ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in
Contemporary Literature: Mad Men
and the Sixties
Dr. David Lavery
Summer 2015
Frank O’Hara
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of
Poets
“It’s wonderful to have three good friends you think are
geniuses.”—Kenneth Koch
From poetry.org
The New York School of poetry began around 1960 in New York City and
included poets such as John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and
Frank O'Hara. Heavily influenced by surrealism and modernism, the poetry
of the New York School was serious but also ironic, and incorporated an
urban sensibility into much of the work. An excerpt from Ashbery’s poem,
"My Philsophy of Life" demonstrates this attitude:
Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea-call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?
Abstract expressionist art was also a major influence, and the New York
School poets had strong artistic and personal relationships with artists
such as Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning. Both O'Hara and James
Schuyler worked at the Museum of Modern Art, and Guest, Ashbery, and
Schuyler were critics for Art News. O'Hara also took inspiration from
artists, entitling two poems "Joseph Cornell" and "On Seeing Larry Rivers.”
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
From poetry.org
O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter" includes the lines "I am not a
painter, I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am
not.”
A second generation of New York School poets arose during the 1960s
and included Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Joe
Brainard. These poets were also influenced by art and their work contained
much of the same humour and collaborative spirit. Their scene grew up
around downtown New York and was associated with the Poetry Project at
St Mark's Church, a poetry organization started in the mid 1960s.
The New York School continues to influence poets writing today. Recently
published books such as Daniel Kane's All Poets Welcome: The Lower
East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s and David LehmanThe Last-Avant
Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets are important
histories of this poetic movement that still captures readers nearly fifty
years later.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
The New York School of Poets
“In an age of split-level conformism, the poets of the New York School put
their trust in the idea of an artistic vanguard that would sanction their
devotions from the norm. The liberating effect of their writing became
increasingly evident in the passionate, experimental, taboo-breaking early
1960s, when the nation’s youngest president was in office, men discarded
their hats, women started using the Pill, the acceleration in the speed of
social change seemed to double overnight, and America finally left the
nineteenth century behind” (Lehman 1).
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
“Substitute Frank O’Hara for
Apollinaire and Abstract
Expressionism for Cubism, and you
get an eerie fit. The poets of the
New York School were as
heterodox, and belligerent toward
the literary establishment and as
loyal to each other, as their
predecessors had been. The 1950
and early ’60s in New York were
their banquet years.”—David
Lehman (2)
Guillaume
Apollonaire
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
“Witnesses to what Robert Motherwell called the ‘the greatest painting
adventure of our time,’ [the New York School of Poets] strove for the same
excitement in poetry, looking to painters as the agents for artistic
change.”—David Lehman (2)
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
“New York poets, except I suppose the color-blind, are effected most by
the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble. . . . In New York,
the art world is a painters’ world; writers and musicians are in the boat but
they don’t steer.”—James Schuyler (Lehman 2).
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
Jackson Pollack, “Number 1”
The New York School of Poets
Abstract Expressionism
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
Jackson Pollack, “Number 8” (detail)
The New York School of Poets
Abstract Expressionism
Jackson Pollack, “Convergence: 10”
The New York School of Poets
Abstract Expressionism
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
Robert Motherwell, Razor’s Edge
The New York School of Poets
Abstract Expressionism
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
Robert Motherwell, Untitled
The New York School of Poets
Abstract Expressionism
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
DeKooning, Whose Name was Writ in Water
The New York School of Poets
Abstract Expressionism
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
Willem DeKooning, Fire Island
The New York School of Poets
Abstract Expressionism
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
“From Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, they learned that it was
okay for a poem to chronicle the history of its own making—that the mind
of the poet, rather than the world, could be the true subject of the poem
and that it was possible for a poem to be (or to perform) a statement
without making a statement” (Lehman 3).
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
“Like painting, writing was properly understood to be an activity, a presenttense process, and the residue of that activity could not help referring to
itself. All poetry was a product of a collaboration with language. While
mimesis, the imitation of nature, remained a goal of art, the abstract
painters had redefined the concept by enlarging the meaning of nature: ‘I
am nature,’ Jackson Pollock said. This, too, was a liberty the poets could
take.”
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
It came to me that all this time
There had been no real poetry and that it needed to be invented.
--Kenneth Koch, “Days and Nights”
“[The New York School] understood too that a poem no less than a
painting could be ‘a hoard of destructions,’ in Picasso’s phrase” (Lehman
6)
“[M]odern poetry gave the poet the license to be strange.”
--John Ashbery
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
“Unlike the Beats, however, the
poets of the New York School
pursued an aesthetic agenda that
was deliberately apolitical, even
antipolitical” (Lehman 9).
