Reading Frank O'Hara's "Lunch Poems" After Fifty Years

Author(s): MARJORIE PERLOFF

Source: Poetry , JANUARY 2015, Vol. 205, No. 4 (JANUARY 2015), pp. 383-391
Published by: Poetry Foundation

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43591886

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 MARJORIE PERLOFF

Reading Frank O'Hara's "Lunch Poems'9 After Fifty Years

The year 1964 was an important one for American poetry: Robert
Lowell published For the Union Dead , John Berryman 77 Dream
Songs (both Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Denise Levertov O Taste
and See (New Directions). Adrienne Rich's Snapshots of a Daughter-
in-Law (Harper) had been published the previous year, and in 1965
Sylvia Plath's Ariel (Faber & Faber) exploded on the scene. I can still
remember the excitement of reading the arresting opening of Plath's
"Lesbos" - "Viciousness in the kitchen! /The potatoes hiss" - or
Berryman's lines, "Filling her compact & delicious body/with chick-
en paprika, she glanced at me/twice" ("Dream Song #4"). In gradu-
ate seminars, we took pains to understand the symbolic substructure
behind this seemingly natural discourse. For, however casual the
"new" vernacular, the poets in question adhered to poetic decorum, as
we had been taught to understand it: a poem like Levertov's "Merritt
Parkway," for example, keeps its eye on the object, tracking closely
the movement of the speeding cars and the emotional charge of the
image, even as Lowell's "For the Union Dead" moves step by step
from the elegiac description of the "old South Boston Aquarium" to
the story of Colonel Shaw's Civil War regiment, to the culminating
insight that now "giant finned cars nose forward like fish; / a savage
servility/ slides by on grease."
No one in my immediate circle had yet heard of another volume
published in 1964 - a small orange and blue book published in City
Lights's Pocket Poet Series called Lunch Poems . City Lights, the leg-
endary San Francisco bookshop, was known for its publication of
Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956), Gregory Corso 's
Gasoline (1958), and the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (to this date,
City Lights's proprietor), but O'Hara wasn't exactly a Beat, even
though he was quite friendly with Ginsberg and Corso. Lunch Poems
(like O'Hara's earlier Meditations in an Emergency from Grove Press),
quickly became a cult favorite, especially on the queer scene in New
York and San Francisco, but establishment critics had reservations as
to what they regarded as O'Hara's frivolity and triviality. In the New
Statesman , Francis Hope referred to O'Hara's "puppyish charm";
in The New York Review of Books , Marius Bewley remarked that the

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 poet's "long invertebrate verse lines can be amiable and gay, like
streamers of crepe paper fluttering before an electric fan," and even
the radical poet-critic Gilbert Sorrentino defined O'Hara's world as
one of "wry elegance, of gesture," quickly adding that "it most cer-
tainly is not my world." In 1977, when I published Frank O'Hara:
Poet Among Painters , the Times Literary Supplement reviewer Thomas
Byrom cautioned that O'Hara's "late Victorian camp" was the style
of an intriguing but minor poet.
The underestimation of O'Hara, like the underestimation of John
Ashbery in the early sixties, is itself a phenomenon that deserves
careful study. Gay-bashing, conscious or unconscious, was clearly
involved, even when, as in the case of Marius Bewley, the critic was
himself gay. With the advent of AIDS in the early eighties, the coun-
tercurrent set in, and today, O'Hara and Ashbery are at the very heart
of the poetry canon, even as the New York School, now encompass-
ing three generations, has become a prominent fixture on the global
poetry scene.
Still, nothing had quite prepared me for the thrill of rereading
Lunch Poems after fifty years. So much of the poetry of the sixties is
dated; O'Hara's, especially in this book, seems curiously up-to-date.
Ferlinghetti, in his editor's note for the fiftieth anniversary edition,
remarks that the poems "established a certain tone, a certain turn of
phrase, a certain urbane wit, at once gay and straight, that came to
identify the New York School of poets in the 1960s and '70s." Fair
enough. But in the next sentence he adds that O'Hara "articulated a
consciousness that was unique among the poetic sensibilities around
the world." At once representative - the voice of a particular com-
munity - and unique: how does that work?
We get some clues in the marvelous selection of the O'Hara-
Ferlinghetti correspondence appended here. First, the self-deprecat-
ing humor: "Yes suh," Frank writes in December 1959, in response to
Lawrence's request for the promised manuscript,

lunch is on the stove and lordy, I surely hope you don't think I
forgot to put the fire under the greens, I am even flavoring same
with cholesterol and hormones so we will all live for ever (in
health's despite, as John Wieners said).

