"Poets Dressed & Undressed" Elwyn Chamberlain
Nudities Unknown To Ancestors' Imaginations
by WILL HUBBARD
I am currently in debt 19,782 dollars and 19 cents compounded annually at a rate of 6.8 percent for a graduate education in the writing of poetry but learned drastically exponentially more about its practice from listening several thousand times to a recording of the poet reading the poem that follows.
It is a poem that properly sweats where others jackknife into the pool sending droplets of distasteful water into the secret fruity liquor cocktails of underage teenagers adjusting bathing suits fringed with new pubic hair. It in other words it does not mind getting wet in secret, uncomfortable all to itself.
Were you aware that we have taken to digitizing the enduring poems for your eternal convenience? We call it A POEM FOR YOU, and if you look down the far right column this minute you'll find another tasty morsel by Mr. O'Hara and forgive yourself all those unspeakable harshnesses.
We sympathize with the difficulty you encounter reading the verse on a lighted, fictional screen. The answer is not, here as ever, to take away the light. Whether it's coming from behind the poem or in front, light will always be at odds with the printed word because it is more powerful and lives easily in beauty.
Human beings may spend one-third of their lives asleep, but the majority of it happens in their mid-twenties. It was said that Frank O’Hara never wanted to sleep. After he was run over by a dune buggy in 1966 while dancing down to the shoreline with his gin gimlet, Willem de Kooning heard the surgeon say "No one should be dying of these injuries." It is a story that could be stitched into a pillow. Instead I tell everyone I know, hoping they’ll take it easy.
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
Ode To Joy
We shall have everything we want and there'll be no more dying
on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs
for our symbol we'll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter
over an insatiable sexual appetite
and the streets will be filled with racing forms
and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars
will swell from the walls and books alive in streaming rooms
to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably
as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin
and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg
and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith
that's sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness
near the grave of love
No more dying
We shall see the grave of love as a lovely sight and temporary
near the elm that spells the lovers' names in roots
and there'll be no more music but the ears in lips and more wit
but tongues in ears and more drums but ears to thighs
as evening signals nudities unknown to ancestors' imaginations
and the imagination itself will stagger like a tired paramour of ivory
under the sculptural necessities of lust that never falters
like a six-mile runner from Sweden or Liberia covered with gold
as lava flows up and over the far-down somnolent city's abdication
and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last
and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan
who's self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulchre at last
that love may live
Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in
and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once or all
while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds
to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbed limbs
that weep a pearly perspiration on the sheets of brief attention
and the hairs dry out that summon anxious declaration of the organs
as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors
pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways
like the ways of gods with humans in the innocent combination of light
and flesh or as the legends ride their heroes though the dark to found
great cities where all life is possible to maintain as long as time
which wants us to remain for for cocktails in a bar and after dinner
lets us live with it
No more dying
—Frank O'Hara (mp3)
Will Hubbard is the executive editor of This Recording. Please attend this.
"Disarm" - Smashing Pumpkins (mp3)
"Good Times" - Sam Cooke (mp3)
"Boat Drinks" - Jimmy Buffett (mp3)
