Frank O'Hara and Urban Pastoral

You can still find Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, published in 1964, in an edition so compact it will fit into the back pocket of your jeans. The publisher's blurb gives this caricature of the New York city poet:

Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn into a darkened warehouse or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, co-existence and depth, while never forgetting to eat Lunch his favourite meal . . ..¹

Wryly faux naïf, this courts noise while soliciting the cliché of quiet rumination. Lunch Poems are not named poems but 'ruminations', made on the street, 'limned', a parodically vintage word, in shadowy urban arcades where the poet finds burning stores of inspiration - while never forgetting to eat . . . Lunch. Lunch: the word is like a hiccup in a glassy urban Arcady where even the brand of typewriter holds the word 'Olive'. The poems are Lunch Poems, the fiction that they are written in a lunch hour is what we are asked to consume. One Lunch Poem, dated 1959, is entitled 'Song':

Song

Is it dirtydoes it look dirtythat's what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirtythat's what you think of in the cityyou don't refuse to breathe do you

someone comes along with a very bad characterhe seems attractive. is he really. yes. veryhe's attractive as his character is bad. it is. yes

that's what you think of in the cityrun your finger along your no-moss mindthat's not a thought that's soot

and you take a lot of dirt off someoneis the character bad. no. it improves constantlyyou don't refuse to breathe do you²

The move from 'SONG' to 'Is it dirty', prompts the question: is 'it' a dirty song, or something else? Is 'SONG' sung in a dirty style? Dirty, as the Oxford English Dictionary says, is a style of jazz singing; from 1955: 'His plaintive tone and style, sometimes called "dirty" and often employing "growl" effects'. The poem is a ditty about dirt, from grime to smut, from the material to the moral - maybe, seeming to question its subject, the absence of question marks makes it hard to know if these lines are to be voiced as questions, and whether they are to be imagined as a duet growled between persons, or as a tune stealthily persisting within someone: 'is he really. yes. very'. 'SONG' spins around the word 'it', a secret whispered in full view, and, as the little syllable recurs in 'city', the sound becomes a strangely burnished void: something peculiar, and personal (someone's own dirty, singular thought), and something vast and shared (all the dirt of a city), so that the intimately singular 'you' belongs to, becomes, as it can, 'everyone'. Taking as it does the throwaway as a subject, 'SONG' might risk seeming to be throwaway itself. But what things seem and what things are is part of the poem's concern. The repetitions nudge you into thinking twice about what comes back, as you might, say, in a subway commute, encounter the peculiar contours of singularity in exactly what seems most repetitious. 'Song' makes an urban jingle out of 'dirty' 'city' across the line-endings, coaxing us into seeing that 'refuse' (to reject, or spurn) and 'refuse' (waste, dirt) look the same on the page, as they might on the street, as perhaps to refuse an encounter might be some kind of waste.

Cutting between the singular and the vast, O'Hara's 'SONG' plays up to ways that the lyric and the urban might seem at once electrifyingly mismatched and caught in a state of mutual longing. His poems traffic in...