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Etheridge Knight

September 23, 2020 by TrigonAdmin

Etheridge Knight Univ. of Pittsburgh Press

Etheridge Knight, photo credit: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press

Behind the Beat Look is a Sweet
Tongue and a Boogie Foot
(for those who see me as a tragic figure)

There is glee in my teeth, and mirth in my mouth.
My birth under the Mississippi sun so a boast,
A toast to my Black Daddy, Gandy-dancer, Master of the
Buck and Wing.  The Skin and Grin.

But what you see might not be what you get.

Etheridge Knight, The Worcester Review, XIX, 1998, p. 131

 

A brief biography of Etheridge Knight (1931-1991), including his ties to Worcester, was written and published by David Shaw as part of an interactive student project. The biography is available here.

A more comprehensive look at Etheridge Knight is featured in The W0rcester Review, Vol XIX 1&2 (1998) including his years in Worcester.  The introduction by Editor Rodger Martin also lays out how his military record can not answer the question of Korean War service one way or another because  a Vietnam War protest fire set at the Army Record Center in St. Louis destroyed significant portions of Knight’s military record.  http://www.theworcesterreview.org/

Visit the Poetry Foundation page for Etheridge Knight

Worcester Telegram article regarding an event.

Filed Under: Literary Tour

Stanley Kunitz

July 31, 2020 by TrigonAdmin

Stanley Kunitz in his Provincetown garden. Photo by James Laughlin

 

The Testing Tree

1

On my way home from school
  up tribal Providence Hill
     past the Academy ballpark
where I could never hope to play
  I scuffed in the drainage ditch
     among the sodden seethe of leaves
hunting for perfect stones
  rolled out of glacial time
     into my pitcher’s hand;
then sprinted lickety-
  split on my magic Keds
     from a crouching start,
scarcely touching the ground
  with my flying skin
     as I poured it on
for the prize of the mastery
  over that stretch of road,
     with no one no where to deny
when I flung myself down
  that on the given course
     I was the world’s fastest human.  
     
       2

Around the bend
  that tried to loop me home
     dawdling came natural
across a nettled field
  riddled with rabbit-life
     where the bees sank sugar-wells
in the trunks of the maples
  and a stringy old lilac
     more than two stories tall
blazing with mildew
  remembered a door in the
     long teeth of the woods.
All of it happened slow:
  brushing the stickseed off,
     wading through jewelweed
strangled by angel’s hair,
  spotting the print of the deer
     and the red fox’s scats.
Once I owned the key
  to an umbrageous trail
     thickened with mosses
where flickering presences
  gave me right of passage
     as I followed in the steps
of straight-backed Massassoit
  soundlessly heel-and-toe
     practicing my Indian walk.
     
       3

Past the abandoned quarry
  where the pale sun bobbed
     in the sump of the granite,
past copperhead ledge,
  where the ferns gave foothold,
     I walked, deliberate,
on to the clearing,
  with the stones in my pocket
     changing to oracles
and my coiled ear tuned
  to the slightest leaf-stir.
     I had kept my appointment.
There I stood int he shadow,
  at fifty measured paces,
     of the inexhaustible oak,
tyrant and target,
  Jehovah of acorns,
     watchtower of the thunders,
that locked King Philip’s War
  in its annulated core
     under the cut of my name.
Father wherever you are
   I have only three throws
      bless my good right arm.
In the haze of afternoon,
  while the air flowed saffron,
     I played my game for keeps—
for love, for poetry,
  and for eternal life—
     after the trials of summer.
     
     4

In the recurring dream
  my mother stands
     in her bridal gown
under the burning lilac,
  with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
     Russell kissing her hands;
the house behind her is in ruins;
  she is wearing an owl’s face
     and makes barking noises.
Her minatory finger points.
  I pass through the cardboard doorway
     askew in the field
and peer down a well
  where an albino walrus huffs.
     He has the gentlest eyes.
If the dirt keeps sifting in,
  staining the water yellow,
     why should I be blamed?
Never try to explain.
  That single Model A
     sputtering up the grade
unfurled a highway behind
  where the tanks maneuver,
     revolving their turrets.
In a murderous time
  the heart breaks and breaks
     and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
  through dark and deeper dark
     and not to turn.
I am looking for the trail.
  Where is my testing-tree?
     Give me back my stones!

by Stanley Kunitz, read at The Higgins House, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1972

 

 

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), twice named Poet Laureate of The United States, was born in Worcester in 1905 and has become one of the most celebrated poets in the United States.  He once said, “Worcester provoked me into poetry.”  Regardless, we can savor the brilliant work those provocations created.   His childhood home is a poetry mecca for poetry lovers over the world.     

