. It’s fun, how little he cares about being PoeticTM. I want my students to think of poetry simply as another means of thinking and speaking.

So, I turn to O’Hara, with his fleeting moments, suspended and extended yet free-flowing and ephemeral. In this spirit, I have attempted not to overthink and over-edit this piece (which is why it has ended up being so very wordy)! I leave you with some of my favourite lines of his, from the end of ‘Steps’, and hope that you, too, step away with him on your lunch breaks.

oh god it’s wonderful

to get out of bed

and drink too much coffee

and smoke too many cigarettes

and love you so much

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References

[1] Larry Rivers, ‘Portrait of Frank O’Hara’, National Portrait Gallery <https://npg.si.edu/blog/portrait-frank-o’-hara-larry-rivers> [accessed 29 March 2024]

[2] Dan Chiasson, ‘Fast company: The world of Frank O’Hara’, The New Yorker (2008) <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/07/fast-company> [accessed 29 March 2024]

O’Hara’s poems:

‘A Step Away from Them’

available to read online on Poetry Foundation —

<https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42662/a-step-away-from-them> ‘Having a Coke with You’ available to read online on Poets.org —

<https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you> ‘Steps’ available to read online on Genius —

<https://genius.com/Frank-ohara-steps-annotated>