Frank O’Hara’s mock-manifesto “Personism” taught me that a poem doesn’t have to have a big-bang at the end where I’m going to change your life with my brilliance. A poem can simply be a message to a friend full of personal references. People can figure-it-out or not.
This idea gave my writing new freedom—blast away and ignore the old rules of the self-contained machine.
O'Hara's poem "At the Old Place" begins:
Joe is restless and so am I, so restless,
Button’s buddy lips frame “L G T TH O P?”
across the bar. “Yes!” I cry, for dancing’s
my soul delight. (Feet! feet!) “Come on!”
In Joe LeSueur’s Some Digressions on Poems by Frank O’Hara: A Memoir, he tells us that “L G T TH O P” stood for “Let’s go to the Old Place,” another gay club. After reading the LeSueur key, I kept rereading the poem thinking—I suppose an excellent reader of poetry could’ve figured-out that “L G T TH O P” was a lipped communication across a loud bar to get out of here—but I also thought I would have never gotten it. I’m grateful LeSueur showed me a way in.
For my poetry to move forward using O’Hara’s lessons, I’ve included notes to save readers from having to search for references that might be difficult to find. (Is anything difficult to find anymore with the Internet?)
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Before stumbling onto LeSueur’s book—decades before—I’d been briefly exposed to O’Hara’s poetry studying English at Michigan State University in 1979. I was told about the romantic poet who had been silly enough to fall asleep on a beach at night and had his head run over by a dune buggy. (Frank’s actual death was nothing like that.)
I remember looking at Lunch Poems and not getting it.
No one mentioned to me that Frank was gay.
With LeSueur’s brilliant book, O’Hara’s poetry became accessible for the first time. I became insatiable for information about Frank’s life. I read every book of theory, his other writings, memoirs. And I wanted to meet his friends.
I found Vincent Warren—Frank’s last boyfriend—who left New York shortly before Frank’s death in 1966 to become the principal dancer of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal for 15 years. When I sent him an email he had retired from dancing and had become the Ballet’s archivist. He sent me a wonderful email of remembrances.
I searched for Bill Berkson. After a few nervous months of trying to craft a letter that didn’t sound insane, I finally put one in the mail asking if we could meet in San Francisco. Bill kindly agreed.
I left LA at 6 a.m. and drove to the French restaurant Bill selected—we met at 2 p.m. My case of nerves continued: “This is kind of odd,” I said, “when you meet someone new you usually start with pleasantries, but we only have two hours.” I had 9 pages of written questions. In a kind and friendly voice, smiling, he said, “Go ahead with your questions.”
Meeting Bill Berkson on a perfect summer day in San Francisco in 2012 was one of the great highlights of my life. Frank was known for holding nothing back—speaking his mind at all times—sometimes cruelly. But his friends who shared so many memories of their time with him were rarely so direct in their published accounts. I had many questions about Frank’s homosexuality, private relationships, and how these parts of his biography may have shaped his art. Bill spoke in such an open, honest, and direct way, I immediately knew why he was a friend of Frank’s. I could understand why Frank cared so much about Bill. “It was so long ago,” Bill said at one point. “You know, for years I could impersonate Frank, the distinctive way he talked.” Bill gave me an immediate sense of their take-no-prisoners, serious discussions of art, tempered, as so many of O’Hara’s poems are, with a wicked, campy sense of humor.
I think what moves me most about Frank’s biography is that he lived “out” and was unapologetic about being homosexual before Stonewall—before “gay—“ before the Gay Rights Movement. He was often flamboyant—what we might now call “fem.” That was particularly brave because such “out” behavior in the 1950s and ‘60s brought with it real safety risks, from getting beat-up to losing apartments and jobs. As I was learning about O’Hara’s insistence to live on his own terms, it sent me reeling back to my first inklings of being gay at age 11—in a Michigan neighborhood in the early ‘70s that had no out gay people—where cock-suckers needed to be beat-up or sent to asylums for shock treatments. If only those living open gay lives in New York had told us in Drayton Plains, Michigan about it. Frank had—in his brilliant poems—but they had not made it to me in suburban Detroit.
My After Lunch title is certainly a play on, and reference to, O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. How does one continue after Lunch? After O’Hara? How do we move forward with our poetry respecting what he taught us—wear those tight pants that make our asses look good so everyone will love us—how to be out, unapologetic, and get it in the art?
I’ve attempted a few triple riffs. O’Hara’s “True Account” poem riffs off of Mayakovsky’s “An Extraordinary Adventure Which Happened To Me, Vladimir Mayakovsky, One Summer In The Country.” This type of “true account” poem is actually quite self-aggrandizing as the sun tells you you’re a pretty swell poet. After several failed attempts I decided to split the difference between two poems, one talking to Marlon Brando, the other listening to the sun at Sanamluang Café in North Hollywood.
Another triple riff comes as I learned how O’Hara’s “For Poulenc” references Apollionaire’s “La Pont Mirabeau.” I’m hoping that the title poem of this book carries the tradition forward.
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“For Poulenc” documents a walk O’Hara took on his first day in Paris. As part of my O’Hara immersion I called my friend from our Michigan State days, Mark Rabinowitz, who now lives in Zurich. I showed him the poem, asked him to get out a map and draw the walk. (I also invited myself to visit Mark and have him take me to Paris—he generously agreed.)
My first entry into Paris began at St. Germain; we stopped on the Pont Mirabeau (where a man was reading a book of Apollinaire poems); and we ended in rue Pergolèse (with the tobacco and the nuns). That boy could walk—the route was nearly 9 miles—a perfect way to enter Paris for the first time. As I stood on that bridge—where Apollinaire and O’Hara stood—our past loves flowing away down the Seine—I wanted to have dinner and then go for a walk with O’Hara. That is the setting for these poems.
The chance that a time machine will be invented in my lifetime seems about zero; the chance that I’ll get to meet Frank (and Lennon and Harrison) in an afterlife seems about zero; fortunately we have this time machine and afterlife called poetry.
—Craig Cotter, Pasadena, California 2014