He has been featured numerous times in The Worcester Review and the WCPA has honored him first as one of the initial poets invited to read at its founding in 1971 and with many celebrations since.

 

 

Learn more about Stanley Kunitz by visiting the following sites:

Stanley Kunitz Boyhood Home

The Poetry Foundation Stanley Kunitz Page

Stanley Kunitz on Wikipedia

Literary Landmark: Boyhood Home of Stanley Kunitz

the Paris Review interview with Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz Obituary in the New York Times

Poetry Everywhere with Garrison Keillor on PBS “Touch Me” by Stanley Kunitz

Filed Under: Literary Tour

Charles Olson

July 31, 2020 by TrigonAdmin

Charles Olson and his major work.

That’s all. I said. I promise to witness.
Charles Olson, Interview, 1970

To build out of sound the walls of the city
And display in one flower the wunderworld so that
By such means the unique stand forth
Clear itself shall be made known.
Charles Olson, Unpublished Fragment

Excerpt from The Charles Olson Sympsium:

Charles Olson’s inventiveness as a poet and scholar, as well as his engagement in community and national politics, have rendered him an American poet who continues to be an originating influence in our times.
Please join us as we mark the centenary with a challenging few days of poetics, friendship, and exploration.

We welcome the participation of poets, presenters, scholars and participants. Contact the WCPA or Olson Centenary Chair Mark Wagner at markgwagner@charter.net for additional information.

COMMUNITY EVENTS & OLSON SYMPOSIUM
SCHEDULE & ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Charles Olson photo courtesy of Charles Olson Papers,
Archives & Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

A Brief Biography

Charles Olson was born in Worcester, December 27, 1910, the son of working-class parents, a Swedish immigrant father and an Irish Catholic mother. They lived on Mitchell Street, moving in 1912 to 6 Norman Avenue. In 1914 his family settled in a third-floor apartment at 4 Norman Avenue, where he was raised. Throughout his youth and into his years at Classical High School Olson struggled to overcome his consciousness of his size and height. He went to Wesleyan College in 1928.

Olson has strong association with two places other than Worcester: Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where in the 1950s Olson was a teacher, rector, advancing alternative ways of thought and verse; and Gloucester, Massachusetts, a north shore fishing community where he spent his childhood summers and a place that would provide the major background for his epic work, The Maximus Poems, which are rich in myth, full of geography, history, architecture, and personal reflections. Though his poetry may not be focused heavily on Worcester, in 1965 at a public reading in Berkeley, California, after reading a poem titled “An Ode on Nativity,” a poem set in Worcester, Olson blurted out, “Gee, I’m moved. Wow, I never write about Gloucester like this. Do you think? I’ve been wrong all this time… My subject is Worcester.” Though these words may have been spoken in jest, some of Olson’s finest moments are Worcester ones. Three stories about his boyhood in Worcester are “Stocking Cap,” “Mr. Meyer” and “The Post Office,” each a loving tribute to a father who took his young son berrying in the summer, gathering walnuts and wild grapes in the fall, and fishing through the ice on Worcester’s lakes in the winter. In “The Post Office,” Olson describes his father’s mail route in Worcester:

It stretched along the lake which bounds the city on the east.
Originally the route ran on both sides of the lake south from the
bridge which carried the road to Boston. The bridge alone, and the
other wooded side (where nothing much was but the city’s amusement
park and some summer camps) were enough to make the route what
my father would like. Just to cross the bridge a winter morning…
or to be a part of the boating around in the summer and the fall,
gave his workday a freedom…

Before Olson left Worcester in 1928 to attend Wesleyan, as Classical High School’s star speaker he had won a summer-long trip to Europe, top prize in a national oratory contest. He received a BA at Wesleyan and stayed on to earn an MA in 1933, writing his thesis on Herman Melville. Olson returned to Worcester to teach at Clark University. He was a favorite among the freshmen students he taught and proctored. He received two Guggenheim fellowships and a grant from the Gren Foundation to study Mayan hieroglyphics.

