Frank O’Hara, a Millennial

At this blog I frequently quote from the New York School of Poets (which wasn’t a school at all—see Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Fiction). Frank O’Hara was born in 1926 and died July 25, 1966, on Fire Island (NY) from a freakish dune buggy accident. He was a true Millennial.

Just fifty years before the technology.

If O’Hara were alive today he’d be tweeting and Instagramming, and Tumblr-ing and posting all over Facebook. He’d be one for the Snapchat.

Frank O’Hara was a conduit for his friends. He was constantly reaching out to people. It sounds shallow to say he was the life of the party, and truthfully I’ve never read that in print, but he brought people together. He also had his snappish, snippy side where he could cut friends off. He collected people. Bu sending them letters, poems, telegrams. I could easily see him writing for Tin House or Barrelhouse, or a gossip column for AWP. He had a sense of humor and a sardonic wit. A hedonist, maybe. Running headlong into the waves. Schuyler described O’Hara as having a “black ear” from talking on the phone so much. Today Frank would have totally had a cellphone in his hand, keeping up with all his contacts, typing in witty texts, and captions to pics.

Then as now, we’d all be amazed at how much writing he’d be able to accomplish.

Frank O’Hara, by Alex Katz oil on wood cutout

Joe’s Jacket

Entraining to Southampton in the parlor car with Jap and Vincent, I

see life as a penetrable landscape lit from above

like it was in my Barbizonian kiddy days when automobiles

were owned by the same people for years and the Alfa Romeo was

only a rumor under the leaves beside the viaduct and I

pretending to be adult felt the blue within me and light up there

no central figure me, I was some sort of cloud or a gust of wind

at the station a crowd of drunken fishermen on a picnic Kenneth

is hard to find but we find, through all the singing, Kenneth smiling

it is off to Janice’s bluefish and the incessant talk of affection

expressed as excitability and spleen to be recent and strong

and not unbearably right in attitude, full of confidences

now I will say it, thank god, I knew you would

an enormous party mesmerizing comers in the disgathering light

and dancing miniature-endless, like a pivot

I drink to smother my sensitivity for a while so I won’t stare away

I drink to kill the fear of boredom, the mounting panic of it

I drink to reduce my seriousness so a certain spurious charm

can appear and win its flickering little victory over noise

I drink to die a little and increase the contrast of this questionable moment

and then I am going home, purged of everything except anxiety and self-distrust

now I will say it, thank god, I knew you would

and the rain has commenced its delicate lament over the orchards

an enormous window morning and the wind, the beautiful desperation of a tree

fighting off strangulation, and my bed has an ugly calm

I reach to the D. H. Lawrence on the floor and read “The Ship of Death”

I lie back again and begin slowly to drift and then to sink

a somnolent envy of inertia makes me rise naked and go to the window

where the car horn mysteriously starts to honk, no one is there

and Kenneth comes out and stops it in the soft green lightless stare

and we are soon in the Paris of Kenneth’s libretto, I did not drift

away I did not die I am there with Haussmann and the rue de Rivoli

and the spirits of beauty, art and progress, pertinent and mobile

in their worldly way, and musical and strange the sun comes out

returning by car the forceful histories of myself and Vincent loom

like the city hour after hour closer and closer to the future I am here

and the night is heavy through not warm, Joe is still up and we talk

only of the immediate present and its indiscriminately hitched-to past

the feeling of life and incident pouring over the sleeping city

which seems to be bathed in an unobtrusive light which lends things

coherence and an absolute, for just that time as four o’clock goes by

and soon I am rising for the less than average day, I have coffee

I prepare calmly to face almost everything that will come up I am calm

but not as my bed was calm as it softly declined to become a ship

I borrow Joe’s seersucker jacket though he is still asleep I start out

when I last borrowed it I was leaving there is was on my Spanish plaza back

and hid my shoulders from San Marco’s pigeons was jostled on the Kurfurstendamm

and sat opposite Ashes in an enormous leather chair in the Continental

it is all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here on

many occasions as a symbol does with the heart is full and risks no speech

a precaution I loathe as the pheasant loathes the season and is preserved

it will not be need, it will be just what it is and just what happens.