The New York School of Poets
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
“For a long time everybody refuses and then almost without a
pause almost everyone accepts. In the history of the refused in
the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always
startling.”—Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation” (1926)
(Lehman 11)
Leopards break into the temple and drink
the sacrificial chalices dry. This happens
again and again, repeatedly. Finally it can
be counted on beforehand and becomes
part of the ceremony.
--Franz Kafka, Parables
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
O’Hara
Personism: A Manifesto
Frank O'Hara
Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the
poor wealthy man's Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I
just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of
mine that can't be got at one reading is because I was
confused too. Now, come on. I don't believe in god, so I don't
have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel
Lindsay, always have; I don't even like rhythm, assonance, all
that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you
down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around
and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.”
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
Personism: A Manifesto
That's for the writing poems part. As for their reception,
suppose you're in love and somebody's mistreating (mal aimé)
you, you don't say, "Hey, you can't hurt me this way, I care!"
you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and
they always do after a few months. But that's not why you fell
in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to
take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always
produces logic, which is very bad for you.
I'm not saying that I don't have practically the most lofty ideas
of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make?
They're just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I
get lofty enough I've stopped thinking and that's when
refreshment arrives.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
Personism: A Manifesto
But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets
what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what?
For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a
middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much
cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a
damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to
excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience
anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for
them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and
Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the
movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's
just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you
want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to
bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of
course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you're
experiencing is "yearning.”
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
Personism: A Manifesto
Abstraction in poetry, which Allen [Ginsberg] recently
commented on in It Is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in
the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction
(in poetry, not painting) involves personal removal by the poet.
For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the
nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite"
defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The
nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of
abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and
Mallarmé).
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
The New York School of Poets
Personism: A Manifesto
Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody
knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to
this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction
for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to
Wallace Stevens what la poési pure was to Béranger. Personism
has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do
with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea,
one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other
than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without
destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's
feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him
into feeling about the person. That's part of Personism. It was
founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a
day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a
blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
Personism: A Manifesto
While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could
use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so
Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will
undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely
between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the
poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between
two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess
that it may be the death of literature as we know it. While I
have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain
Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it
is only just that poetry finish literature off. For a time people
thought that Artaud was going to accomplish this, but actually,
for all their magnificence, his polemical writings are not more
outside literature than Bear Mountain is outside New York
State. His relation is no more astounding than Dubuffet's to
painting.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
O’Hara
The New York School of Poets
Personism: A Manifesto
What can we expect from Personism? (This is getting good,
isn't it?) Everything, but we won't get it. It is too new, too vital a
movement to promise anything. But it, like Africa, is on the
way. The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand,
and for content on the other, had better watch out.
September 3, 1959
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
John Ashbery (1927-)
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
Ashbery
The New York School of Poets
From a post on poets.org
I'm not an Ashbery fan and don't like his influence on
contemporary poetry. LIke Derrida, he's pompous and
repetitious. No music, no humanity. Logorrehea of flowing,
endless, discursive prose, chopped up into lines. I take this
poem to be about the indeterminancy of art and an aping of
that indeterminancy. If you pick up a thousand-year-old
Chinese poem, often the humanity comes through as if it were
written yesterday. Can you imagine another society picking
this up a few hundred years from now? They're going to have
a good laugh on us.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
Ashbery
The New York School of Poets
From “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”
Perhaps an angel looks like everything
We have forgotten, I mean forgotten
Things that don't seem familiar when
We meet them again, lost beyond telling,
Which were ours once.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
Ashbery
Meaningful Love
What the bad news was
became apparent too late
for us to do anything good about it.
I was offered no urgent dreaming,
didn't need a name or anything.
Everything was taken care of.
In the medium-size city of my awareness
voles are building colossi.
The blue room is over there.
He put out no feelers.
The day was all as one to him.
Some days he never leaves his room
and those are the best days,
by far.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
The New York School of Poets
Ashbery
Meaningful Love
There were morose gardens farther down the slope,
anthills that looked like they belonged there.
The sausages were undercooked,
the wine too cold, the bread molten.
Who said to bring sweaters?
The climate's not that dependable.
The Atlantic crawled slowly to the left
pinning a message on the unbound golden hair of sleeping maidens,
a ruse for next time,
where fire and water are rampant in the streets,
the gate closed—no visitors today
or any evident heartbeat.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
Ashbery
Meaningful Love
I got rid of the book of fairy tales,
pawned my old car, bought a ticket to the funhouse,
found myself back here at six o'clock, pondering "possible side
effects.”
There was no harm in loving then,
no certain good either. But love was loving servants
or bosses. No straight road issuing from it.
Leaves around the door are penciled losses.
Twenty years to fix it.