During WWII, Olson worked in the Office of War Information, then in Roosevelt’s 1944 re-election campaign. Finding no place for an artist in such pursuits, Olson left politics and began writing poetry seriously in the period during which he served as informal secretary to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. In 1950 he stepped out of the footsteps of Pound and began the development of post-modern free-verse with Robert Creeley.

In 1957, Olson retreated to Gloucester to concentrate on his own poetry, emerging occasionally, the leader of anew poetic counterculture. He taught briefly in Buffalo and at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He died in 1970 at the New York Hospital and is buried in Beechwood Cemetery, West Gloucester. Charles Olson was an extremely influential poet. His stature did not lie merely in his physical size but in the mythic dimension of his work.

Filed Under: Literary Tour

2015 Gregory Stockmal Reading (7th Annual)

January 22, 2020 by TrigonAdmin

Thank you to the WPI and Gregory Stockmal Fund for another successful tribute to Gregory Stockmal and his relationship with Stanley Kunitz.

Download the original flyer, featuring Gregory OrrDownload

Filed Under: Stockmal

2016 Gregory Stockmal Reading (8th Annual)

January 22, 2020 by TrigonAdmin

We regret that the Q&A talk and poetry reading by poet Carolyn Forché had to be canceled due to circumstances beyond the control of Holy Cross or the Worcester County Poetry Association.

Filed Under: Stockmal

2017 Gregory Stockmal Reading (9th Annual)

January 22, 2020 by TrigonAdmin

Thank you to those who attended the 9th Annual Gregory Stockmal Reading which was held on Wednesday, October 18 at Clark University and featured Pam Bernard.

The annual Gregory Stockmal Reading continues the efforts of Greg Stockmal to honor American poet Stanley Kunitz and his legacy in Worcester.

The event was co-sponsored by the Friends of the Goddard Library, Clark University, the Gregory Stockmal Fund and the Worcester County Poetry Association.

Filed Under: Stockmal

2018 Gregory Stockmal Reading (10th Annual)

January 22, 2020 by TrigonAdmin

Wednesday, October 24
7:30 – 9:00 pm

featuring Eleanor Wilner

Assumption College, Curtis Hall Auditorium,
Tsotsis Family Academic Center,
500 Salisbury Street, Worcester

Co-sponsored by the Assumption College Department of English, the Gregory Stockmal Fund and the Worcester County Poetry Association.

Filed Under: Stockmal

2019 Gregory Stockmal Reading (11th Annual)

January 22, 2020 by TrigonAdmin

Wednesday, October 16, 2019 – 7:30pm
Anna Maria College, Zecco Performing Arts Center
50 Sunset Lane, Paxton

Each year the Worcester County Poetry Association partners with a local college or university to present a poet who had a connection to poet Stanley Kunitz. This year we welcomed Patrick Donnelly as our reader at the 11th Annual Gregory Stockmal Reading on Wednesday, October 16th. The reading was hosted by Anna Maria College in Paxton and started at 7:30pm.

Stockmal Reading Original FlyerDownload

Filed Under: Stockmal

Frank O’Hara

January 16, 2020 by TrigonAdmin

 

 

A True Account Of Talking To The Sun On Fire Island

 

The Sun woke me this morning loud
and clear, saying “Hey! I’ve been
trying to wake you up for fifteen
minutes. Don’t be so rude, you are
only the second poet I’ve ever chosen
to speak to personally

so why
aren’t you more attentive? If I could
burn you through the window I would
to wake you up. I can’t hang around
here all day.”

“Sorry, Sun, I stayed
up late last night talking to Hal.”

“When I woke up Mayakovsky he was
a lot more prompt” the Sun said
petulantly. “Most people are up
already waiting to see if I’m going
to put in an appearance.”

I tried
to apologize “I missed you yesterday.”
“That’s better” he said. “I didn’t
know you’d come out.” “You may be
wondering why I’ve come so close?”
“Yes” I said beginning to feel hot
wondering if maybe he wasn’t burning me
anyway.

