Meditations in an Emergency: Poems and Books by Frank O'Hara

In Meditations in an Emergency: Poems and Books by Frank O'Hara, we are reading his works 'Meditations in an EMergency,' 'Radio,' and 'Personal Poem'.

Meditations in an Emergency

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

????????? Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

????????? Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

????????? I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

????????? Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

????????? However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

????????? My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

????????? Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

????????? St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

????????? Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

????????? It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

????????? “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.

?????? I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency” from Meditations in an Emergency. Copyright ? 1957 by Frank O’Hara.

Radio

Why do you play such dreary music

on Saturday afternoon, when tired

mortally tired I long for a little

reminder of immortal energy?

All

week long while I trudge fatiguingly

from desk to desk in the museum

you spill your miracles of Grieg

and Honegger on shut-ins.

Am I not

shut in too, and after a week

of work don’t I deserve Prokofieff?

Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning

to aspire to. I think it has an orange

bed in it, more than the ear can hold.

Copyright ? 1956 by Frank O’Hara. Source Poetry, March 1956

Personal Poem

Now when I walk around at lunchtime

I have only two charms in my pocket

an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me

and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case

when I was in Madrid the others never

brought me too much luck though they did

help keep me in New York against coercion

but now I'm happy for a time and interested

I walk through the luminous humidity

passing the House of Seagram with its wet

and its loungers and the construction to

the left that closed the sidewalk if

I ever get to be a construction worker

I'd like to have a silver hat please

and get to Moriarty's where I wait for

LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and

shaker the last five years my batting average

is .016 that's that, and LeRoi comes in

and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12

times last night outside birdland by a cop

a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible

disease but we don't give her one we

don't like terrible diseases, then

we go eat some fish and some ale it's

cool but crowded we don't like Lionel Trilling

we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like

Henry James so much we like Herman Melville

we don't want to be in the poets' walk in

San Francisco even we just want to be rich

and walk on girders in our silver hats

I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is

thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi

and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go

back to work happy at the thought possibly so

Copyright Credit: Frank O'Hara, "Personal Poem" from Lunch Poems. Copyright ? 1964 by Frank O'Hara.

Source: Lunch Poems (City Lights Books, 2014)

Frank O' Hara: Essential Books To Get Now

Lunch Poems (paperback)

Order the book from BOOKS-A-MILLION or Bookshop

DESCRIPTION

Essential poems by the late New York poet.

Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry.

Edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his monumental The New American Poetry in 1960, it contains some of the poet's best known works including "The Day Lady Died," "Ave Maria," and "Poem" Lana Turner has collapsed ]. These are the compelling and formally inventive poems--casually composed, for example, in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading--that made O'Hara a dynamic leader of the "New York School" of poets.

"O'Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few books of his era show less age."--Dwight Garner, New York Times

"As collections go, none brings . . . quality to the fore more than the thirty-seven Lunch Poems, published in 1964 by City Lights."--Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review

"What O'Hara is getting at is a sense of the evanescence, and the power, of great art, that inextricable contradiction -- that what makes it moving and transcendent is precisely our knowledge that it will pass away. This is the ethos at the center of Lunch Poems: not the informal or the conversational for their own sake but rather in the service of something more intentional, more connective, more engaged." --David L. Ulin, Los Angeles TImes

"The collection broadcasts snark, exuberance, lonely earnestness, and minute-by-minute autobiography to a wide, vague audience--much like today's Twitter and Facebook feeds."--Micah Mattix, The Atlantic

"Sweet poems, funny, exhilarating, spontaneous, subversive, poignant, and sometimes--often--more deeply, even darkly moving. But above all sweet. Probably a greater proportion of O'Hara's poems can be read for sheer pleasure than the poems of any other 20th-century writer. This slim volume is his liveliest, most distilled and delectable single collection. Quintessential O'Hara, and such a bargain "--Lloyd Schwartz, Grolier Poetry Book Shop

Meditations in an Emergency (paperback)

Order the book from BOOKS-A-MILLION?or?Bookshop

DESCRIPTION

Collected poems from one of the Twentieth Century's most influential voices.

Frank O'Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry, "which, by its vitality alone, became the dominant force in the American poetic tradition."

Frank O'Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in New England; from 1951 he lived and worked in New York, both for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art, where he was an associate curator. O'Hara's untimely death in 1966 at the age of forty was, in the words of fellow poet John Ashbery, "the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed.”.

This collection is a reissue of a volume first published by Grove Press in 1957, and it demonstrates beautifully the flawless rhythm underlying O'Hara's conviction that to write poetry, indeed to live, "you just go on your nerve."

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