Personal anthology: Frank O’Hara
Because I’ve got a bit of writer’s block today, here’s another poem from the commonplace book. Some years ago, a friend who shared my fondness for Frank O’Hara’s poems pointed this one out to me. "It’s really kind of a perfect poem, don’t you think?" she said, and I read it and had to agree.
Interior (With Jane)
The eagerness of objects to
be what we are afraid to docannot help but move us Is
this willingness to be a motivein us what we reject? The
really stupid things, I meana can of coffee, a 35¢ ear
ring, a handful of hair, whatdo these things do to us? We
come into the room, the windowsare empty, the sun is weak
and slippery on the ice And asob comes, simply because it is
coldest of the things we know
It really is.
Tho if we’re going to talk about the New York School this reader confesses a fondness more for Kenneth Koch than for Frank O’Hara.
But poems like this make me start to reconsider.
As a Philadelphian, you’ll appreciate this. I teach several O’Hara poems to my U.Arts students each Fall. “The Day Lady Died,” “Why I Am Not A Painter” and “A Step Away From Them” are constants, but then I rotate new ones each time. I then give them an odd assignment. Instead of writing on O’Hara, their assignment is to describe a hypothetical design for a work of art — and it can be any art form — based on their reading of O’Hara. In addition to the description, they also have to crtically explain the interpretive rationale behind their decisions. Knocks ’em dead every time.
What a fantastic assignment. He wrote so many poems about works of art, I imagine it would be very satisfying to return the favor.
Supposedly, the Art Museum has a portrait of O’Hara by Alice Neel. I haven’t seen it, though — I only know of its existence because they had a postcard of it in the shop.