Asters bloom one way or another.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
James Schuyler (1923-1991)
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
Schuyler
Korean Mums
Beside me in this garden
are huge and daisy-like
(why not? are not
oxeye daisies a chrysanthemum?),
shrubby and thick-stalked,
the leaves pointing up
the stems from which
the flowers burst in
sunbursts. I love
this garden in all its moods,
even under its winter coat
of salt hay, or now,
in October, more than
half gone over: here
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
Schuyler
Korean Mums
a rose, there a clump
of aconite. This morning
one of the dogs killed
a barn owl. Bob saw
it happen, tried to
intervene. The airedale
snapped its neck and left
it lying. Now the bird
lies buried by an apple
tree. Last evening
from the table we saw
the owl, huge in the dusk,
circling the field
on owl-silent wings.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
Schuyler
Korean Mums
The first one ever seen
here: now it's gone,
a dream you just remember.
The dogs are barking. In
the studio music plays
and Bob and Darragh paint.
I sit scribbling in a little
notebook at a garden table,
too hot in a heavy shirt
in the mid-October sun
into which the Korean mums
all face. There is a
dull book with me,
an apple core, cigarettes,
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
Schuyler
Korean Mums
an ashtray. Behind me
the rue I gave Bob
flourishes. Light on leaves,
so much to see, and
all I really see is that
owl, its bulk troubling
the twilight. I'll
soon forget it: what
is there I have not forgot?
Or one day will forget:
this garden, the breeze
in stillness, even
the words, Korean mums.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
Schuyler
Faure's Second Piano Quartet
On a day like this the rain comes
down in fat and random drops among
the ailanthus leaves—"the tree
of Heaven"—the leaves that on moonlit nights shimmer black and bladeshaped at this third-floor window.
And there are bunches of small green
knobs, buds, crowded together. The
rapid music fills in the spaces of
the leaves. And the piano comes in,
like an extra heartbeat, dangerous
and lovely. Slower now, less like
the leaves, more like the rain which
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
Schuyler
The New York School of Poets
Faure's Second Piano Quartet
almost isn't rain, more like thawedout hail. All this beauty in the
mess of this small apartment on
West 20th in Chelsea, New York.
Slowly the notes pour out, slowly,
more slowly still, fat rain falls.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
Frank O’Hara
(1926-1966)
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
Frank O’Hara on Mad Men
“For Those Who Think Young,” 8:46 & 47:00
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
Frank O’Hara on Mad Men
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
Excerpt from Mayakovsky.
"Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again."
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
The New York School of Poets
On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing
the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art
Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.
To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile
and pull the trigger. Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
O’Hara
On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing
the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art
on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract
the robot? they're smoke, billows above
the physical event. They have burned up.
See how free we are! as a nation of persons.
Dear father of our country, so alive
you must have lied incessantly to be
immediate, here are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate's flag, bravely specific
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
The New York School of Poets
On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing
the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art
and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
O’Hara
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
The New York School of Poets
To the Film Industry in Crisis
Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,
nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition
is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,
promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you
are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,
it's you I love!
In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.
And give credit where it's due: not to my starched nurse, who taught me
how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availed
herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church
which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment,
not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you,
glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope,
stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all
your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms! To
Richard Barthelmess as the "tol'able" boy barefoot and in pants,
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
O’Hara
To the Film Industry in Crisis
Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck,
Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car
and smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage
on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet,
Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers' gasping spouses,
the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to prefer
Johnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West in a furry sled,
her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph Valentino of the moon,
its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer,
Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea's yacht,
and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierney
from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx,
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
To the Film Industry in Crisis
Cornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates,
Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls,
Joseph Cotten puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and Dolores del Rio
eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria Swanson reclining,
and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye reclining
and wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and wise, William Powell
in his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor blossoming, yes, to you
and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extras
who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two lines,
my love!
Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delays
and enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover you
as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces
in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at night
but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedent
you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
Why I am Not a Painter
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?”
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
Why I am Not a Painter
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
The Day Lady Died
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 Easthampton
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
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The New York School of Poets
O’Hara
The New York School of Poets
The Day Lady Died
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 Theatre 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
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The Day Frank O’Hara Died, July 25th, 1966
Willem DeKooning, Fire Island
The New York School of Poets
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties
The Day Frank O’Hara Died, July 25th, 1966
The New York School of Poets
in an electric storm
which is what you were
more lives than a cat
dancing you had a feline
grace, poised on the balls
of your feet ready
to dive and
all of it, your poems,
compressed into twenty years.
How you charmed, fumed
blew smoke from your nostrils
like a race horse that
just won the race
steaming, eager to run
only you used words
--James Schuyler, “To Frank O’Hara” (1974)
ENGL 6480/7480 | Studies in Contemporary
Literature: Mad Men and the Sixties