flotsam // caroline crew

Tag Archives: Frank O’Hara


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there is 62% chance of forest in the future.

Well, there is in my fairly immediate future, because the state of Massachusetts in 62% covered in forest and I’ll be living there in just over 3 months. After the forever and maelstrom of MFA apps, its taken me a long while to want to write anything about it in long-form.

Don’t get me wrong, I could not be more psyched to go to UMass (Amherst). A heavy, heavy majority of my favourite poets came out of that program. And James Tate. And Dara Wier. I mean come on:


I’ve known for a while now. Almost three months since the offer, and almost a month since I decided absolutely. I got a job teaching there. I need to find some knowledge to pass on.

There are other important things I will need to find, too. Like, a home and probably a driver’s licence, and some people to hug. These things I am looking forward to. I want a home. I know that everyone does, but I want a home with an expiration date longer than a year. I want to make some kind of life for a while.

Among other things, I am nervous about finding poems again. I’ve been back in academia for a while and it is quite a contagious disease that debilitates time to write creatively. And, when the poems do make time for me / I for them, they seem to be backwards looking. All I can write about is the last earthquake that happened to me (in a good way). So I am hoping, with this anthology that James Tadd Adcox is putting together to finally write the final poem about that. It may involve a little chanting. Definitely light (I have been following etymology), and possibly angels. I’ll let you know when I know.

Oh! Speaking of always writing backwards. Just this week I had two poems in the latest issue of H_NGM_N, right here. These mean a lot to me. First of all, because Nate Pritts (editor of H_NGM_N and wonderful poet) is a such a kind soul and one of the most amazing poets writing at the moment. Secondly, because the two of them straddle either side of my leaving Atlanta, and it is just weird/ interesting seeing them together.

Of course, part of the slowness in crisis/ excitement about Amherst might be that it is going back across the Atlantic but in a very different way and to a very different place. I have peace with that, I want another new life. But I can’t imagine the real distance being collapsed– the distance that means you don’t speak on the phone, you can’t spontaneously visit someone you used to know. The people I put in a box marked ‘Extreme Fondness, But Won’t See Again’ will be on the other end of a phone, or a car ride. And that is very strange. I suppose my head still looks backwards so I can’t expect much more from poems.

Recently, it was Poem In Your Pocket Day. There were lots of quite terrible jokes about it. I carried this in my pocket, as I do many days, because I like lyric that breaks down address and lets me in. I’d I feel forgiven for not looking entirely forward, yet.

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when were were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days


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dear Frank O’Hara

Mr. O’Hara would have turned 85 today if it wasn’t for that dune buggy accident.
He’s still my most consistently favourite American poet.
I wondered if he’d gotten old whether his poems would have slowed down. That pace pace pace is a reason why I love him.
And pure joy. Simply joy at the world that spills into the text.
I am glad O’Hara was a poet not a painter.

But I am sad that I was not alive when you were alive, because even though I hate coke, I would’ve like to have a coke with you.

Here is a poem of his that I carry around with me:



TODAY

                


   Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!


   You really are beautiful! Pearls,


   harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all


   the stuff they’ve always talked about


                       


   still makes a poem a surprise!


   These things are with us every day


   even on beachheads and biers. They


   do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.

					
		
	



					



	

				

			
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who are you talking to here? : epigrams

	


	

					


First of all I constantly mix up epigrams and epitaphs. I have various ‘tricks’ to keep the difference in my mind, but my young young brain still likes to think epiGRAm, like GRAve. But anyway, epigrams (I just wiki-ed to make sure I got it correct) have been on my mind a lot recently. I will give you specific reasons another time. THE POINT IS I’ve questioned how these brief quotes placed like a cherry on top of a collection function.


Or, how should it function?


