Aaron Shurin on Frank O'Hara’s Lunch Poems

For National Poetry Month, we asked some of our published poets to pick their favorite poetry collection published by City Lights.

Aaron Shurin, author of CitizenandKing of Shadows, among many other wonderful books, chose Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara.

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It’s a small gathering of occasional pieces written, Frank O’Hara tells us, in the Olivetti typewriter showroom on Fifth Ave during breaks from work, hence: Lunch Poems. Among its gems are two little poems that rock mid-century poetics: “The Day Lady Died” and the poem beginning “Lana Turner has collapsed!” Yes, the enjambment is extraordinary: the sentence compression of “Oh Lana Turner we love you get up!” which enacts the push of his will, and the beginning of “The Day Lady Died,” whose anxious, exhausting accumulation of place and action comes to a halt in breathtaking silence—literally—“and everyone and I stopped breathing.” My O’Hara is light in his shoes, he has fun and can make fun of himself, he is frequently unapologetically exclamatory, he knows his Hollywood screen goddesses too well, and his dizzy-queen “quandariness” is checked: enabled. Yes, he has deep knowledge of French Surrealism, an acute internationalist sensibility, and intimate relation to contemporary painting and painters. But it’s the image of his tender performances sitting alone at a typewriter (I started to write “piano”) in a public showroom and playing … errr … writing poems that most excites me. His own disingenuous narrative suggests a casual act, but in that plate glass window he brilliantly “framed” himself for history. His writing thrives in the ironic distance between the typewriter’s chatty clackety-clack and the poem’s normal, noble pedigree of composition. The dolor which might have drowned him was undercut by his I-do-this-I-do-that insouciance, his gossipy brainy vulnerability, the love not quite loved enough, and a fey bearing of enjoying life too much. It’s often this insistent but subtle flamboyance—his boulevardier panache—that lures us in; then we’re all happy to be gay like Frank.