In Which The Clouds Get Enough Attention As It Is

Poet Among Painters

by JAMES SCHUYLER

I first met Frank O'Hara at a party at John Myers' after a Larry Rivers opening: de Kooning and Nell Blaine were there, arguing about whether it is deleterious for an artist to do commercial work. I was most impressed by the company I was suddenly keeping.

A very young-looking man came up and introduced himself (I had already read a poem by Frank in Accent, the exquisitely witty "Three Penny Opera," written either at Harvard or at Michigan.) He asked me if I had read Janet Flanner that week in the New Yorker, who had just disclosed the scandal of Gide's wife burning all his letters to her. "I never liked Gide," Frank said, "but I didn't realize he was a complete shit."

This was rich stuff, and we talked a long time; or rather, as was so often the case, he talked and I listened. His conversation was self-propelling and one idea, or anecdote, or bon mot was fuel to his own fire, inspiring him verbally to blaze ahead, that curious voice rising and falling, full of invisible italics, the strong pianist's hands gesturing with the invariable cigarette.

Frank told me that he had taken a job at the Museum of Modern Art, working in the lobby at the front desk, in order to see Alfred Barr's monumental retrospective of Matisse. Frank had idols (many) and if Matisse was one, so was Alfred Barr, and remained so during all of Frank's years of association with the museum. The first time I dropped by to see him, I found him in the admissions booth, waiting to sell tickets to visitors and, meanwhile, writing a poem on a yellow lined pad (one called "It's the Blue!").

He also had besides him a translation of Andre Breton's Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares (although he made translations from the French - Reverdy, Baudelaire - his French was really nothing much). Soon we were sharing an apartment on East 49th Street, a cold water flat five flights up with splendid views.

Frank O'Hara was the most elegant person I ever met, and I don't mean in the sense of dressy, for which he never had either the time or the money. He was of medium height, lithe and slender (to quote Elaine de Kooning, when she painted him, "hipless as a snake"), with a massive Irish head, hair receding from a widow's peak, and a broken, Napoleonic nose: broken in what childhood scuffle, I forget. He walked lightly on the balls of his feet, like a dancer or someone about to dive in the waves. How he loved to swim! In the heaviest surf on the south shore of Long Island, often to the alarm of his friends, and even at night when he was drunk and turn waspish. That was both unpleasant and alarming, since he would say whatever came into his head, giving his victim a devastating character analysis, as with a scalpel.

watching tv in 1955  Frank's friends! They came from all the arts, in all troops. As John Ashbery has written in his introduction to The Collected Poems (nearly seven hundred pages of them): "The nightmares, delights and paradoxes of life in this city went into Frank's style, as did the many passionate friendships he kept going simultaneously (to the point where it was almost impossible for anyone to see him alone - there were so many people whose love demanded attention, and there was so little time and so many other things to do, like work and, when there was a free moment, poetry.)"

Then there were the events. Frank was in love with all the arts: painting and music and poetry, almost all movies, the opera and particularly, the ballet. Then there were the parties and the dinners and old movies on late night TV. When did the poems get written?

with franz kline at the cedar tavern in 1959
One Saturday noon I was having coffee with Frank and Joe LeSueur (the writer with whom Frank shared various apartments over the years), and Joe and I began to twit him about his ability to write a poem at any time. Frank gave us a look - both hot and cold - got up, went into his bedroom, and wrote "Sleeping on the Wing," a beauty, in a matter of minutes.

