40. „Lunch Poems“ turns 50

Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems,” the little black dress of American poetry books, redolent of cocktails and cigarettes and theater tickets and phonograph records, turns 50 this year. It seems barely to have aged.

O’Hara wrote these poems, some during his lunch hour, while working at the Museum of Modern Art. He started at MoMA as an information desk clerk and, though he lacked formal training, became a curator. He had a painterly eye and a silvery personality.

“Lunch Poems” was urbane and sociable, a cheerful rebuke to the era’s more determined academic verse. “I do this I do that” poetry, O’Hara called his work, and this collection’s first poem, “Music,” sets the tone of his free-associating voice and method.

If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian
pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s
and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.

“Naked as a table cloth,” “nerves humming”: These are not-bad distillations of O’Hara’s sensibility. / Dwight Garner, NYT 9.8.