It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille Day, yes
it is 1959, and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in East Hampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
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 go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega, and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatere and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.
« Some rambling thoughts on Don Draper | Main | Earl Campbell: Or football as performance art » Lots of poetry today12 Aug 2008 12:39 pm
Frank O'Hara. Robert Hayden. So, what the hell...I'm coming out as giant poetry fan. In fact, in college I really thought I was going to app for an MFA program after I graduated. We see how that turned out. Anyway here is a Frank O'Hara piece that I just loved when I was in college called the "The Day Lady Day Died":
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Hey Ta-Nehisi:
Question: Why does your blog kick vast amounts of ass and why has it taken a major publication so long to pick you up? This is easily my new favorite blog. The diverse range of topics you cover are great!
I do have one complaint though: I was going through some childhood stuff last night, when I came upon my old Star Wars actions figures. I can no longer pick-up Lando Calrissian without laughing. Damn you!
The beauty of your prose gave you away as a poetry fan long before today. This is easily my new favorite blog, as well, and it's the way you write as well as what you write that makes it for me.
That piece reminds me a little of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetry.
I do have one complaint though: I was going through some childhood stuff last night, when I came upon my old Star Wars actions figures. I can no longer pick-up Lando Calrissian without laughing. Damn you!
Whoops, sorry for the double-post, especially something so inane!
I like Frank O'Hara pretty well...but aren't you violating his copyright (or his family's, since he's dead)?
Just askin'.
Here Where Coltrane Is
by Michael S. Harper
Soul and race
are private dominions,
memories and modal
songs, a tenor blossoming,
which would paint suffering
a clear color but is not in
this Victorian house
without oil in zero degree
weather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind;
it is all a well-knit family:
a love supreme.
Oak leaves pile up on walkway
and steps, catholic as apples
in a special mist of clear white
children who love my children.
I play “Alabama”
on a warped record player
skipping the scratches
on your faces over the fibrous
conical hairs of plastic
under the wooden floors.
Dreaming on a train from New York
to Philly, you hand out six
notes which become an anthem
to our memories of you:
oak, birch, maple,
apple, cocoa, rubber.
For this reason Martin is dead;
for this reason Malcolm is dead;
for this reason Coltrane is dead;
in the eyes of my first son are the browns
of these men and their music.
I'm not sure on the copyright, and I'm not even sure what family he has left, if any. He didn't have kids, and may not have had siblings.
O'Hara is by far my favorite poet, so you are just piling up the points today. As a transplant to New York, and as somebody who can't imagine anything else (like O'Hara), this stanza from Meditations on an Emergency is one of my favorites:
However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't
even enjoy a blade of grass unless i know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and
even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh.
Here is my favorite New York poem, by Denise Duhamel......
Fear on 11th Street and Avenue A, New York City
Now the papers are saying pesticides will kill us
rather than preservatives. I pass the school yard
where the Catholic girls snack. Cheeze Doodles and apples.
No parent today knows what to pack in a lunch box
and the plaid little uniforms
hold each girl in: lines in the weave cross
like directions, blurry decisions.
A supervising nun sinks in her wimple. All the things she can't do,
she thinks, to save them, her face growing smaller.
She dodges their basketball.
Who said the Catholic church has you for life
if it had you when you were five? I remember my prayers at odd times
and these girls already look afraid.
But it's not just the church. It's America.
I fear the children I know will become missing children,
that I will lose everyone I need to some hideous cancer.
I fear automobiles, all kinds of relationships.
I fear that the IRS will find out the deductions I claimed this year
I made up, that an agent will find a crumpled draft of this poem
even if fear edits this line out... I have no privacy,
no protection, yet I am anonymous. I sometimes think
the sidewalk will swallow me up. So I know when the girls
line up to go inside and one screams to her friend
"If you step on a crack, you'll break your mother's back..."
she means it. She feels all that responsibility, that guilt.
There's only one brown girl who doesn't do what she should.
She's dancing by herself to a song on her Walkman.
One of her red knee socks bunches at her ankle and slips into her sneaker.
And the shoulder strap of her jumper has unbuckled so her bib flaps.
Maybe she can save us. I clutch the school yard's chain link fence.
Please, little girl, grow up to be pope or president.
This dude died way too soon by getting run over by a dune buggy. But that's a great way to go out if you're Frank O'Hara.
If you like Frank 'O, you may dig August Kleinzahler:
http://openlettersmonthly.com/issue/may08-kleinzahleresque/
The Fire Island poem is a fake, apparently. Ask Kent Johnson.
Video of Frank O'Hara
http://www.frankohara.org/video/usapoetry.html
Poetry readings on video
http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/archives/video.html
VHS VIDEO CASSETTES from The NET Outtake Series, representing nearly 20 programs made up of out-take film footage drawn from the National Educational Television program USA: Poetry produced by Richard O. Moore of KQED-TV during 1965-66. These are extraordinary black-and-white documents, focusing on single poets typically in their home environment reading and discussing their art. Anne Sexton, Frank O'Hara, John Wieners, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, William Everson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Koch, Ed Sanders, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Richard Wilbur, Denise Levertov, and Louis Zukofsky all have programs in The NET Outtake Series.
Mark lists: "William Everson"
Thanks for the info. I saw Everson (aka Brother Antoninus) give a reading sometime in 1980 or 1981 and I'm glad to see there's video available.
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
(from "Lana Turner has Collapsed!"
O'Hara, of course.
BTW, lead character in "Mad Men," Don Draper, is shown reading O'Hara.
A classic by Grace Paley, "The women let the tide go out."
The women let the tide go out
which will return
which will return
the sand, the salt, the fat drowned babies
The men ran furiously
along the banks of the estuary
screaming
Come back you fucking sea
right now
right now
Sir,
I have recently discovered this fantastic blog, and I really don't have time for another blog in my life right now.
Good news for fans of Frank O'Hara: he is one of a limited number of poets who is available in CD in the excellent Voice of the Poet series, so you can actually put him on your iPod.
ta-nehisi,
not only do you have a fantastic blog, but i think this must be the most civilized comment board in the history of the internet. ya' done good!