Frank O’ Hara. From reading his short collection of poems, I could tell that he was a very interesting man. What a pity that he only lived til the age of forty. If one were to tell me that he died after being hit by a dune buggy while soaking in the sun at a beach I wouldn’t have believed him.
Anyways, I like his style of writing. Perhaps we should read more poetry that uses the same French collage techniques and American colloquial speech.
It only makes sense that O’ Hara was Harvard-educated. He was very aware of political events that were occurring around him as evidenced by his quote,
“I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days.“
I understand that he is joking and probably has little interest in poets in Ghana but I just thought it was interesting how “The Day the Lady Died” was published in 1959 and Ghana won its independence in 1957. I also noticed that as he was walking around the city he commented on the multitude of different races he saw. He saw the “Negro standing in the doorway with the toothpick”, the Italian wife of Federico Fellini, Giulietta Masina, and the Puerto Ricans that were on the avenue. He touched on political issues such as overpopulation and corruption and deceit in the United Nations.
This was a very interesting read.
It did not feel as if I were reading poems. And though I was reading separate poems I felt like I was reading journal entries simply in the form of a poem. The poems, chronologically, were “A Step Away From Them” to “The Day The Lady Died” to “Steps.” Was there any intrinsic meaning to the titles and their chronological order. I feel as though he put deep thought into that and many other areas of his writing for them to be left open for discussion.
