Frank O’Hara: Poet of the Present
A Step Away from Them
It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. 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. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.
On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.
There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they’ll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.
A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.
Oh my. The start of this letter, a letter about a poem which is mostly ‘easy,’ is going to be sort of philosophical. Be prepared. But stick with me, because the poem is, well, easy. Easy and not easy. Both. Before I engage in philosophical musings, however, let me tell you the ‘foreground’ of the poem, which I am sure you recognize. It is about New York City, about mid-town Manhattan, about the streets which seethe with activity and movement and life as one walks through the area around Times Square. This is a ‘walk through Times Square at mid-day’ poem.
The present moment. How unusual it is. There is before, which exists in memory and in our (trained) synapses. There is after, which is the future for which we are always planning and which our desire(s) impels us toward. A future when our lacks in the current moment will be remedied: Filled.
The immediacy of the present moment, its fulness, even when not encumbered by memory and desire, is something in which we are all immersed. Every day, every moment of the day. Yet things pull us away from the richness of the present. The past is linked to us by memory. The future is linked to us by desire. Both past and future shape the present moment, the moment in which we live. Because of these shaping forces, “memory and desire” as T. S. Eliot put it, we do not live fully in the present.
Much of the poetry of the past two centuries, I think, tries to restore the present to us, tries to get us to fully inhabit our consciousness of what is happening right before us, to live in the moment in which we live. Two poets whom I adore, William Wordsworth and William Carlos Williams, try to peel away the “dead stringencies” (the phrase is Sylvia Plath’s) that warp the present moment and restore the immediate, unmediated, world to us, in all its messy grandeur.
My emphasis on presentness is a way of encountering, entering into, the poems of Frank O’Hara. He wrote what is often deceptively simple verse. He used the American vernacular, not the splashy literary language of ‘serious poetry’ and poets. He seemingly eschewed large topics like mortality and suffering and beauty in order to ‘document’ his immediate surroundings, the world through which he moved, literally: The detritus in which we spend our living moments. O’Hara tried to erase the harmful category of the ‘esthetic,’ where poems reside in a world of art that is seemingly divorced from the lives we live every day.
That last phrase harkens back to one of my favorite passages in all of twentieth century writing, a short parable called “On Parables,” by Franz Kafka. Here is the entire parable, with the lines I am most concerned with put into bold:
Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross over to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares.Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
That phrase, “in daily life, which is the only life we have,” accompanies me on every day of my life. For surely Kafka is right, that what we have is our everyday life, what we live in and pass through. O’Hara understands that.
One can approach O’Hara by noting his connection to abstract expressionism. He was deeply knowledgeable about Jackson Pollack (he wrote a book on him!), a friend to Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers. What Pollack tried to do in his ‘drip’ paintings was to record in the composition (the painting) the very time in which he is composing: The painting is the ‘record’ of the sweep of his arm, the movement of his brush, the ‘form’ the paint takes as it encounters the canvas. The painting contains and is fully shaped by its own moment, the moment when the artist stands before or above (in Pollack’s case, he often was dealing with large canvases he placed on the floor). The painting is a record of its own moment of creation. It is, somehow, ‘pure present.’ (The phrase is Henri Bergson’s. I have written about poetry and Bergson – just type in your browser “Bergson Gutman poetry”. Bergson, revealingly, does not believe a pure present exists – what is before us is always immediately a memory, past, gone as time goes everlastingly forward.)
Too much philosophy, I know. But just listen to O’Hara’s poem. It recounts a walk he has taken exactly as he took it.
Those first two stanzas are remarkably present. Nothing esthetic or exciting appears to happen in the walk he recounts. He begins by telling us that it is lunch time. (His first book was entitled, Lunch Poems.) He sees taxicabs. He sees workers, their yellow helmets, their mid-day meals: They eat sandwiches and drink Cokes. Women walk over grates and the rising air from the subway beneath flips up the hems of their skirts. It is a hot day, the sun is out, and for a second time he sees the cabs whose movement provides a bit of a draft. As he is walking along, he looks at wristwatches – whether sold on the street, or in shop windows, we do not know. All we know is he looks at wristwatches, and then at cats which play in sawdust.
There is not much happening here except that he is walking at lunchtime and looking around him. The poem’s substance is a series of sense-impressions in the present moment.
In the second stanza we recognize his walk takes him through Times Square, for the great advertising signs of the era loom up before the speaker and before us readers. A Camel sign (he does not record that brand!) which puffs smoke out of an oversize smoker’s mouth. A waterfall advertising Bond apparel (later, a Pepsi sign) – at the time, the largest sign in the world. And, the poet-walker’s eye still roving, a black man with a toothpick, watching a blond girl, the man “languorously agitating.” There are not only sights, but so many sounds: “Everything/suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of/ a Thursday.” Thus far, we have experienced the world as the walker does – Baudelaire would have called the walker a flâneur, a man of the city walking about and observing, a great ‘type’ in the rise of modernity and the city, a man who because he can just walk around and does not have to ‘work’ reflects the new affluence of not just money but time.
