After reading each poet’s work, I realized that they all go into a lot of detail about their surrounding which helps the reader envision the writers state of mind. Frank O’hara describes the laborers in Times Square who “feed their dirty torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola” while Ginsberg went into detail about the “garbage cans chained to concrete anchors” near his Lower East Side apartment. The detail in the poems of each of the artists assigned to us helped place us into the mind of the authors.
Most of these poems made very specific references to areas in New York City as well as the people the authors associated with during that time. These details could be easy to skip over but to the people writing, they are significant details. I found that Dining out with Doug and Frank by James Schuyler really grabbed my attention. Schuyler describes the plight of a New Yorker when asking “…but how often do you want to pass Miss Liberty and see that awesome spiky postcard view?”. Views that might be astonishing for non-native New Yorkers become just another day passing the same monument. The poem really starts to draw me in when Schuyler tells the story of his first lover, BIll Aalto. He tells this story in a way that makes him seem to be detached from this relationship but you can really see the admiration he had for Bill in his writing. Schuyler ends this poem by acknowledging its length and finally revealing the characters in the title of this poem, Doug and Frank, which makes it seem like he was not trying to make this poem about them at all.
Being familiar with the deliberate phrasing Allen Ginsberg uses while reciting his poems, I could hear his voice while reading both of his poems. Mugging started with Ginsbergs signature long winded descriptions of the Lower East SIde and climaxed when he got mugged on a street for his money. Ginsberg’s reaction to being mugged was calm and unphased. Which can be related back to the fact that he was a practicing Buddhist. Ginsberg and Schuyler both went into great detail about their surroundings and the events they faced during their time. The exact details on city blocks and the artists of their time seemed to be a way for these poets to immortalize that period in time for them.
