The poem I chose for the final paper is “A step away from them” by F. O’Hara. Even though, we briefly discussed it in class it was very difficult to come up with the argument I wanted state in the analysis. I read a lot of thoughts of other on poets about “A step away from them” and realized that all of them noticed the same thing: a poem is sort of a motion picture of events that are going on in the daily life as someone walks along the street. I would really love to go deeper into researching about O’Hara, his poetry and the relevance of this poem to the New York Writing. By analyzing this poem I want to show how all of us miss out on a lot of details that are going on around us because we percept them as a routine thing. O’Hara writes about people he sees on his way to grab a bite at the lunch time, about the sun that is shining, about the cabs that are passing by – he lists the things that we are so used to already that we prefer not to notice, but those exact things make New York be New York. I did not come up with the final thesis but I know the general idea I would like to elaborate on.
As to the visual part: that will most likely be a short video capturing moments in the city that O’Hara described in the poem.