“Frankly I wanted to tell you
I like your poetry. I see a lot
on my rounds and you’re okay. You may
not be the greatest thing on earth, but
you’re different. Now, I’ve heard some
say you’re crazy, they being excessively
calm themselves to my mind, and other
crazy poets think that you’re a boring
reactionary. Not me.

Just keep on
like I do and pay no attention. You’ll
find that people always will complain
about the atmosphere, either too hot
or too cold too bright or too dark, days
too short or too long.

If you don’t appear
at all one day they think you’re lazy
or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

And don’t worry about your lineage
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on
the jungle, you know, on the tundra
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were
I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting
for you to get to work.

And now that you
are making your own days, so to speak,
even if no one reads you but me
you won’t be depressed. Not
everyone can look up, even at me. It
hurts their eyes.”
“Oh Sun, I’m so grateful to you!”

“Thanks and remember I’m watching. It’s
easier for me to speak to you out
here. I don’t have to slide down
between buildings to get your ear.
I know you love Manhattan, but
you ought to look up more often.

And
always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space. That
is your inclination, known in the heavens
and you should follow it to hell, if
necessary, which I doubt.

Maybe we’ll
speak again in Africa, of which I too
am specially fond. Go back to sleep now
Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem
in that brain of yours as my farewell.”

“Sun, don’t go!” I was awake
at last. “No, go I must, they’re calling
me.”
“Who are they?”

Rising he said “Some
day you’ll know. They’re calling to you
too.” Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

Frank O’Hara

 

Frank O’Hara’s early life hinted at American themes of mobility, touches of the rural upbringing, and a first rate education. Born to Russell O’Hara and Katherine Broderick in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 27, 1926, Frank and family returned to 12 North Street in Grafton where he grew in the embraces of his parents, brother John (Phil) and sister Maureen. O’Hara’s father and his Uncle Leonard ran a family business comprised of a dairy farm, a John Deere agency, livestock dealership, and a small hardware store for farmers. The family also owned many farms, a lumber mill in Northbrook, and a 1,200 tree apple orchard in Milford.

Photo: Fred McDarragh

The O’Hara household was lively, with artistic parents. Russell was a pianist, and both parents were involved with community activities. A great part of their lives included love of music, books, art, theater, movies, and politics. (Members of the family still claim to be Democrats.)The welcomed lively discussions and differences. As a teenager Frank talked about returning when older and raising dogs on Tower Hill Farm on Sibley Street, one of the three farms the family owned. Though time crafted other plans, O’Hara spent many summer days at Kitville, a town beach on Route 140 East toward Upton. During later summers, Frank virtually lived at the Red Barn Summer Stock Theater in Westborough, a bit to the east of Grafton. Other influences shaping Frank’s aesthetic sensibilities included livestock and apples, St. John’s High School in Worcester, the colorful, mellow, seven hills on which Worcester and the surrounding towns stand.

O’Hara’s travels began with his studies of piano at the New England Conservator of Music between 1941-1944. Then the wider world and its complicities landed him on the USS Nicholas, where he worked as a sonar man in the pacific Theatre during World War II. He returned to attend Harvard on the G.I. Bill, meeting up in Cambridge with John Ashbery, a poetic kinship that will anchor, along with Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, the New York School of Poetry. But first came the University of Michigan, where he earned an MA in English Literature.

While the restless world called him, Grafton and family life are found in Frank’s short, surrealistic plays such as Try! Try! and Change Your Bedding. And where O’Hara’s poetry is not confessional in the way of Kunitz, where he does not catalogue his places and thoughts like Olson, nor revisit key events in childhood like Bishop’s strong work, childhood is there in “Poem (There I Could Not Be a Boy),” “Memorial Day, 1950,” and an early poem he wrote for his sister, “The Spoils of Grafton”:
Oh piano! Hire a moving van!
Put down the Mendelssohn and run!

The tension between what shaped him, and the need for distance from what shaped him, also turns up in “Autobiographia Literaria,” Here, O’Hara speaks of the alienation he felt in schoolyards as a boy, and yet,
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!

O’Hara’s love of the place and the people of New York defined his mature life. His work a MOMA, criticism for Artnews, and the poems – sometimes scribbled at lunchtime – cemented his place in the pantheon of New York artists during the turbulent late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1960, O’Hara was named Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions. He curated and wrote the catalogues for four major shows at MOMA. Yet for all his love of the visual arts, O’Hara’s poetry is what summons us.