And on September 25, 1963, when the project is finally ready to go,

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 If you are coming to New York give me a ring at Canal 8-2522
or the museum and come by for a drink in my new loft which
is a great improvement on the place you saw last time. (Bigger
and colder.)

Shouldn't it be bigger and warmer? Bigger and better? Not in

O'Hara's contradictory universe.
Humor goes hand in hand with unusual modesty. It took five years
for Frank to put the manuscript together and even then he had real
qualms about doing so. In the letter of 1963 cited above, he writes,
"if you or [Don Allen] find anything you don't like I'd rather not
print it, excepting Rhapsody and Naphtha which I really like a lot for
personal reasons." And again,

If you don't like these you can also mail them back there collect,
I think. ... At any rate, I went over them carefully while here
and thought I'd mail them off before I developed any more
qualms.

And in 1964, when Ferlinghetti does prune the manuscript, sending

back a few poems, Frank writes,

I am perfectly content with the ones you sent back, with the
possible exception of Personal Poem which I am sending back
for your consideration, if that's okay. I'm not insisting on it at
all, and if you find it weak by all means leave it out, because
my feeling for it may be entirely sentimental and may also have
vanished by the time the book comes out.

Surely few poets are so deferential to their editors: Frank goes

along with the title, even though he is wondering if Lunch Poems
sounds too much like Ginsberg's Reality Sandwiches or (Frank camp-
ing it up) like Michael McClure's Meat Science Essays. And he is hesi-
tant about writing his own "blurp" as he calls it, even though in the
end he does write the anti-blurb on the back cover:

Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare

of a Manhattan noontide, has paused at a sample Olivetti to
type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more
deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn

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 his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life,
coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch his
favorite meal

It's not that O'Hara doesn't believe in his own talent, but he
refuses, here as in the poetry itself, to take himself too seriously. Self-
importance is his bugbear. Consider one of the most famous lyrics in
Lunch Poems : "Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)":

Lana Turner has collapsed!

I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

there is no snow in Hollywood

there is no rain in California

I have been to lots of parties

and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

This poem first became notorious because of the circumstances of

its composition: as Joe LeSueur tells it, O'Hara informed the audi-
ence at Wagner College on Staten Island that he had written "Lana
Turner" on the ferry coming over from Manhattan. Robert Lowell,
with whom O'Hara was reading, responded with a thinly veiled
snub: "Well, I'm sorry I didn't write a poem on the way over here."
The story has come down to us in various versions, but over the years
it served to underscore the charges of triviality and "mere camp" lev-
eled against the O'Hara of Lunch Poems. How clever to read a poem
just composed on the Staten Island Ferry crossing from Manhattan!
Clever but also suspect. Obviously, neither Whitman's "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry" nor Hart Crane's The Bridge - those founda-
tional poems for Lowell as for O'Hara - were composed that way!

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 And yet, instantaneous or not, "Lana Turner" is, to my mind, a
great poem. First of all, it has what Ezra Pound called "constatation
of fact" - the grace of accuracy. By 1962, Lana Turner, the glamorous
"Sweater Girl" of the forties and femme fatale of such film noirs as

The Postman Always Rings Twice , was a has-been; her career had been
badly damaged by her affair with mobster Johnny Stompanato, who
was killed in 1958 when Lana' s fourteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl
Crane, caught the two fighting and killed Stompanato with a kitchen
knife. It was like a scene from a B movie.

