9 February

Frank O’Hara sees a headline that Lana Turner has ‘collapsed’ and immediately writes a poem

1962 The whole poem reads:

Lana Turner has collapsed!

I was trotting along and suddenly

it started raining and snowing

and you said it was hailing

but hailing hits you on the head

hard so it was really snowing and

raining and I was in such a hurry

to meet you but the traffic

was acting exactly like the sky

and suddenly I see a headline

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

there is no snow in Hollywood

there is no rain in California

I have been to lots of parties

and acted perfectly disgraceful

but I never actually collapsed

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

This is one of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, so called because they evoke chance encounters while the poet is on his lunch break from his job at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. To add to the sense of casualness, the poem does away with punctuation marks (apart from the exclamation points after ‘collapsed’), to good comic effect in the last line, especially. The lines often run on (as in ‘hits you on the head / hard’) and lack the usual capital letters at their start.

Characters appear without the formality of an introduction (who is ‘you’?), and the poem’s plot seems to be governed by the quotidian – the weather, newspaper headlines and random thoughts – to all of which the aimless act of ‘trotting along’ keeps the narrative consciousness open.

Unkind critics have referred to the Lunch Poems as O’Hara’s ‘I-do-this-I-do-that’ poems, but not everything is what it seems. This one was actually written on the Staten Island ferry, which means that although the poem may have been composed in a hurry (the ferry takes less than half an hour to cross between Manhattan and Richmond), its apparently immediate elements, like the traffic, meeting ‘you’, arguing about the weather, or even seeing a headline about Lana Turner, aren’t really as ‘there’ as they seem.

In other words, there’s nothing self-revelatory about the poem. O’Hara hated the confessional style, as exemplified in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) and in the work of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Referring to Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’, he told Edward Lucie-Smith: ‘I don’t think that anyone has to get themselves to go and watch lovers in a parking lot necking in order to write a poem, and I don’t see why it’s admirable to feel guilty about it. They should feel guilty.’1

By contrast to ‘Skunk Hour’, ‘Lana Turner’ is a poem of surfaces. The words don’t refer to deep psychological states so much as play against or interrogate each other, so that, for example, the word ‘collapsed’ registers not anything that happened to Lana Turner (fainted? fell into a drunken stupor? died of a heart attack?) but the clichéd use of the word in newspaper headlines.

1 ‘Edward Lucie-Smith: An Interview with Frank O’Hara’, in Frank O’Hara (ed. Donald Allen), Standing Still and Walking in New York, San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1983, p. 13.