When I taught poetry, I always arrived with pencils, pieces of paper, and a printed out poem by Frank O’Hara. If my students, middle schoolers forced to cram into libraries and over-filled classrooms, had heard of any poets before, O’Hara wasn’t one of them. With his short declarations and excited exclamations, he was a far cry from Robert Frost, Shel Silverstein, or anyone else past teachers had forced upon them.
Here, finally, was a poet without the careful composition that made poetry feel stuffy, like some hidden language adults pretended to understand. I watched their faces screw up with little laughs reading about Lana Turner’s fainting spell—a room full of twelve-year-olds giggling about 1950s movie gossip and an actress they had never heard of before. It was like an inside joke.
Anyone familiar with O’Hara’s work will recognize this feeling of camaraderie—there’s an immediacy to his work, an off-the-cuff wit that makes you, almost immediately, co-conspirators. In his artistic manifesto (which he wrote, in typical O’Hara fashion, in a single hour while Donald Allen was on his way to pick it up), he described writing a poem for a single person: as if he just as easily could have picked up a phone instead of a pen. It was unlike anything my students had read before.
How, amidst the poetic structure and planning they were used to, could it not change their idea of what poetry was? In the 100 years since his birth, and 60 since his death, generations of writers have found inspiration in his casual profundity. In many ways, he never stopped being the king of the New York art scene.
I asked them to be like Frank O’Hara, noticing colors and sounds and people we encountered. O’Hara is most famous for his collection Lunch Poems, written in his lunch break as a receptionist from the Museum of Modern Art—proving even future curators/art critics must begin at the front desk. He’s often been called a painter’s poet, and, rejected by the conventional literary scene, found himself faster friends with the Abstract Expressionists than the literary world.
Lunch Poems—reviewed by Ted Berrigan, as, emphatically “a great book!” and one of the “most important documents in contemporary poetry”—includes some of his most famous works, including “The Day Lady Died,” “Ave Maria,” and “A Step Away From Them.” This last one was my usual classroom pick. Selecting an eager student to read it aloud, a school’s worth of seventh graders would follow along on their printouts, as they began: It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets They protect them from falling bricks, I guess.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