At the start of the third stanza the walker thinks as well as sees, for our ‘current’ life is part what we experience externally (sensations, like sight and sound) and part what we experience internally (thoughts, memories, emotions). Seeing the great signs about him, he thinks of his friend Edwin Denby and what he wrote about commercial light (electric bulbs in signage, neon) in the midst of natural light. Our flâneur halts his walk to buy a cheeseburger. Signs abound: Here the shop where he buys his burger denoted by its sign all in caps, JULIET’S CORNER. The shop’s name is linked, by similarity of name, to an Italian actress, Guiliettta Masina. Who is linked to Federico Fellini, the director of La Dolce Vita and other films, since she was his wife. But she also acted in his films: “è bell’ attrice.” ‘Is a lovely and fine actress.’ Oh well, his thoughts flit away, and he orders a chocolate malted to go along with his cheeseburger. He goes back to looking. A rich lady in furs puts her dog in – another – taxicab.
It appears that the third stanza will go on recording sensations. Puerto Ricans on the avenue, a warm day. But then comes, and every time I read this poem I find it miraculous, a small but intense elegy on the people he has known who have died.
First Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
Astonishing lines. An elegy! Three dead friends and the lament, “But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?” I love that comma in the second sentence. It need not have been there – read the line without it, and it makes the same sense. But not the same, for the comma highlights, I think, the distinctive singularity of those who died. They were, and are gone.
That singularity, we recognize, refers us back to Edwin Denby, and perhaps Giulietta Masina. There are people in this poem, laborers, women with flowing skirts, a Negro, a blonde chorus girl, a lady in furs, Puerto Ricans. But people observed and people known to the walker are different: The former are seen, the latter are shaping forces in his life.
So our flâneur moves onward, but now – having lamented the passing of those he mourns – he is transformed into impersonality, from the “I” with which the poem opened to a “one” in these lines. Onward, still observing, now seeing magazines on newsstands and posters and a huge painted name on a warehouse, all manifestly ‘signs.’ Understanding that everything that is present faces destruction (the warehouse will soon be torn down), he re-enters the present, no longer dissociated from himself by memory, lament and mourning. Memory is now memory, no longer a lamented fulness: “I/used to think they had the Armory/Show there.”
And then, following the cheeseburger and the chocolate malted, he has “a glass of papaya juice” and goes “back to work.”
My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.
I always have difficulty with these last words. Does he mean that even as he goes back to work, his consciousness is still with him, hidden but nonetheless there, secretly put away from the demands of the workaday world? Does he mean that even amidst the mundane world of work there is always, though often hidden, poetry? Is it a specific reference to Reverdy, a French surrealist poet?
Reverdy is in some ways O’Hara’s antecedent, writing in simple French language, full of sense impressions but also with a sense of inwardness. He sought “the sublime simplicity of reality,” a phrase of his that also – to my mind – describes what O’Hara was after, too. Thus, the small book of poems in O’Hara’s pocket is most likely not happenstance.
Let’s turn to my favorite among O’Hara’s poems, “The Day Lady Died.” Once again it is a ‘walking about’ poem, the poem of a flâneur. Once again, its core is elegiac: It recounts coming upon grief in a modern setting and in a modern way. Here the grief arises from the death of a singer, Billie Holiday – “Lady” – and turns on the moment he recognized that she was dead. (The title, “The Day Lady Died,” is an inversion of her nickname, ‘Lady Day.’)
The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed meI walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these daysI go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandarinessand for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on itand I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
The poem begins with very specific time: clock time, and calendar time, and the year. This is a recollection, told in the present tense, of a specific event. (“Three days after Bastille Day” gives us the date, July 17.)
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me.
Three things, aside from the time and date, are revealed in this first stanza. Our flâneur gets “a shoeshine” because he is going to spend the weekend in the Hamptons. He will get there by train, the time of his arrival marked with specificity. He will go to dinner in Easthampton, a dinner hosted by people who he does not know but “who will feed me,” although, as we will learn, he knows the people with whom he will stay, Patsy and Mike.
The second stanza we know about, having looked at “A Step Away from Them.” His walk here begins very similarly: A hamburger, a malted, a book purchase of the sort a literary type like O’Hara might buy.
