"It is next to my flesh, that's why"

It is next to my flesh,
that's why. I do what I want.
And in the pale New Hampshire
twilight a black bug sits in the blue,
strumming its legs together. Mournful

                    






     glass, and daisies closing. Hay 
     swells in the nostrils. We shall go
     to the motorcycle races in Laconia
     and come back all calm and warm.

For me there is an ineradicable element of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the poetry of Frank O'Hara, and not merely for its power of time and place. Ever since adolescence - that unimpeachable age of criticism - there has been a lot of the erotic for me, in the writer who could say in A Blithedale Romance, that there was no petal folded, no dew-drop latent in Zenobia. But then I felt that way then about how the telephone directory gathered all the Smiths in one place, each one an enthralling layer of new oral sensations, with quite a lot of alliteration when one got to Alan. What else was erotic, and may I say ebullient in Hawthorne for me, I did much later find in O'Hara - a self-consciousness of constituting a new voice, and a lack of remorse in doing so; an awareness of being with people who were making a new thing, and one of them.

And there is another reason why one appreciates so very much the poetry of Frank O'Hara. He is from me as distant as I am from the extracts I invoke here; and he didn't reach me by imagining who I'd be. He did his work.


He did his part, you could say. More than as a Fourierist in expressionism's arcadia, he was a villager of time, malgré lui. He did what they do, renewing the invention of the bloodstream.

Frank O'Hara

A Raspberry Sweater

1956

Donald Allen, editor

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

op. cit.

iv, photo W.E.

Let's do O'Hara's deal

Very often nowadays (I think),
we greet each other as hurdles
once again to endure in a path
to higher existence, in virtu-
al refuge known as plans. Nat-
urally, I couldn't conceive of
such a fundamental deformation,
if I were not vulnerable to it.

I observed that not even youth 
and income can defeat the feeb-
leness inherent in common calcu-
lations; and possibly our contem-
porary horror, "social media,"
are augury, in ditziest vacuity,
of this slipstream into anomie.

Knowing better is not being bet-
ter; it's often being worse. But
knowing something utterly is not
a feeble anchorage, for passing
it on neutrally, in closeness to
one's past and present. The scan-
dal of our genius is on-axis to
the honest gaze.

What is so unarguably to be 
known, if not that there is
poetry to taste in standing
still? Don't take mine, one
would say. Take my hearing,
for your extravagantest ex-
ercise.

       ..

       the only truth is face to face, the poem whose
          words become your mouth
       and dying in black and white we fight for what we
          love, not are 
       ..
























Frank O'Hara
Ode: Salute to the French
  Negro Poets
  [fragment]
1958
Donald Allen, editor
The Collected Poems of 
  Frank O'Hara
op. cit.

Edward Mendelson
Review of Selected Poems
  of Frank O'Hara
  Mark Ford, editor
  Knopf, 2008
The New York Review
  of Books
September 25, 2008©

John Latta
Isola di Rifiuti
October 23, 2012©

Course correction

  Frank O'Hara at
  a rail station.

  Fifty years ago
  for the summer.

  We left Federal
  Court yesterday
  not somber, but
  seeing simpler.

          Just when I was getting completely through
          dried out, balled up, anxious and empty
          like a gulch in a John Huston movie
          I went to see Strange Interlude and began
          to go away for a weekend on the beach
          into that theatre again and again
          now I have a pot of basil a friend gave
          me and am reading Keats again and realize
          that everything is impossible in a different way
          well so what, but there's a difference
          between a window and a wall again.


 

         

Frank O'Hara
Again, John Keats, Or
  The Pot of Basil
MS 8 June 1963
Ephemeris 2
May 1969
Donald Allen
  Editor
The Collected Poems of
  Frank O'Hara
op. cit.

Strategies of falsehood

O sentiments sitting beside my bed

what are you thinking? of an ebony vase?

of a pail of garbage? of memorizing Whitman?

You are leaning on my elbow backwards.

What are you doing, my darling sentiments?

You are indeed bored. Can it be that I'm asleep?

Shall you stride on the shingle with an oar

in your hands, or beach my heart, my barnacled?

You would let me lay in bed all day,

free to drown in your wing-beatings as you fled

past and past my glazed, teary-from-the-breezes heart,

which is not going to open up and look out any more.

The great project of the new American government, to pulverize humane society into anomie through every pore of its apparatus, relies on sustained pummelings of humiliation by every available means. This afternoon, one of its pluperfect practitioners of vitriol, chosen for those qualities to be Attorney General of the United States, will carry out that task before every camera in the country, that can be conducted to the Senate. Again the beating will be inflicted, to cushioning huzzahs of Republicans on the dais, and especially from Rubio, to be rewarded soon with a crushing blow to relations with Cuba. What this nation can be conditioned to tolerate is written well enough in that revolting legacy of the Cold War; this new American government is but a sentimental monument to a transparent continuity.

