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.

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.