BY DORIANNE LAUX
This summer I visited the Museum of the City of New York, where I strolled past Gus Powell’s photography collection “Manhattan Noon.” Inspired by poet Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, the photographs are tableaus of city life taken during Powell’s lunch hour: a woman downing half a sandwich, workers lying on a plate-glass awning, a couple kissing amidst traffic. Hung from the walls every few feet were reprints of O’Hara’s poems, such as “The Day Lady Died,” “A Step Away From Them” and “Music.” As a writer, I was encouraged by what Powell had to say about his creative process.
“Some days I had a few hours and other days I had 15 minutes … but each day I wanted to make something. This meant that my sensitivity was turned up. … This directly led me to try and make pictures that were really of nothing at all. A ‘light event’ or ‘color event’ might be all that the sidewalk would offer that day and it would have to be enough.”
“Don’t wait. If you want to be a writer, you have to write. All the time. Day in, day out. It’s as simple as that. Tear a sheet from O’Hara’s book and use your lunch hour to write a poem every day for a week, a month or a year. Maybe it’s 15 minutes in the morning before you even get out of bed, or maybe it’s an hour in the afternoon. Find a time that works for you and develop a practice.”
The same was true for O’Hara, who went out every day on his lunch break to capture something about New York in 30 minutes. When I begin to feel sorry for myself and think I don’t have enough time to write or that I must write only about big issues, I call on O’Hara to help me remember to “turn my sensitivity up,” to take it on the fly, to stay ready for anything.
O’Hara wrote this famous poem after seeing a headline in the newspaper:
“Poem”
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 most famous poems. People delight in its simplicity and seeming effortlessness, it’s wry humor and outright sentiment. You can imagine it being written in one sweep of the pen, in the moment, of the moment. Here’s his famous elegy to blues singer Billie Holiday:
“The Day Lady Died”
It is 12: 20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4: 19 in Easthampton
at 7: 15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what
the poets
in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once
heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in
her life
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