With the publication of Meditations in an Emergency (Grove, 1957) he began to share with a wider public the brilliance and spontaneity of his thought and writing. He called his method Personism, which he defined as writing that addresses a poem to one person, creating a tone that involves a powerful inclusivity and love. In poems such as “Having a Coke with You” and “The Day Lady Died,” we enter a living world at times comic, burlesque, political, full of anxiety, difficult to summarize. The poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” (dated July 10, 1958) captures both the guises:
always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space. That
is your inclination, known in the heavens
and you should follow it to hell, if
necessary, which I doubt.

O’Hara died on Fire Island in 1966.

Celebrating Frank O’Hara Thursday, November 19, 2009

Pictures from the event held at the Worcester Art Museum

A talk for the Worcester Country Poetry Association at the Worcester Art Museum, November 19, 2009

The following is from Dr. Alan Feldman, who spoke and recited the works of O’Hara at the event:

Oh be droll, be jolly
and be temperate! Do not

frighten me more than you
have to! I must live forever.

That’s from an early O’Hara poem called “The Critic” (1951). Recently, at the Dodge Poetry Festival, I had the opportunity to pose a question to a stage full of poets laureate: I asked them, What are your thoughts about immortality? So that they wouldn’t think me some religious nutcase, I explained that I was thinking, for example, of Horace saying that he knew his poetry would live on, because he’d been the first to bring Greek meters into Latin. Well, the answers were bewilderingly disappointing. The poets all claimed they were writing for living audiences. “I don’t believe there will be a posterity,” Maxine Kumin said gloomily. Personally, I couldn’t see how anyone would care to write poetry if he or she didn’t think of including both the poets of the past, and, as well, generations unborn.

When O’Hara, wrote a review of Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, he gave us a clue––one of many, I think––that his mind was always on the relationship of poetry and immortality. As you recall, the novel ends with Zhivago’s poems being read years after his death by men who knew him, and felt that he had given them the poems to describe the city in which they now lived: “They were . . . enveloped by the unheard music of happiness that flowed all about them and into the distance. And the book they held seemed to confirm and encourage their feeling.”

Years ago, when I first wrote about O’Hara in a book that later became the Twayne United States Authors study on O’Hara, I felt I needed to make an argument for his lasting importance. Robert Lowell––there’d been a volume in this series on him for years––was then the great, serious poet of the day. O’Hara was, in a way, his antithesis, though I loved both of them. Both had a way of weaving their life experience into poems that would ring true long after the specific occasions had passed. I thought this was similar to the way Catullus can complain about his beloved Lesbia, and address his poet friends, and grieve for his brother, and pull us into his world of 2,000 years ago. As you may know, O’Hara gave a reading with Lowell on Statin Island and wrote a little poem on the subway on the way:

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up.

Lowell sniffed that he hadn’t written a poem on the way here, implying that poetry required a long process of thought and revision––the opposite of O’Hara’s spur of the moment compositional practice. And I think for a long while, maybe to some extent even now, O’Hara’s ability to quickly write a poem, revising it very very little if at all, along with his desire to include the incidental details of his times and his milieu, meant that he was rebuking poetry for aspiring to escape the quotidian into timelessness. But, of course, paradoxically––and here we’re dealing with the mystery of his genius––he did the exact opposite. “The Day Lady Died,” O’Hara’s well-known elegy to Billie Holiday, is going to live on precisely because O’Hara prepares us for the timeless moment of “leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT” and listening to her by including many of the incidental details of his lunch hour, including even the name of his bank teller, Stillwagon, first name Linda he once heard.

Nearly forty years after I began my project, I would argue that O’Hara has very possibly eclipsed Lowell, at least as someone who matters to younger poets. But more than that, I think he is beginning to demonstrate that he, just as Zhivago did, has helped create the art for which an occasion has yet to exist.

Case in point: The second season of Mad Men! Don Draper (self-created, and self-named) protagonist, a suit from Madison Avenue, is drinking in a Greenwich Village bar, and four seats down there’s a guy reading a slim volume of poems. And it’s not Lowell’s but, lo, it’s Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency! and later in the episode Don has purchased the book, and is reading it in his study. Jon Hamm, the actor who plays Draper, does an understated and yet expressive voice-over reading of the enigmatic little poem that concludes the book:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe 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.

