Dining on Irreverence in Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems

This post is maybe PG-13 or so. Not too bad. Some language and irreverence. It may bother some religious brothers, so stop now or read to the end.

John Ashbery calls what Frank O'Hara does as "free-associating.... speculative rumination." As one example, Ashbery points out "in 'Mary Desti's Ass,' a title whose meaning, I discovered accidentally in a bookstore, namely a book called Isadora Duncan's End by Mary Desti." But Ashbery doesn't see that as necessary to appreciating the poem, just demonstrating O'Hara's process.

O'Hara's irreverence knows [almost] no bounds. Reality, meaning, punctuation (and sentence structure), and God--even what he's doing (poetry) gets little reverence in terms of structure or titles. He could have left many without titles, but instead he titles several simply "Poem"--taking out the solemnity of the practice of poetry: homogenizing and abstracting.

From "On Rachmaninoffs Birthday": "Quick! a last poem before I go / off my rocker." With a heavy dose of humor, he makes the poems sound dashed off and even insults what he is doing as a measure of insanity (or maybe just himself).

Here's a typical attack on logic:

the final fatal hour of turpitude and logic demise
is when you miss getting rid of something delouse
is when you don't louse something up

and on morality (strangely, more stringent now than then):

oh shit on the beaches so
what if I did look up your trunks and see it

--the last two from "For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson."

He does love his pop culture references although he is merciless to it, too: "never argue with the movies" ("Fantasy"), "Lana Turner has collapsed!" ("Poem"),

About the only thing he takes seriously is art, honoring it in his own peculiar fashion. From "The Day Lady Died": "she whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldreon and everyone and I stopped breathing" and from "A Step away from Them": "My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy."

The poem I'd like to dissect is one of the shortest: one of the dozen or so "Poem" poems. It begins, "Wouldn't it be funny" which many of his poems implicitly begin this way. It continues, "if The Finger had designed us" which calls up God with its capitalization and "finger" (a thing representing the whole) does appear in Exodus with Pharoah and the writing of the ten commandments as well as numerous uses regarding the manner one conducts sacrifices to God. A finger directs, points, and accuses. But there's another use of the finger that will be medically useful for people with the problem I'll describe below.

What if people, O'Hara speculates, don't poop for a week? (Now you may surmise what the finger is for.) People get fatter until Sunday morning and "ploop!" Of course, churches would be larger, noiser and smellier facilities although many would no doubt put the incense to good use.

You could stop there, but it has broader significance. That is what some do, is it not? We go to be cleansed once a week, thinking that's good enough for the rest of the week.

If you read the letters between Frank O'Hara and his publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, you'll note that O'Hara had little to do with the selection and ordering of the poems in his book although he gently insisted (without "insisting") on "Personal Poem" and "For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson." He wasn't even sure about the book title, which Ferlinghetti went with. So the book runs a temporary, working title that had more to do with their construction than any unifying theme. And maybe processs is what should be highlighted in O'Hara's work.

I'll conclude with passages from various poems about life and death. One critic opined that O'Hara's death was no accident. Here are some passages that suggest that may have been a possibility. Remember, though, that these are extracts that happen to form a pattern--not intentionally, but "all jumbled / together like life is a Jumble Shop" ("A Little Travel Diary"):

I only need one bullet preferably silver
if you can't be interesting at least you can be a legend

--Yesterday down at the Canal

willow trees they remind me of Desdemona
I'm so damned literary
and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of nothing 

I'm so damned empty
what is all this vessel shit anyway
we are all rushing down the River Happy Times...
and we arrive at the beach
the chaff is sand
alone as a tree bumping another tree in a storm
that's not really being alone, is it, signed The Saw

--Poem en Forme de Saw

I just want to go on being subtle and dead like life

--"For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson."

I can't even find a pond small enough
to drown in without being ostentatious

--"Memoir of Sergei O..."

"this various dream of living"
I am alive with you

--"St. Paul and All That"

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

--"Steps"

I've never felt so wide awake

--"At Kamin's Dance Bookshop"

we are all happy and young and toothless
it is the same as old age
the 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....
we shall be happy
but shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be possible
Rene Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn't it
I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don't believe it.

--"Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul"

I was initially dubious of the claim (whose, I cannot find now) since O'Hara was struck by Jeep on a beach (and O'Hara wrote of dying on the beach), but who knows. Interesting though. I have another essay somewhere on his more famous poems (different computer).