The last class was the first time I met Frank O’Hara and other members of the New York School of poetry such as Allen Ginsberg and James Schuyler. The poems of Frank O’Hara drew my attention from the first reading. That is why, when we were asked to choose the favorite poem I chose his “A Step Away from Them.” The main attribute of the mentioned above poets’ poems is urbanism. They give us the images of our every day life situations.
O’Hara’s poetry is like a motion picture where the scenes of the city’s life change each other: laborers with “dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola”, cabs, “cats playing in sawdust”, “a blond chorus girl”, neon, Juliet’s Corner, “a lady in foxes”, Puerto Ricans, magazines, posters, and papaya juice. These images are randomly picked. It creates chaos in the head when you try to visualize all of them while reading the poem. However, the poet paradoxically transforms the chaos of images to the harmony at the end. By saying “the magazines…and posters…they’ll soon tear down” and mentioning three dead friends, the poet states the death as the mechanism of life in the city. The posters are gone, so the new ones will be put up. People die, but the city’s life never stops and more and more visuals of the city’s movement will occur.
I am sure, all of us see almost the same life traffic everyday. However, it is O’Hara’s true mastery to be able to put the seen images on the paper so precisely, establish the disorder of the crowd reasonable, and transform it to harmony.
