The re-vamped MoMA has a room dedicated to the gay poet Frank O’Hara, who once worked at the admissions desk, selling postcards.
O’Hara would write on his lunch break. He particularly liked lunch, as a daily event, and in fact wrote a book called “Lunch Poems.”
A younger gay poet--Mark Doty--has commented on O’Hara’s urbane “and sometimes genuinely celebratory” tone, and that tone is on display in lines that MoMA has quoted on a prominent wall:
oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
It’s not clear to me if O’Hara was addressing his longtime partner, the dancer Vincent Warren, but that’s at least a nice thing to imagine.
O’Hara was dead at forty--having been hit by a jeep on Fire Island.
What I like in his artful lines is the parallel structure: simple verb plus direct object. “Drink too much coffee.” “Smoke too many cigarettes.” “Love you so much.” There’s also so much feeling in the “oh god”--and we’re maybe not used to seeing that kind of chatty declaration in poetry.
It was a surprise and a treat to see these lines at MoMA yesterday. I’m glad my family made the trip.
O’Hara would write on his lunch break. He particularly liked lunch, as a daily event, and in fact wrote a book called “Lunch Poems.”
A younger gay poet--Mark Doty--has commented on O’Hara’s urbane “and sometimes genuinely celebratory” tone, and that tone is on display in lines that MoMA has quoted on a prominent wall:
oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
It’s not clear to me if O’Hara was addressing his longtime partner, the dancer Vincent Warren, but that’s at least a nice thing to imagine.
O’Hara was dead at forty--having been hit by a jeep on Fire Island.
What I like in his artful lines is the parallel structure: simple verb plus direct object. “Drink too much coffee.” “Smoke too many cigarettes.” “Love you so much.” There’s also so much feeling in the “oh god”--and we’re maybe not used to seeing that kind of chatty declaration in poetry.
It was a surprise and a treat to see these lines at MoMA yesterday. I’m glad my family made the trip.
As a secret snowflake gift last year, I typed up Lines for the Fortune Cookies — and snipped them up like real fortune cookie fortunes and made a paper fortune cookie pocket for them and stamped the backs, so that if one arranged them in number order, they made the poem.
ReplyDeleteBut my secret snowflake recipient never noticed the numbers ...and didn't realize it was a poem. ....so it just seemed like their secret snowflake was secretly in weird-weird-love with them.
I love everything about this story and would have loved to be the recipient. You must go see the Frank O’Hara room at MoMA. Very “Mad Men.” It has your name all over it. And one other thing about the Frank O’Hara poem that I didn’t mention; I like the sense that it celebrates messiness and excess and human error. “Too much coffee.” “Too many cigarettes.” I wish I could have met that guy.
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