Poem of the Week 2014/18

for National Poetry Month, poets writing to poets: James Schuyler on Frank O'Hara

To Frank O'Hara

for Don Allen

And now the splendor of your work is here
so complete, even
"a note on the type"
yes, total, even the colophon

and now people you never met will meet
and talk about your work.
So witty, so sad,
so you: even your lines have

a broken nose. And in the crash
of certain chewed-up words
I see you again dive

into breakers! How you scared
us, no, dazzled us swimming
in an electric storm
which is what you were
more lives than a cat

dancing, you had a feline
grace, poised on the balls
of your feet ready
to dive and

all of it, your poems,
compressed into twenty years.
How you charmed, fumed,
blew smoke from your nostrils

like a race horse that
just won the race
steaming, eager to run
only you used words.

Stay up all night? Who wants to sleep?
It is not your voice I hear
it is your words I see
foam flecks and city girders

as once from a crosstown bus
I saw you waiting a cab in light rain
(drizzle) as once you
gave me a driving lesson and the radio

played The Merry Widow. It broke us up.
As once under the pie plate tree
(Paulonia)
it broke you up to read Sophie Tucker

– with the Times in a hammock –
had a gold tea service. "It's way out
on the nut," she said, "for service,
but it was my dream."

James Schuyler

Schuyler and O'Hara were long time friends; both were associated with what was labeled the "New York School" of poets, analogous to the "New York School" of painters, the action painters and abstract expressionist that the poets hung out with (both men worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York). Both led messy lives, in the echt gay Bohemian style of their times. Schuyler worked for a few years as a secretary to W H Auden; apparently he found the latter's formal inventiveness and virtuosity intimidating, and part of his reaction was to develop in the opposite direction, towards a less structured poetics (similarly, Beckett's experience as a secretary to Joyce during the writing of Finnegans Wake led him to realize he could only grow in the opposite direction, towards the stripped-down). Both of these New York poets makes subtle, conversational music out of what might look like random detritus until they make the readers see it with their amused, intelligent, enthusiastic eyes, revealing that it is actually the stuff of real poetry.

O'Hara died young, only 40 years old, after being struck early one morning by a vehicle on a Fire Island beach. In this poem, Schuyler contemplates all that is left of the man he knew: his collected poems, which will, more and more as the people who actually knew him pass on, replace the man himself as the reality of "Frank O'Hara." The line between the man and his poetry is particularly blurry in the case of an observational, autobiographical poet like O'Hara. In this poem Schuyler slips back and forth between the two entities, the man he knew and the poems that man wrote: "so witty, so sad, / so you: even your lines have / a broken nose." The "crash of words" turns into a memory of the man diving into the waves (crash there might be an oblique reference to O'Hara's death), and the reckless, enthralling way he lived. As the dead man recedes farther into memory, his influence remains in how Schuyler sees the world: "It is not your voice I hear / it is your words I see" . . . .  Schuyler moves towards some memorable glimpses of his friend, ending with a somewhat camp reference to the sort of glam performer O'Hara enjoyed (see his poem Lana Turner has collapsed!); in this case, it's Sophie Tucker with her golden tea service: a useless, beautiful, heartbreaking dream.

I took this from the Selected Poems of James Schuyler, though since Schuyler has also now become his poems, perhaps I should upgrade to the Collected Poems.