Then, his book Lunch Poems is literally that. Frank became a permanent member of the International Program at the Museum of Modern Art at the behest of the then-director, Porter A. McCray. I later wended my way into the same department and had ample opportunity to observe Frank in action.

with grace hartigan

He would steam in, good and late and smelling strongly of the night before (in his later years, his breakfast included vodka in the orange juice, to kill the hangover and get him started). He read his mail, the circulating folders, made and received phone calls (Frank suffered a chronic case of "black ear": I once called him at the museum and the operator said, "Good God!"; but she put me through). Then it was time for lunch, usually taken at Larré's with friends. When he got back to his office, he rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter and wrote a poem, then got down to serious business. Of course this didn't happen every day, but often, very often.

with patsy southgate & kenneth koch It has been suggested that the museum took too much of so gifted a poet's time. Not really: Frank needed a job, and he was in love with the museum and brooked no criticism of it. At times, of course, he became impatient with the endless and often seemingly petty paperwork connected with assembling an exhibition, and I have seen him come from an acquisitions meeting with smoke coming out of his ears (he never divulged a word of what passed at these highly confidential affairs). But Frank had the rare gift of empathy for the art of any artist he worked with; he understood both intention and significance. And he was highly organized, with a phenomenal memory. When I say, "he got down to work," I mean it; he worked, and he worked really hard.

James Schuyler died in 1991. You can purchase Homage to Frank O'Hara here. You can find more remembrances of Frank O'Hara here.

with helen frankenthaler
"Flume (Bon Iver cover)" - Peter Gabriel (mp3)

"Skinny Love (Bon Iver cover)" - Ingrid Michaelson (mp3)

"Wolves (Part I & II)" - Ellie Goulding (mp3)

at the club  I loved him very much so quickly I wish as I'm sure everyone else does who had ever known him that we hadn't lost him.

Charles Olson

In Which We Wonder In The Inching Sun How It Was Known

Poems Newly Appeared: Some Are Dun-Colored

The journal Conduit is many things. By its own accounting, it is “Words & visions for minds on fire.” It is also “An international magazine of poetry, art, fiction, non-fiction, non sequiturs, and interviews.” Not least, it is “The only magazine that risks annihilation.” That is a lot of slogan to appear in the first few pages. And, without meaning to do any disservice, we wonder if annihilation is really necessary for such an interesting magazine.

The current issue, No. 20, has as its theme “Humans ‘n’ Nature.” What is suggested is that we, humans, have a complex relationship with everything else. And in particular, with volcanoes. The first poem in the issue begins:

     At the stairs to the top of the volcano,
     you warn me, “Secrets are small fires.
     Let’s be more primitive. Let’s tie ourselves up.
     Let’s wait for the monster.”

Written by Carley Moore, the poem, “The Match,” expresses the volatility of the speaker’s bedroom activities, with the volcano used to express how love can force a young woman to sacrifice important things, not mentioned.

It should be clear: by the metaphoric use of the volcano. For poets, as for anyone, the difference between figurative and actual peril is important to keep in mind. Especially in the matter of volcanoes.

We had this particular natural phenomenon in mind already following the death of Craig Arnold (see Poems Newly Appeared, Oct. 13). A talented poet, Arnold was last heard from while blogging from the volcanoes of Japan. After Moore’s poem in Conduit, with its vivid evocation of standing at a fiery precipice, it came as a shock to see there was also a poem, cautiously positioned at the back, by Craig Arnold. His piece here is called “asunder,” and it would have appeared in print right around the time of his disappearance. “Now I write / without hope of answer,” he writes.

Conduit is printed biannually. In lieu of bios, contributors are listed only with city of residence and email address. Carley Moore of Brooklyn, New York, can be reached at carley.moore@nyu.edu. Craig Arnold, formerly of Laramie, Wyoming, is listed with the email address greatdarkman@yahoo.com.

* * *

When reading a poet who has died early, a certain optical illusion occurs. Lines that were more or less harmless when they were written now seem full of omen. The poet titles a book Made Flesh, and the old phrase takes on a glow of ironic premonition when he goes missing a few months later.

Sometimes, though, the sequence is reversed. Instead of writing unwittingly about what is to come, a poet writes unwittingly about what has already happened. This, at least, seems to be the case with Derek Walcott’s poems in the Nov. 19 New York Review of Books.