The tabloid headline is thus wonderfully absurd, "collapsed" be-

ing a curiously empty verb. One can, after all, collapse from heat
stroke as easily as from a heart attack. The silly announcement be-
comes the occasion for the poet's account of his stressful morning -
an account made surprisingly immediate by its address to a nameless
you. "Trotting" in line two is an odd word choice - animals trot,
people don't - making the poet look silly as he confronts the rain,
snow, and possible hail: "you said it was hailing/but hailing hits you
on the head/hard." The line break and alliteration of h's gives the
account an off- tune note. Rain and snow are bad enough, snarling
the traffic, and Frank always seems to be late for a lunch date. But, so,
and, and... we can see the "I" getting more and more exasperated
when - lo and behold - he sees that headline, "lana turner has
collapsed!" It acts like a tonic, making the bad weather suddenly
palatable. After all, "there is no snow in Hollywood/there is no rain
in California" (at least not in the poster version). The logic of these
statements is wholly absurd, suggesting as they do that if Lana Turner
has collapsed, even in good weather, the poet trotting about in hail
and snow is somehow above the fray: "I have been to lots of par-
ties/and acted perfectly disgraceful/but I never actually collapsed."
Maybe things aren't so bad after all! And so it's time for the grand
gesture: "oh Lana Turner we love you get up."
Nothing about this seventeen-line poem with its breathless,
run-on lines capturing the tempo of midtown Manhattan, is dated.
Lana Turner remains a potent Hollywood legend - witness Calvin
Bedient's literary magazine by that name - and the moment of ev-
eryday life represented, the way an unexpected external stimulus can
suddenly break a mood, is made so real we can see and feel it. The
feat of such writing is not saying too much. Information is kept to a
minimum - think how the poem would be spoiled by the details of
the Stompanato story - and generalization is avoided. A lesser poet

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 would tell us what he or she has learned from contemplating the
headline or would pontificate about the hollowness of Hollywood
glamour. A lesser poet would explain how and why he "acted per-
fectly disgraceful." Perhaps someone insulted him? Perhaps he was
involved in a lovers' quarrel? Who knows? O' H ara knows better
than to dwell on such disclosures: his aim is to portray a situation
with which anyone can identify. The poet sees himself as faintly
ridiculous, trotting rather than walking or running and not even
being able to identify hail. It's all quite absurd, as he lets "you" know,
and yet quite accurate in its relation of inside to outside, traffic on the
ground to natural traffic in the sky, Hollywood to O'Hara's uptown
Manhattan.

Almost all of O'Hara's Lunch Poems have a comparable lightness of

being, but their seemingly casual diction and immediacy belie their
very careful construction. Consider the poem O'Hara himself calls,
along with "Rhapsody," his favorite: "Naphtha," which dates from
1959 - O'Hara's annus mirabilis when he wrote "The Day Lady
Died," "Personal Poem," "Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right
day!)," and "Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul," as
well as such great poems, not included in Lunch Poems for one reason
or another, like "Joe's Jacket" and "You are gorgeous and I'm com-
ing!" "Naphtha" - the title refers to a flammable liquid mixture of
hydrocarbons, rather like gasoline - has a charmingly absurd opening:

Ah Jean DubufFet
when you think of him
doing his military service in the Eiffel Tower
as a meteorologist
in 1922
you know how wonderful the 20th Century
can be

In 1959 MOMA was staging a large DubufFet exhibition, curated

by the august Peter Selz. O'Hara's response to the work was mixed:
he seems to have understood right away that there was something very
odd about this successful painter. Imagine doing one's military ser-
vice as a meteorologist in the Eiffel Tower! Such absurdities remind
us "how wonderful the 20th Century/can be." And indeed, DubufFet
was a wonder. In his WWI incarnation he was part of the modern-
ist cénacle that included Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. But in 1924

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(after his post in the Eiffel Tower) he abruptly gave up painting and
spent the next two decades as a wine merchant. When he reemerged
as a painter after WWII, it was as the founder of art brut or outsider
art. Line thirty-seven of "Naphtha" - "and Jean Dubuffet paint-
ing his cows" - refers to such works as MOMA's own "primitivist"
Cyclist with Five Cows.
Outsider art: Dubuffet provided O'Hara with the occasion to con-
sider what it meant, in our "wonderful" century, to be an outsider,
whether a Native American, as in the absurdist Iroquois section of
the poem, or a black composer/performer like Duke Ellington, or an
avant-garde woman artist (Sonia Delaunay) in a world of powerful
male ones, and, as a gay man, "made in the image of a sissy truck-driver."
But - and this is what makes O'Hara' s poems so unique - the poet
refuses to play victim: his Iroquois (a reference to construction
workers in Manhattan at the time of the building of the great sky-
scrapers, who were mostly drawn from a Mohawk tribe in upstate
New York; the men were known for not having a fear of heights) are
presented not as exploited laborers but as "fierce and unflinching-
footed" figures out of a Hollywood film "with their horses/and their
fragile backs/which are dark." Indeed, O'Hara reads "the parable of
speed" - the speed trumpeted by the avant-garde - as coming some-
how from "behind the Indians' eyes." These fantasy Iroquois, "nude
as they should be," thus become enshrined in the mythology of the
Eiffel Tower, the symbol of the New Century. Or again, perhaps they
are the "savages" of Stravinsky's Rite of Springy that avant-garde classic.
Where does O'Hara' s own circle come in? "It is our tribe's cus-
tom/to beguile," remarks the poet and indeed his cénacle has its
own tribalisms, even as "we were waiting to become part of our
century." After WWII, New York replaced Paris as art capital, even
if "we don't do much ourselves/but fuck and think/of the haunt-
ing Métro/and the one who didn't show up there." "We" know that
"you can't make a hat out of steel/and still wear it," but "who wears
hats anyway." A newly demotic age looks back quizzically on the he-
roic avant-garde. Personal life, in any case, goes on:

