Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets

(On Preparing for a Tribute Reading) A Few Thoughts on O’Hara’s “Personal Poem”

197 (On Preparing for a Tribute Reading) A Few Thoughts on O’Hara’s “Personal Poem” Ralph Angel This chapter was originally delivered as a lecture at Vermont College of Fine Arts, January 2000. 1 I’d been on the phone one morning, one day back in September, I think. A pleasant young man from a start-up magazine in San Francisco called at the arranged time to interview me. He asked smart questions. He was clearly well read. He cared about poetry, and he cared about language and its gazillion possibilities. But near the end of a perfectly amicable, even sweet, chat, he grew impatient with me. I got testy. I’d let him down. He wanted to know about my process. I said, “I don’t have one.” He recalled things we’d already talked about and concluded that I was mistaken. “You must have a process,” he said. “There’s no such thing as process,” I replied. He paused and he sighed, and he paused again. And I paused, and then I said, “Listen, if there’s such a thing as process, and if I have one, I don’t know what it is. And if I knew what it was, I don’t think it would be very wise to tell you about it.” So, I went shopping—I live in L.A.—for groceries. Pears were in season; well, Bartlett pears were in season. I mailed a package to my sister from the post office and bought some stamps. I walked to the neighborhood public library. I still love public libraries. I paged through some magazines, the New Yorker, Harper’s, Home and Garden. I checked out The Disappearance, anepistolarymemoirbyGenevièveJurgensenconcerningthesimultaneous, freak deaths of her two very young daughters. That same afternoon, I was down in my study listening to Gershwin and wrote a postcard to a friend in Denmark. Then the phone rang. It was someone from a local arts center inviting me to participate in a tribute )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 ralph angel 198 reading for Frank O’Hara with three other poets. I got very excited. As requested, I rattled off the top of my head a half dozen or so poems that I said I’d love to read. Then I sat back down at my desk and signed the postcard I’d just written. The music had just stopped; everything was quiet. On a legal pad I wrote: Now you are crossing a wide street at night anxious in the traffic and rushing to get to the bakery before closing. That was all, maybe the beginning of something—I don’t know. I wrote it down because I could hear it. It’s all I could hear. Then I thought about O’Hara. I went to the bookshelf and picked out the Collected Poems and read for the first time in a long time the first poem I had mentioned on the phone. It’s titled “Personal Poem.” Now when I walk around at lunchtime I have only two charms in my pocket an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case when I was in Madrid the others never brought me too much luck though they did help keep me in New York against coercion but now I’m happy for a time and interested I walk through the luminous humidity passing the House of Seagram with its wet and its loungers and the construction to the left that closed the sidewalk if I ever get to be a construction worker I’d like to have a silver hat please and get to Moriarty’s where I wait for LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and shaker the last five years my batting average is .016 that’s that, and LeRoi comes in and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12 times last night outside birdland by a cop a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible disease but we don’t give her one we )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 (on preparing for a tribute reading) 199 don’t like terrible diseases, then we go eat some fish and some ale it’s cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like Henry James so much we like Herman Melville we don’t...