Earlier this year, Walcott was campaigning to be the next University of Oxford Professor of Poetry. But he dropped out of the election, despite leading in the polls, due to a smear campaign that focused on his sometimes unprofessional manner with female students. Instead, poet Ruth Padel was elected to the position. That seemed to be the end of it, until, nine days later, Padel herself resigned when it was revealed that she had slandered Walcott in emails to journalists. “I do think I was very silly to send those emails,” she explained.

And here we are now, with all that nastiness behind us, though not by much. The first line of one Walcott poem in the New York Review reads: “There was no ‘affair,’ it was all one-sided.” With this, it would appear that Walcott is about to offer his version of l’affaire Walcott and his related affairs. And how could he not be referring to the Oxford drama?

But he is not. Or, it seems, not wittingly. The poem is ostensibly about a simple, distant love interest. It takes place in “Siracusa,” where he is squinting into the sunlight:

     I wondered in the inching sun how it was known
     to the ferry’s horn, the pines, the Bay’s azure hills
     and the jeering screaming girls that I would lose her.

Who is “her”? Perhaps it does not matter. The “affair” mentioned in the first line may in fact be a simple love interest. Like so many poets before him, Walcott is alone in Italy, forlorn and full of words, looking for truth beside a fountain he refers to, unironically, as “the cool dark well sacred to Arethusa.”

Then we move to the second poem, and our suspicions revive. It includes the lines:

             I have no reason to forgive her
     for what I brought on myself. I am past hating.

Now it does seem to matter who “her” is. True, our baser nature reveals itself by making an immediate association with Padel. And perhaps Walcott has not made the association himself. The whole poem is a little confusing. If we are being asked to read it at face value—about a love affair—then we decline. If, on the other hand, Walcott is referring to the Oxford event, then he is being oblique indeed.

We seek clarity. Any readers who have seen recent poems by Ruth Padel in journals are encouraged to contact us.

* * *

Literary journals enjoy themes. Since a journal may appear only quarterly, biannually, or, like a high school prom, annually, a good theme provides some useful context. To compare with the theme “Humans ‘n’ Nature,” see past installments of Poems Newly Appeared, which looked at journals focusing on “Noir” and “Dread,” for example.

The model of all themed journals is probably Granta, having been around, off and on, since 1889, and almost never missing an opportunity for a theme. The current issue focuses on “Chicago.” Each of the fiction and reportage pieces has a perfectly evident connection with the city. Indeed, the word “Chicago” is usually used in the first paragraph, as though by a pupil careful to make sure he is answering the assignment.

Not so the poems in the issue, which are two, one each by James Schuyler and Anne Winters. We thought Schuyler was a member of the “New York School.” We know that he lived, worked, and died in Manhattan, and wrote poignantly about the city as a complex habitat for friends and art. The poem included here by Schuyler, “Coming Night,” does not mention “Chicago,” nor does Winters’s “Knight with Lady.”

“Coming Night” appears here in print for the first time, and we are delighted to have it. But we are unable to find even a circumstantial connection with the city in question. The poem conjures up “willows” and “sumac”—not the background flora one normally associates with the hog butcher for the world.

Leaving butchers aside, Winters’s poem communicates her first experience of seeing a penis, which was her father’s:

     —how could I have known?
     Long dun-colored unaware

     Dodona bough it seemed to me,
     —pale hornbeam suckering and sprawled.
     Indifferent, it had the quality
     of Fact; of old, seamed, Entity:
     I was called to a lifetime of study.

We, too, have looked, but we have not found “Chicago.” In any case, we think we discovered the reason for these poets’ inclusion in Granta No. 108. Schuyler was born in Chicago, and in fact today would have been his 86th birthday. Anne Winters, born in New York City and for whom New York is a “primary subject” of her poetry, currently lives in Evanston, Illinois.

—T.K.              

T.K. comments weekly on some poems currently in journals. Contact at poemsnewlyappeared@gmail.com.

The Very Best - Julia (mp3)

Stevie Wonder - Sir Duke (mp3)

Steve Perry - Oh Sherrie (mp3)