O'Hara at MoMA

What better way, MoMA thought, to celebrate the publication of a new edition of selected poems by Frank O’Hara than to host a lunchtime reading? Rumor has it that O’Hara wrote many of his most famous poems at a typewriter shop while on his lunch, a break from staffing the information desk at the Museum of Modern Art.

Yesterday a group of contemporary poets read some of O’Hara’s work, along with a poem each had written that derived from or responded to one of his. Hettie Jones read “Personal Poem,” “Walking to Work,” and “Steps,” then finished with her “Lunch Poems.” Vincent Katz selected “For Grace, After a Party” and “Having a Coke with You,” then read his “30.” Philip Schutlz’s “Why I Am Not a Novelist” responded to O’Hara’s own “Why I Am Not a Painter.” And so on.

Lee Ann Brown’s sort-of-stilted reading of “Mediations in an Emergency” did nothing to temper the poem’s most powerful lines:

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--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. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

In the background, trucks honked and trains rumbled, children shouted and adults clucked over the heat and the Picasso sculptures--practically the same sounds O’Hara would have been hearing as he wrote.

Photo: thanks