So many of its rhymes are audible clarions of one reflex after another, tempered and tested for decades in demagogy's cauldron here, that I don't know why we aren't collecting this literature more meticulously as we go. But we do have another, incalculably more prolific in its tributaries than this procrustean lode of manipulation and force. As the poet Kenneth Koch wrote in The New Republic, "In its music and its language and in its conception of the relation of poetry to the rest of life, [O'Hara's] is a poetry which .. changed poets and others, and which promises to go on moving and changing them for a long time to come."

Refreshment rises to occasion, not to custom. Given the occasions mounted by this government, I shouldn't wonder that this language will do it in.  

Frank O'Hara

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

Donald Allen

  editor

  Dolce Colloquio

  1953

  Poetry, May 1970

University of California Press

op. cit.

Ryan Matthews

Kees Scherer

  Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon

  at MoMA

Matthias Lauridsen

Pier, 1950s, anonymous

Saturday commute clxvi: Street sign in O'Hara

It's the month of May in my heart as the song
says and everything's perfect: a little too chilly
for April and the chestnut trees are refusing to bloom
as they should refuse if they don't want to, sky
clear and blue with a lot of side-paddle steamers
pushing through to Stockholm where the canals're true-blue

in my spacious quarters on the rue de l'Université
I give a cocktail in the bathroom, everyone gets wet
it's very beachy; and I clear my head staring at the sign
LOI DU 29 JUILLET 1881 **

                                                             

                         so capitalizing on a few memories 

from childhood by forgetting them, I'm happy as a finger

of Vermouth being poured over a slice of veal, it's

the new reality in the city of Balzac! praying to be let

into the cinema and become an influence, carried through

streets on the shoulders of Messrs Chabrol and Truffaut

towards Nice

             or do you think that the Golden Lion

would taste pleasanter (not with vermouth, lion!) ?

no, but San Francisco, maybe, and abalone

                                           there is

nothing in the world I wouldn't do foryouforyou (zip!)

and I go off to meet Mario and Marc at the Flore

**  Introduced by the anti-monarchist, 

anti-imperialist representative of

Montpellier in the Chamber of Deputies,

Eugène Lisbonne, a diligent opponent of

"the government of moral order," this Law 

established the sweepingly broad freedom 

of the press in France, embodying special

protection against loyalty oaths and oth-

er indignities against chestnut trees.

Frank O'Hara

Beer for Breakfast

  Paris, April, 1960

  Floating Bear, 1961

Donald Allen

  editor

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

op. cit.

Suppose it were Friday xlvi: rsvp

This minute I've not been able not been

you know simply not been like positively being dead

able to hear your voice though having dialed

you at home at studio at bar. I am not frantic,

I hope, at not being able to catch your sigh

of boredom, not I, not the number who knows all

about the city's darling diversions. I never expected

you to speak to me having once illuminated to me

with your long exotic thumbnail my weakness

which I wear "cross at the war" elegantly.

I hope that your blue eyes are slanting into music

by Ben Weber, because I should have only reminded you of

a cello concerto of our old midsummer anguish,

vieux jeux like falling out of trees into a collector's album.

And upbraided you for my expecting the absence

which like a vulgar newspaper horoscope has happened

to Jane. Where are you? where are you? where are you?

Frank O'Hara

October 26 1952 10:30 O'Clock

Donald Allen, editor

The Collected Poems of

  Frank O'Hara

op. cit.

Antoni Tàpies

Of heroes on their weekend

  Having a Coke with you

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, 
  Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia
  in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better
  happier St Sebastian


partly because of my love for you, partly because of your
  love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around
  the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on
  before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be
  anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when
  right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting
  back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through
  its spectacles . .

        

Frank O'Hara

Having a Coke

  with You

  [fragment]

1960

Donald Allen

  editor

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

op. cit.

Saturday commute cxliv: August air

. .

but everything convulses under the silver tent of Spain
the dark
        the dry
               the shark-bite sand-colored mouth
of Europa, the raped and swarthy goddess of speed! o Spain
to be in your arms again
                        and the dung-bright olives
bluely smiling at the quivering angulas 
                                       smudge
                                against the wall of mind

where the silver turns
against the railroad tracks
                           and breath goes down
and down and down
                 into the cool moonlight
where the hotel room is on wheels
and there all buttocks are black and blue
                                         dun
is the color of the streets and sacks of beer
where dopes lead horses with a knight on each

         do you care if the rotunda is sparrows

caught behind the arras of distaste and sorrow

                                              did you

                  wait, wait very long

                  or was it simply dark and you standing there

   I saw the end of a very long tale

   being delivered in the Rastro on Sunday morning

   and you were crying, and I was crying right away too

all Retiro confided in us

in those betrayals

                  we never meant but had to do, the leaves

           the foolish boats like High School

                                  before the Alhambra

                            before the echo of your voice

I have done other things but never against you

           now I am going home

           I am watering the park for Violetera

           I am cherishing the black and white of your love

Frank O'Hara

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

Madrid

  [fragment]

August, 1961

Donald Allen, editor

op. cit.