Customer Reviews

Meditations in an Emergency

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If you wondered what Don Draper was reading and why he got that far away look in his eye then your curiosity is much like mine. I had to know. Meditations In An Emergency is that book. Frank O'Hara was the voice that spoke to the madness, the chaos, and the contradictions in the cultural transition between 50's and 60's America. He was one of the best poets of the twentieth century and along with writers like Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry.
O'Hara's poetry is vital, raw, gritty, and extremely moving.

And Don Draper is thinking:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the castastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Most people who are stumbling across this book will find it because it was featured in Mad Men, with one of it's poems, "Mayakovsky", partially recited by the main character. Seeing that episode after the fact, the poem does ring true for Don Draper, except that Mayakovsky eventually killed himself.

But there is so much more to Meditations in an Emergency that that poem alone. There are a dozen gems in the work, many which surpass Mayakovsky in my opinion. O'Hara is an interesting, philosophical read that will cause you to look deeper at life and self. A work for the ages.

MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY contains 30 poems, short to medium in length. Thirteen are one-pagers, twelve are two pages, five are three.

Some of the poems are opaque. An exuberant talker, O'Hara on occasion launches into an erudition spill, and when this is applied to a subject of limited interest the outcome may be a poem unlikely to speak to most readers, especially those of us not thoroughly tutored in his ways and means.

Yet I think I am like most of his readers who forgive him this, knowing that with the next poem or the one after the next he will return to his naturally communicative, pleasure-giving mode.

What the American poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth once noted about O'Hara is right on the money: Each of the poems has the air of a "fresh start." When encountering the best of them it is as if your eyes, long occluded, open suddenly onto the world.

This being O'Hara, there are newly-coined and revived words and phrases (cupiditously; buttered bees); thoughts of suicide, express and implied; premonitions of violence; paeans to pop culture icons ("For James Dean"); a campy fandom of Hollywood ("To the Film Industry in Crisis"); tossed off witticisms ("It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so"); a devotion to New York ("I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life"); and, finally, intimate love poems that draw us near.

He has an original voice, and yet I enjoy the occasions when he behaves as other poets, like Ginsberg or the Romantics, or even Shakespeare, who I swear I hear in the poem "Radio." It begins, "Why do you play such dreary music / on Saturday afternoon, when tired / mortally tired I long for a little / reminder of immortal energy?" This shares the questioning voice found in Shakespeare's sonnets (the constant Why? Who? What?) as well as the author's expression of mock petulance -- disappointment turning into complaint turning into self-pity -- such as in Sonnet 34: "Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day / And make me travel forth without my cloak / To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way?"

For some reason I like to read O'Hara's poetry while standing, or walking around a room.

An example of beat poetry of the 1950s. Much of the material grips you but other parts make you feel like the poem is part of an inside joke you are never going to get. Good but not engaging... someone decided to ping me about this book a year after I read it and I could not recall a single poem I read in it (unlike poems I have read in the "everyman" series on Kipling, jazz, war, etc.). Not great poetry but good. It has nothing to do with Wasilla, Alaska.

The country is gray and brown and white and trees. Snows and skies of laughter always diminishing.

Less funny, not just darker, not just gray.

It may be the coldest day of the year. What does he think of that...I mean, what do I?

And if I do...perhaps I am myself again."

The above was quoted from the voice over narration at the end of the second season premiere of "Mad Men" on AMC.

I had never heard of Frank O'hara or "Meditations in an Emergency" before, but the words Mr O'Hara created have filled me with wonder and awe.

When it becomes available again I intend to purchase this book in the hope that there may be even more words that will have a similar effect contained within it.

This is a hard book to locate, and was so glad to have it offered here. I am very satisfied with the book, it is in excellent shape. thanks!!!!

I was neither bored nor exalted by this book of poems. The collection was so-so to me.