Now this reflects a mystifyingly revealing light on Draper, a person whose identity seems to come into and out of existence in a fascinating flux. It gives a depth to this character that film alone could never give. I think this is one pretty good instance of immortality––a poet writing words for occasions that haven’t yet arisen––and especially wonderful for a poet like O’Hara who, in fact, wrote so many occasional poems, often for his friends.

The poem I’ve chosen to highlight today is somewhat less known than the Lana Turner poem or “The Day Lady Died”–– it’s a longer poem, “Joe’s Jacket,” in a way a kind of super-sized example of what O’Hara once called his “I do this I do that” poems.

It was written on August 10, 1959––and, by the way, we know this because O’Hara precisely dated most of his poems, and, as I’ve implied, they were almost all of them written quickly and left just as they were. Though he wrote many poems to his friends, and, as he famously said in “Personism”, he wanted the poem to be “between two persons instead of two pages,” in general, O’Hara seemed to have a casual disregard for contemporary audiences. Don Allen had to collect his poems to publish them in books, and many poems stayed in the drawer till after his death. I think O’Hara’s diffidence came from his complete confidence in his own genius, and, more broadly, a confidence that poetry––if it really is poetry––has to outlast its own time. As Catullus says in giving his poems to his friend Cornelius: “So here’s the book, for whatever it’s worth/ I want you to have it. And please, goddess,/ see that it lasts for more than a lifetime.”

Anyway . . . August 10, 1959, the day after the weekend that O’Hara began his affair with the handsome young dancer, Vincent Warren, his very own Lesbia I suppose––the attractive and troublesome lover who inspired some of his best poems. . . .

I think meteorologists have a good term to describe the way the poet opens up his inner landscape to us here, “a complex sky”––that is, one in which all kinds of clouds are present at once, puffy cumulus and wispy cirrus, and, above them stratocumulus and whatever. So too, O’Hara interweaves all kinds of language in this poem: chatty diary-like narrative, raw confession, campy irony, and, most important, a kind of lyrical intellectual music as well. If the poem is somewhat long, it is because this is a pivotal moment in O’Hara’s life, as he seems to know. He’s about to die and be born, I guess, as he implies by mentioning that he was reading D. H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death”, a poem about death, true enough, but ultimately about reincarnation:

Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!
for you will need it.
For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

“Of” not “to.”

Joe’s jacket is the seersucker jacket O’Hara like to borrow from his roommate, Joe LeSueur. The Barbizonian kiddy days refers to the 19th century school of painting, which included painters of rural scenes like Millet, and, I guess, refers to the reason we’re here today at the Worcester Art Museum––O’Hara’s origins in central Massachusetts, specifically rural Grafton Massachusetts. Jap is the painter Jasper Johns, Kenneth is, of course, “excitement prone” Kenneth Koch, Ashes is John Ashbery––well, it’s a distinguished cast. But what matters, I think, is how completely O’Hara is able to portray the complexity of his own mind at this particular moment.

Joe’s Jacket

Entraining to Southampton in the parlor car with Jap and Vincent, I
see life as a penetrable landscape lit from above
like it was in my Barbizonian kiddy days when automobiles
were owned by the same people for years and the Alfa Romeo was
only a rumor under the leaves beside the viaduct and I
pretending to be adult felt the blue within me and light up there
no central figure me, I was some sort of cloud or a gust of wind
at the station a crowd of drunken fishermen on a picnic Kenneth
is hard to find but we find, through all the singing, Kenneth smiling
it is off to Janice’s bluefish and the incessant talk of affection
expressed as excitability and spleen to be recent and strong
and not unbearably right in attitude, full of confidences
now I will say it, thank god, I knew you would

an enormous party mesmerizing comers in the disgathering light
and dancing miniature-endless, like a pivot
I drink to smother my sensitivity for a while so I won’t stare away
I drink to kill the fear of boredom, the mounting panic of it
I drink to reduce my seriousness so a certain spurious charm
can appear and win its flickering little victory over noise
I drink to die a little and increase the contrast of this questionable moment
and then I am going home, purged of everything except anxiety and self-distrust
now I will say it, thank god, I knew you would
and the rain has commenced its delicate lament over the orchards

