O'Hara, Frank. Lunch Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964.
When reading Lunch Poems for the first time, you have the sensation of overhearing a telephone call or cocktail party conversation, full of references to people you don't know and places you have never been. The conversation is witty, lively, spontaneous, and ranges at times within the same poem-at times within the same line-from incredibly vulnerable and intimate to highly affected and playful. It transforms a mundane world of shoeshines and taxicabs and hangovers (and yes, lunch) into something shinier, brighter.
Some poems, like "The Day Lady Died," or "Lana Turner Has Collapsed," use cultural references that have survived the decades, and required no extra glossing. Other references, to painters whose fame has been eclipsed by others', to historical events (Krushchev's visit to New York), and to locations around New York, may require some legwork for readers who didn't live through the fifties and sixties, or who have never been to New York. That work is a small price to pay to appreciate the cultural backdrop of the poems; and even if the latter-day reader misses some of the references, the beauty of O'Hara's work is still compelling.
The wittiness and playful high spirits in O'Hara's work are often conveyed by camp, or dramatic emotional high notes that are (sometimes) used for ironic effect. We see this in "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)" (78). "Lana Turner has collapsed!" the poem opens breathlessly, then steps back to note in a more mundane fashion the rain and snow of the day on which the speaker saw the headline. The short poem ends on a partly reproving, partly pleading, and all campy note: "I have been to lots of parties/and acted perfectly disgraceful/but I never actually collapsed/oh Lana Turner we love you get up" (78).
The comic high drama of the final line is echoed in many places in the book, and is part of the vitality that makes these poems so lively and fun. O'Hara gives us wonderful lines like "I have in my hand only 25¢, it's so meaningless to eat!" (1), and "I'll be happy here and happy there, full/of tea and tears" (8), and especially these lines in "Five Poems":
an invitation to lunch
HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?
when I only have 16 cents and 2
packages of yoghurt
there's a lesson in that, isn't there
like in Chinese poetry when a leaf falls?
hold off on the yoghurt till the very
last, when everything may improve (49)
Sometimes the camp is pure fun, as in the Lana Turner poem; other times it is used as a contrast to the real emotional exposure (and vulnerability) of poems like "Personal Poem." "Personal Poem" describes a friendly chat with LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), in which the subject matter ranges from somber (Miles Davis being "clubbed 12/times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop," 32) to literary ("we don't like Lionel Trilling/we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like/Henry James so much we like Herman Melville," 33), but the tone of the poem remains fairly light throughout. At the end of the poem, however, O'Hara tips his hand:
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so
Slipped in at the end of this chatty poem is a quiet longing for contact, for intimacy beyond the conversation with a fellow poet in a bar.
O'Hara employs camp not only as a counterpoint to those moments of real emotional vulnerability; the camp serves to underscore the lust, longing, love, tenderness, and regret by its vitality, it insistence on joy. This counterpoint and amplification is at work in "At Kamin's Dance Bookshop," dedicated to Vincent Warren, one of the important loves in O'Hara's life, and a dancer for the New York City Ballet.
The speaker in the poem wills love into being, wills it into becoming more substantial, more fleshy, less of a shade. The fact that this solidification occurs in a dream intensifies the longing that permeates the poem. The invocation of Fanny Elssler (a dancer who would perhaps have been better known in 1962 than in 2002) at the beginning and the end encodes the poem (it is she to whom the poem is literally addressed). It also signifies the one who is actually addressed, the lover who is also a dancer, to whom the poem is dedicated. The reference to Fanny Elssler is a decoy, a campy dodge, but is not meant to resist decoding.
The personal elements in his poems allows an intimacy rare in the work of other poets. In many cases he achieves this effect through direct address: "you were there always and you know all about these/things/as indifferent as an encyclopedia with your/calm brown eyes" (38).
Even the quieter poems still have an unmistakable vitality to them. One of those, "How to Get There" is a quiet meditation on a foggy day on the West Side, in which the external reality melds with the internal mental and emotional state of the speaker: "betrayal staving off loneliness, I see the fog lunge in/and hide it/where are you?/here I am on the sidewalk" (44). When the fog lifts, the loneliness is uncovered again, "and we drift into the clear sky enthralled/by our disappointment/never to be alone again/never to be loved" (45-6).
There are a few poems that seem to defy the understanding of the reader, that perhaps operate more in a truly surreal mode, as opposed to associative. I found "Alma" to be one of those: we zoom from the dancer under three suns ("one black one red"), who is "fanning the purple sky getting purple," to the image of children watching "munching muffins, the cock-roaches like nuggets half hid in the bran. Boy! how are you, Prester John? the smile of the river, so searching, so enamelled" (3). Most of the poems in the book feel much more grounded than that, however, grounded in a place, time, or character (or often all three).
O'Hara's Lunch Poems, like his work collected elsewhere, is lively and quicksilver, rather than somber or self-important or ponderous. The vitality of his work, which readers first found so arresting during O'Hara's lifetime, continue to testify to O'Hara's love of life, his exuberance, and his joy.