September 2019: Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara
1991, Carcanet Press, 233 pages. Written in English, read in English.
I have not made my peace with poetry yet. There are some poets that, individually, strike me as better than others: Auden, Murdoch, some Israeli poets. But the genre in itself is problematic to me, maybe because I’m used to reading prose, and poems are a medium that should be savoured by reading slowly, which I usually don’t do.
David Bowie apparently loved poetry, or at least, he loved this particular poet, Frank O’Hara, who I have not heard about until now, enough to put him in his list of favourite books. O’Hara was a remnant of the beat generation of poets, a representative from the New York side of the equation where the more famous names were residents of the other coast.
O’Hara lived a short life, dying from complications of injuries from a car crash at only 40, but during that time he has made enough of an impact to warrant a book of selected poems, ordered chronologically. Some of these are shorter and more structured, some are rambles that are more in the style of other beat poets. O’Hara has developed a unique formatting style in which he had abruptly ended a line in the middle, and continued it at the end of the next line, rendering it a double meaning — both that gleaned by reading the whole line, and by reading the indented line as a separate sentiment.
As this is a chronological display of O’Hara’s work, it picks up in quality, in my opinion, closer to the middle of the book. Poems are more refined and ideas are better expressed. But closer to the end of the book — perhaps the end of his life — the poems become long and meandering, corresponding more with O’Hara’s friends and acquaintances and less with his potential audience.
And that was the feeling I’ve had for most of the reading experience — O’Hara peppers his poems with names of people that are only known to him and his circle of acquaintances, references to obscure pieces of literature and art, and frequent hops between various languages — and it seems that his main effort is trying to impress his colleagues and friends, and less that he is trying to make any kind of impact on the world with his poetry.
The October 2019 selection for the David Bowie Book Club will be A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