an enormous window morning and the wind, the beautiful desperation of a tree
fighting off strangulation, and my bed has an ugly calm
I reach to the D. H. Lawrence on the floor and read “The Ship of Death”
I lie back again and begin slowly to drift and then to sink
a somnolent envy of inertia makes me rise naked and go to the window
where the car horn mysteriously starts to honk, no one is there
and Kenneth comes out and stops it in the soft green lightless stare
and we are soon in the Paris of Kenneth’s libretto, I did not drift
away I did not die I am there with Haussmann and the rue de Rivoli
and the spirits of beauty, art and progress, pertinent and mobile
in their worldly way, and musical and strange the sun comes out

returning by car the forceful histories of myself and Vincent loom
like the city hour after hour closer and closer to the future I am here
and the night is heavy through not warm, Joe is still up and we talk
only of the immediate present and its indiscriminately hitched-to past
the feeling of life and incident pouring over the sleeping city
which seems to be bathed in an unobtrusive light which lends things
coherence and an absolute, for just that time as four o’clock goes by

and soon I am rising for the less than average day, I have coffee
I prepare calmly to face almost everything that will come up I am calm
but not as my bed was calm as it softly declined to become a ship
I borrow Joe’s seersucker jacket though he is still asleep I start out
when I last borrowed it I was leaving there is was on my Spanish plaza back
and hid my shoulders from San Marco’s pigeons was jostled on the Kurfurstendamm
and sat opposite Ashes in an enormous leather chair in the Continental
it is all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here on
many occasions as a symbol does with the heart is full and risks no speech
a precaution I loathe as the pheasant loathes the season and is preserved
it will not be need, it will be just what it is and just what happens.

This poem illustrates for me what I think many readers will find in the future: that O’Hara’s “deep gossip” as Allen Ginsberg called it, is about as deep as it gets. Though it acknowledges the flow of events at this important juncture, it also generates a music for all of us, and for those who will live after, dwellers in O’Hara’s beloved city, for example, awake far into the early morning, when their lives descend on them with a weight of feeling that’s otherwise indescribable: “the feeling of life and incident pouring over the sleeping city/ which seems to be bathed in an unobtrusive light which lends things/ coherence and an absolute, for just that time as four o’clock goes by.”

What I wish for younger American poets now is that they draw courage from O’Hara’s ability to weave references to feeling with lyrical expansiveness and ironic playfulness. At a time when the poetry of John Ashbery, in which the self is suppressed, or, at the very least, pretty thoroughly camouflaged, seems to have set the fashion, it’s my hope that the poetry of O’Hara will show the way for poets to avoid leaden, self-absorbed confession, enjoy self-irony, but still find a way to render the complexity of their full minds and hearts. As O’Hara wrote in his poem for the painter Robert Rauchenberg:

what
can heaven mean up, down, or sidewise
who knows what is happening to him,
what has happened and is here, a
paper rubbed against the heart
and still too moist to be framed.

Filed Under: Literary Tour

Submissions open for the 2020 WCPA Annual Contest: The Frank O’Hara Prize

January 16, 2020 by TrigonAdmin

JUDGING & AWARDS:
First Place: $100 – Second Place: $50 – Third Place: $25
Winning poems will be published in The Worcester Review, after which all rights revert to the poet.
Contest winners will be announced in June 2020.
Winners’ Reading & Award Reception to be held September 2020.
Submissions will not be returned. Entrants who wish to be notified of contest results must enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope with their entry.
Contest Judge:  Doug Holder
2020 Contest Chairs:  Bob Gill and Chris Reilley

submit

For full contest information, including rules, eligibility, and guidelines, please visit the WCPA Annual Contest: The Frank O’Hara Prize page.

About the Judge: Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, MA. He teaches creative writing at Endicott College, and College Writing at Bunker Hill Community College. Holder’s work, both poetry and prose, have appeared in Rattle, Sahara, Cafe Review, Woven Tale Press, The Boston Globe, Poetry Quarterly, Toronto Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, and many other publications. He is also the winner of the Allen Ginsberg Award from Newton Writing and Publishing Center in 2015.

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