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A review by deathbedxcv
Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
5.0
“i am terribly bored/sometimes it is like seeing a bad movie/other days, more often, it's like having an acute disease/of the kidney”
* ‘Lunch Poems’ by American poet, musician, and Museum curator Frank O’Hara is a collection of his poetry from 1953-1964. From what I can tell, and from what the internet tells me as well, these poems were usually written by O’Hara during his lunch hour working at the Museum of Modern Art. This is something that the beginning of ‘Personal Poem’ can be used to prove, “Now when I walk around at lunchtime;” as well as it’s ending, “I wonder if one person out of 8,000,000 is thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi [Amiri Baraka] and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go back to work happy at the thought possibly so[.]” And it’s also in this poem that we get, at least I believe, to the heart, or stomach, of O’Hara’s poetic philosophy of Personism, which according to him has the one minimal duty of “address itself to one person (other than the poet himself).” And this is very true in O’Hara’s writing. I found that a lot of it is personal—or person based—even autobiographical. They also felt very conversational, with lines like, “You say that everything is very simple and interesting it makes me feel very wistful, like reading a great Russian novel does[.]” I absolutely love O’Hara’s writing because of this. It honestly feels like, after a while, I become like Frank O’Hara. Another thing that one realizes very quickly from this collection is that O’Hara knew a lot, and I mean a lotttttttt, of artists. He name drops left and right like it’s nothing. Anyway, another thing I will say is that this man knows how to write about love in the mundane sense of it all, and when you can do that, I think that’s incredible.
* ‘Lunch Poems’ by American poet, musician, and Museum curator Frank O’Hara is a collection of his poetry from 1953-1964. From what I can tell, and from what the internet tells me as well, these poems were usually written by O’Hara during his lunch hour working at the Museum of Modern Art. This is something that the beginning of ‘Personal Poem’ can be used to prove, “Now when I walk around at lunchtime;” as well as it’s ending, “I wonder if one person out of 8,000,000 is thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi [Amiri Baraka] and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go back to work happy at the thought possibly so[.]” And it’s also in this poem that we get, at least I believe, to the heart, or stomach, of O’Hara’s poetic philosophy of Personism, which according to him has the one minimal duty of “address itself to one person (other than the poet himself).” And this is very true in O’Hara’s writing. I found that a lot of it is personal—or person based—even autobiographical. They also felt very conversational, with lines like, “You say that everything is very simple and interesting it makes me feel very wistful, like reading a great Russian novel does[.]” I absolutely love O’Hara’s writing because of this. It honestly feels like, after a while, I become like Frank O’Hara. Another thing that one realizes very quickly from this collection is that O’Hara knew a lot, and I mean a lotttttttt, of artists. He name drops left and right like it’s nothing. Anyway, another thing I will say is that this man knows how to write about love in the mundane sense of it all, and when you can do that, I think that’s incredible.