how are you feeling in ancient September

I am feeling like a truck on a wet highway
how can you
you were made in the image of god
I was not

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 I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver
and Jean Dubuffet painting his cows
"with a likeness burst in the memory"
apart from love (don't say it)
I am ashamed of my century
for being so entertaining
but I have to smile

The tone is complex. It's one of those moments where the poet
admits being very low - skidding along like a truck on a wet highway.
His friend remonstrates, "how can you/you were made in the image
of god." On first reading, we are likely to think the words are "you
made in the image of a god" - the usual cliché. But "image of god"
is part of Catholic theology: we are all made in the image of God. So
the would-be compliment is deflated and leads to the "I was not/I
was made in the image of a sissy- truck driver."
Better to laugh than to cry. Especially when Frank remembers
those foolish cow paintings. For Dubuffet, successful proponent of
art brut that he was, what with his thick impasto reductionist paint-
ings, was in fact a sophisticated writer, producing catalogue commen-
taries like the MOMA one which contains the phrase "with a like-
ness burst in the memory." It is the contradiction between self-styled
outsider and comfortable bourgeois that makes Dubuffet - and by
extension "my century" - "so entertaining." Dubuffet playing the
childlike innocent. Somehow "I have to smile."

The humor of "Naphtha" is complex and delicate, not the least

of O'Hara's jokes being the disparity between French and American
modernisms, between the Eiffel Tower and Manhattan skyscrap-
ers, the "primitivism" of Dubuffeťs painting and the "primitive"
Iroquois, the "haunting Métro" made famous in such films as Zazie
dans le métro (someone is always left behind!), and the "truck on
a wet highway." But so subtle is the relation of present to past, of
American poet/curator to French painter, that, gently satiric as the
poem is, Dubuffet himself evidently took "all that gas" as a compli-
ment. "The most exciting thing that has happened to me recently,"
O'Hara wrote John Ashbery on Feb i, 1961,

is that Big Table [where "Naphtha" was first published] for-

warded me an envelope the other day and in it was a drawing
from Dubuffet. It is in India ink on his stationery . . . the head

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 of a man, and around it is written, so it fills out the rest of
the space - "Salut Frank 0'Hara...de Paris... le jour de
Noël i960... à vous... un bon jour ... d'un ami... j'ai lu le
poème . . . dans Big Table . . . bonne année . . . Jean Dubuffet."

No doubt Dubuffet appreciated the "smile" with which "Naphtha"

concludes. But why is the poet " ashamed of [his] century/for be-
ing so entertaining"? One expects him to be proud or pleased, what
with all that entertainment value. But O'Hara never opts for the
easy response. Throughout "Naphtha," the references have been to
violence - ofWWI, of the "fierce and unflinching- footed" Iroquois,
whose "backs" have been rendered "fragile," of the need for steel
hats, and evidently of the abuse that makes him feel "like a truck on
a wet highway." To find our century so "entertaining" requires disci-
pline. And then of course a smile!
I am always reciting those last lines to my friends, relishing the mix
of pathos and humor that I take to be uniquely Frank O'Hara's. When,
in the poem that precedes "Naphtha," I read the wonderfully absurd
exclamation, "Khrushchev is coming on the right day!" it being
the right day for the always scowling, fist-thumping Soviet dictator
for no better reason than that Frank is in love and it happens to be a
gorgeous windy day in New York, I always smile. The arc of feeling
is so perfectly rendered. O'Hara's wholly unpretentious and delight-
ful little book is full of such moments - moments as immediate in

2015 as they were fifty years ago. Surely, Lunch Poems is a twentieth-
century classic. Which is to say that all those currently taboo poetic
terms - authenticity, sincerity, immediacy, voice - may be coming
back to haunt us. And I have to smile.

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