Without interrogation, I assumed that the epigram a poet chooses is one of those lines they cull to memory. I am a terror for doing that, I have lines of poems that I have carried around for so long that they exist entirely out of their original context in my mind. Some examples:


‘restraint so passionate / implies possession’ — Louise Gluck, Palais des Artes


‘As for me, I am a watercolor. / I wash off’ — Anne Sexton, For My Lover, Returning to his Wife


‘I’m no biologist / But I know what I like / and I know how to follow it home’ — Heather Christle, Today I Saw A Plant


‘and in a sense we’re all winning / we’re alive’ — Frank O’Hara, Steps (actually I’ve culled most of this poem)


The with culling certain lines is that come to have their own significance in your mind, they are no longer tempered or illuminated by the context of the poem. As an epigram, such lines are more a personal talisman of the poet. In this way, the epigram is less of a performative and not indicative of any kind of dialogue between the epigram and the text.


To perform rather than lay on the front page as an amulet, doesn’t the epigram have meaning in itself, and in regard to the following poems, as well as somehow stimulate a path back to its original context, this other poem and for that text to have meaning as a larger epigram?


The epigram is not an icon, it is the compact of a conversation.


Take, for example, the epigram for Ada Limon‘s Sharks in the Rivers:


What matters is this: void. The world alone. The river’s mouth.


It is a line from one of the poem’s in Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York/ Poeta en Nueva York. The whole poem could intertwine with Limon’s sequence, ‘Sharks in the Rivers’ and the following shape-shifting leitmotif of water within the collection. Inherent in both (Lorca’s poem and Limon’s collection) is the an occupation with the liminal space, of the edge of things, more subtle that the Romantic standing at the Abyss.


What this poor meditation comes back to is the question of how to choose an epigram. To say outright in some keywords of a culled line ‘this is how I felt writing’ or ‘this is how I want you to feel when you read’, or to create a dialogue with another piece of work, giving the reader paths if they would like to go off in search.


I’ll let you know how it goes.

					
		
	



					



	

				

			
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Because I’m not totally heartless: [the Valentines poem]

	


	

					
So, this is pretty much the love poem I return to over and over again.


Happy valentines, dearests.


Steps by Frank O’Hara


How funny you are today New York

like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime

and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left


here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days

(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still

accepts me foolish and free

all I want is a room up there

and you in it

and even the traffic halt so thick is a way

for people to rub up against each other

and when their surgical appliances lock

they stay together

for the rest of the day (what a day)

I go by to check a slide and I say

that painting’s not so blue


where’s Lana Turner

she’s out eating

and Garbo’s backstage at the Met

everyone’s taking their coat off

so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers

and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes

in little bags

who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y

why not

the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won

and in a sense we’re all winning

we’re alive


the apartment was vacated by a gay couple

who moved to the country for fun

they moved a day too soon

even the stabbings are helping the population explosion

though in the wrong country

and all those liars have left the UN

the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest

not that we need liquor (we just like it)


and the little box is out on the sidewalk

next to the delicatessen

so the old man can sit on it and drink beer

and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day

while the sun is still shining


oh god it’s wonderful

to get out of bed

and drink too much coffee

and smoke too many cigarettes

and love you so much


i


i


and this is a love poem that is quite new to me, I haven’t carried it with me for very long, but it is my tip-top almost romantic poem for right now:


This Practice by Ada Limon (via The Scrambler)


They say the first thing that goes

is the short-term memory. You forget

your keys, you forget your address,

you forget the name of the president.

I like to think it’s just a matter of practice—

we’ve had more time to practice the memory

of our favorite light, our brother’s face, the

creek that runs down the center of our town.

I want to practice. Like the Russian soldier

who had to make up a word to say how

hard he would fight, said he would fight

“fiercefully,” that’s how I will remember you,

that’s how I will practice—“fiercefully.”


 


 


 


 

					
		
	



					



	

				

			
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Why.

	


	

					
This is a shit post, sorry.


But I’ve been on an utter O’Hara binge recently. And this is running and running and running off my tongue:


As Planned — Frank O’Hara


After the first glass of vodka

you can accept just about anything

of life even your own mysteriousness

you think it is nice that a box

of matches is purple and brown and is called

La Petite and comes from Sweden

for they are words that you know and that

is all you know words not their feelings

or what they mean and you write because

you know them not because you understand them

because you don’t you are stupid and lazy

and will never be great but you do

what you know because what else is there?

					
		
	



		
			
	
	



	




	


	







	

	


	

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