Customer Reviews

Lunch Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

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The perfect introduction to the poetry of O'Hara, "Lunch Poems" is a celebration of life in New York City with art, poetry, music, friends, and of course, the movies. This book contains 'Ave Maria' with the marvelous opening lines:

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images...

I wish I could remember what generous soul suggested that I read this little book of poems in college, but my expression of gratitude remains unfulfilled. From "Lunch Poems" I tackled the collected poems and never looked back, eventually writing my senior year thesis on O'Hara and film. This little volume, however, retains a special place in my book collection since it was my first O'Hara and my first poetry book. My copy is worn from many trips on trains and airplanes - the perfect antidote to the mind-numbing experience we call travel. To paraphrase the last line of 'A Step Away From Them':

My heart is in my pocket, it is Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara.

I'm only writing the obvious here because I couldn't believe people were giving this book only four stars when they give all kinds of mediocre books five. This book contains the best poem of mid-20th century America--"The Day Lady Died"--and is a quintessential example of New York School poetics. Terrific, fun, funny, exciting, moving poetry.

The best collection of poetry written after World War II that I am aware of, "Lunch Poems" brings together the high culture and low culture. O'Hara was known for hanging out with the '50s elite of celebrity and progresive painters, musicians, and actors. Yet he also had an affinity for walking the streets of New York alone at lunchtime or evening, befriending vagrants, observing day to day work and the diversity of metropolitan life. His poems are witty, profound, insightful, original, inspiring, and always unsettling the reader with his unusual observations about life. O'Hara is incredibly literate and knows his poetic heritage, but through "Lunch Poems" he remains intenseley aware of his present and the importance of what goes on around him. Between musings on Charles Baudelaire, Billie Holiday, Arthur Rimbaud, and Miles Davis, one gets the sense of a rootless, absorbing man in love with New York City, art, poetry, daily life, and transcendent experience.

Hello my literate friends.

I want to tell you something. This is a book of poems and I should not be writing a review for it. It is famous everywhere except here, and we are here. But I will tell you what you should know to buy this book. That is my job. Now that we have that clear.

These poems are beautiful and good. They are also talky, which is a word my friend Mark Halliday uses, which means that they might sometimes seem close to prose. They are called Lunch Poems because that is the idea, poems that you might compose on your lunch break, walking around New York with some change in your pocket, if you are Frank O'Hara. They seem silly sometimes, and they are, but they are not meaningless: they convey a voice which is suitable and believable and honest.

I think you will like this book.

I will tell you a secret: in my copy of this book, City Lights has increased (somehow) the font size, or the kerning or whatever, so that some lines run-over onto the next. In the original version this did not happen. This is a minor detail that I want to tell you about because you deserve to know. City Lights if you are reading this: hello, and, please fix it.

Thank you.

Frank O'Hara's _Lunch Poems_ contains a number of greats including the famous poem, "The Day Lady Died." Each verse is infused with spirit and life and peppered with O'Hara's keen sense of urban observation.

What I especially like about this particular edition is its diminuitive size -- great to sneak into any bookbag or briefcase for a quick dose of O'Hara on the morning train ride.

Frank O'Hara's reputation seems caught in a holding period, an awkward stage preliminary to his work becoming universal and timeless.

Consider, for example, the final scene in the opening episode of the second season of "Mad Men," the cable TV series set in the world of advertising as practiced in New York in the early 1960s. We see the show's protagonist, Don Draper, picking up a slim volume of O'Hara's poems ("Meditations in an Emergency," 1957). He recites the final lines from "Mayakovsky." There is an ambivalence to the scene. Was the O'Hara poem chosen for its intrinsic merit, or was the O'Hara name used as an easy marker for the zeitgeist (the same way the show's producers highlight the period-specific cut of Draper's suit and hair and attitudes)? With friends like these, when will O'Hara escape his confinement to the mannerist ghetto of the "New York School"?

And so some readers may pick up "Lunch Poems" (first published in 1964) after seeing it praised as an emblematic cultural document of mid-twentieth century America. Yet even if the time-bound aura of O'Hara is the come-on, what makes you stay enthralled is his voice -- a "thinking" voice as vitally American as Whitman or Frost.

There are 37 poems in "Lunch Poems" and their quality as well as their accessibility varies. The poems span a period from 1953 to 1964. This book is not a "best of" O'Hara collection, yet it does contain what may be his most durable poem.

A few of these short pieces are so recondite that they lose me. In a few others O'Hara raises an opaque scrim to suggest beauty beckoning from the other side, and these poems begin to "click" only after multiple readings. But the majority of the poems are freshly-minted coins granting immediate access to a lively, urbane worldview. While general knowledge of the New York cultural scene in the '50s and early '60s is helpful, these poems, at their best, easily communicate to us in a way undimmed by the passage of time.

The poems are populated with the poet's friends and lovers, with artists and musicians, and with the conversation of meals and parties. Here are O'Hara's travel experiences and his love of foreign languages (you could write an essay on the myriad uses of French in O'Hara's poetry). The man wears his erudition lightly on his sleeve. He's enamored of both high and low American culture: "I am ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have to smile" ("Naphtha", 1959). Another poem from the same year, "Rhapsody," contains a premonition of O'Hara's early death a few years later: "I historically belong to the enormous bliss of American death."

Most delightful is his man-on-the-street reportage that spins off in all directions. A typical bout of intense observation occurs in "A Step Away From Them," which begins: "It's my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs."

In what I think are the best of the poems, the cityscape serves as a platform for accessible philosophizing. An enduring example is "The Day Lady Died." Is there another poem where so much meaning resides in its title? At first glance the title rattled me. In it I heard a rhythm, but an uncertain one. Then I hit upon the answer: simply reverse "Day Lady" to reveal "Lady Day," the nickname of blues singer Billy Holiday whose dark night of the soul ended in 1959. The displaced "day" (her missing day) had to be displaced (had to go missing) from O'Hara's title. The text of the poem recounts the day the poet walked the streets and avenues of Manhattan attending to errands. These everyday pleasures come to a halt when O'Hara spies a tabloid newspaper's front page announcing Holiday's death at age 44. It is the day after death, the first of many days fate denied her.

In the poem's final stanza where O'Hara recalls once hearing Holiday perform at the Five Spot Café, the poet accomplishes a wonder. He turns death into something other than displacement and omission. Memory overpowers death, conjoining time present and time past.

great small book of poems that you can whisk out and read on the run, at lunch, or during your cigarette break.

Frank O'Hara's poems have become windows into a vibrant past, and to have this little book of some of his best is to have a portable time machine.

buy this now. it's the essential frank o'hara. great choice to keep around for lulls in the day, or for when you're in need of a quick smile.