Sixth issue (of eight) of this important little magazine edited by LeRoi Jones. Contributors to this issue include Jones, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, Gilbert Sorrentino, Diane DiPrima, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Whalen, et al.
Thank you for reading and listening and watching—for being part of our community—throughout this month. With final good wishes for the health of all, here is Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), one of the presiding spirits of Knopf Poetry for his generosity on the page, his pursuit of beauty in its myriad forms, his boundless sense of adventure and of literature’s possibilities. May soft banks enfold you until we meet again over a poem.
River
Whole days would go by, and later their years, while I thought of nothing but its darkness drifting like a bridge against the sky. Day after day I dreamily sought its melancholy, its searchings, its soft banks enfolded me, and upon my lengthening neck its kiss was murmuring like a wound. My very life became the inhalation of its weedy ponderings and sometimes in the sunlight my eyes, walled in water, would glimpse the pathway to the great sea. For it was there I was being borne. Then for a moment my strengthening arms would cry out upon the leafy crest of the air like whitecaps, and lightning, swift as pain, would go through me on its way to the forest, and I’d sink back upon that brutal tenderness that bore me on, that held me like a slave in its liquid distances of eyes, and one day, though weeping for my caresses, would abandon me, moment of infinitely salty air! sun fluttering like a signal! upon the open flesh of the world.
More on this book and author:
Learn more about Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara, edited by Mark Ford
Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul BY FRANK O'HARA
It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch ah lunch! I think I am going crazy what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up at excitement-prone Kenneth Koch’s I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems at Joan’s studio for a new book by Grove Press which they will probably not print but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it
yesterday I looked up the rue Frémicourt on a map and was happy to find it like a bird flying over Paris et ses environs which unfortunately did not include Seine-et-Oise which I don’t know as well as a number of other things and Allen is back talking about god a lot and Peter is back not talking very much and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth’s although he is coming to lunch with Norman I suspect he is making a distinction well, who isn’t
I wish I were reeling around Paris instead of reeling around New York I wish I weren’t reeling at all it is Spring the ice has melted the Ricard is being poured
we are all happy and young and toothless it is the same as old age the only thing to do is simply continue is that simple yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do can you do it yes, you can because it is the only thing to do blue light over the Bois de Boulogne it continues the Seine continues the Louvre stays open it continues it hardly closes at all the Bar Américain continues to be French de Gaulle continues to be Algerian as does Camus Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb and Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher (I think!) and Irving Sandler continues to be the balayeur des artistes and so do I (sometimes I think I’m “in love” with painting) and surely the Piscine Deligny continues to have water in it and the Flore continues to have tables and newspapers and people under them and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy we shall be happy but we shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be possible René Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn’t it I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don’t believe it
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.