Then stanza three: His preparations for the weekend. Money from the bank. Memory intrudes – the first name of Miss Stillwagon he seems to recall is Linda, and she breaks from her usual practice and does not look up his balance. And we go back to books, not a New World Writing for himself, though, but a ‘thoughtful’ gift for his friend and hostess-to-be, a woman named Patsy. He buys a book of poems by Paul Verlaine, with illustrations by the famed painter Pierre Bonnard. But he also tells us the other possibilities he considered before rejecting them for the Verlaine/Bonnard: Hesiod in a modern translation, a play by the playwright-of-the-moment Brendan Behan, one of two plays by the transgressive writer Jean Genet. The choice among these literary works was difficult, and he almost went “to sleep” when faced by the possibilities. “Quandariness” means, literally, being faced by a choice and being in uncertainty and perplexity: A dilemma. “Sleep” is an escape from the dilemma, and perhaps a response to the work (and need for relaxation) that the choices in the bookshop have given rise to.
A gift for his host, Mike, is easier: Just buy a bottle of liquor Mike likes. In this case, Strega, a golden-colored liqueur from Italy. The markers of social class in the poem are clear-cut and obvious: New York, artsy, intellectual. Middle class but not conventionally so. New writing from Ghana, nineteenth century French poetry, Greek writing in a contemporary translation, playwrights like Behan and Genet, continental liqueur, and then chic imported French cigarettes (“Gauloises”) and recondite American ones (“Picayunes” were strong: Produced by Liggett in North Carolina, originally made in New Orleans, they were made from the tobacco that was also used in Gauloises). He will, one assumes, smoke the cigarettes over the course of his stay in the Hamptons.
Before we go further, note how O’Hara uses capital letters to spell out the names of things, both publications and businesses: NEW WORLD WRITING, GOLDEN GRIFFIN, PARK LANE, NEW YORK POST, 5 SPOT. In this poem we are in a recognizably commercial and public world, and yet, and yet, the poem is intensely personal and private. The contrast between the commercial and the private is emphasized, which makes the personal experience both recognizable (as occurring in our shared world) and yet intensely private.
In the midst of thinking of the time and train schedules, walking around, eating and drinking, getting money, shopping, “casually” buying cigarettes for the coming trip, O’Hara sees a newspaper with Billie Holiday’s “face on it.” So ends stanza four.
The last stanza is what the poem has aspired to. On a hot summer day, sweating from the heat and his modest exertions, O’Hara sees the newspaper photograph and slips into intense memory. He stood by the door to the toilets in a night club, the 5 Spot, and Billie Holiday sang – well, ‘sang’ is the wrong word, she ‘”whispered a song “ as her accompanist Mal Waldron played the piano. And then that wondrous final phrase, “and everyone and I stopped breathing.” That final phrase has two referents. When O’Hara heard Billie Holiday whispering her song, he and everyone went silent, anticipatory, attentive to each word; Wordsworth, in an equally inspired phrase, speaks of the moment when the sun sinks down, evening lowers over the earth, and he is, like a nun, “Breathless with adoration.” “And everyone and I stopped breathing.” He offers this supreme phrase, of worshipful attentiveness, to Billie Holiday’s singing.
But the line has another referent, this one about the poet recognizing himself in a present moment, not in recollection of the long ago past. “And I stopped breathing.” One can forget the “everyone,” and the past experience of Lady Day, and recognize how in the middle of everything the poet “stopped breathing.”
Let’s conclude by looking closely at what this second referent of that final phrase tells us about the experience he is recounting: “The Day Lady Died.” Death intrudes into the everyday activities of the poet in his world, and he is breathless at how sudden is its intervention. He is stunned by the ‘end’ of beauty, and art, and the evanescent moment of transcendence: All are gone, gone, marked by the photo of Billie Holiday on the front page of the New York Post. She is gone, and so is beauty, art, transcendence. What is particularly clear to him is that evanescence is, well, evanescent.
Time, which had unreeled as a sequence of sense experiences in this poem, of timetables and anticipatory actions and casual meals and encounters, now stops. For O’Hara, the past is sealed off but still present. The present is emptied of everything but shock. “And I stopped breathing.”
The poem itself is a memory. It is told in the present tense, from the “It is” with which it opens to the “I am sweating a lot now” which opens the final stanza. But it ends with an invocation of the past: “and I stopped breathing.” The present becomes the past, now residing in memory. (Perhaps Bergson was right?) Yet its presentness, like an insect captured in amber, remains, more powerful than anything else.
I began this letter by speaking of how difficult it is to live in a ‘present’ moment. This poem is full of the activity of present moments, but concludes with something else, a moment of shock when all fades away but memory and the intolerable present-ness of consciousness. Billie Holiday is dead. The poem commemorates her, and captures the intense and once-present recognition by the poet that she is no more. It is an elegy, but it circles around a present moment, now past, when the poet recognized with shock that death had exerted its dominion over her.