Frank O’Hara’s poetry

This week I chose Frank O’Hara to write about and I imitated him in my modeling poem. I really like his idea that poems should not contain any abstract or philosophical allusions (I think this way it is easier to understand it) and the idea that poetry should be amusement. In his lunch poems we can see the flurry of images and the cityscape of New York. In his poem entitled “A Step Away from Them” we can see the typical ingredients of a lunch poem. Even the first line tells us that. After this comes the description of the city itself. Basically he is just going around in the city and writes down what he can see. First we have some construction workers with their yellow helmets, then arrives the pop culture with Coca-Cola and a very subtle allusion to Marilyn Monroe (the flipping skirts). He even notices some cats playing in the sawdust. He sees the typical yellow New York City cabs and describes the weather (which was hot that day). After the exact designation of the place where he is (Time Square), he notices the famous “puffing billboard” which is also part of the pop culture. Racial issues and the question of integration became more and more important during the 50s, especially that Blacks are important “components” of the New York cityscape. In the poem a “Negro” stands down the street, representing his race. Then comes a girl, then some sudden honks, and we get the exact time and date of that day. This is quite unusual, in general poets do not give these data to their readers, but as this is a lunch poem, we can understand that. O’Hara’s great appreciation for neon appears in the poem, this must have been a new experience for people that time; he appreciated it even in daylight, when it cannot shine as bright as at night. He stops for a cheeseburger (pop culture again), when his mind gives out the names of some famous people, sort of randomly. We cannot even really understand how these names come here and what must be their significance in the course of the poem but this is what makes this poem a lunch poem, it is almost a stream of consciousness by Virginia Woolf. The representatives of another important ethnic group are to be noticed: some Puerto Ricans arrive down the avenue. And here comes the sudden change in the tone of the poem: the poet leaves his happy and easy-going style and becomes sad and deceived. He is talking about deaths, the deaths of some artists, artists like he is. After this change and his sorrowful thoughts, he has to come back to his real life, to his work. He even tells us he has papaya juice in his hands and a volume of poetry by Pierre Reverdy.
In “Personal Poem” we almost have the same pattern, as it is also a lunch poem. Here as well we have many places and people mentioned and the racial question comes up here as well (the handshake with LeRoi).