The Dish

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

There is no one I would rather read on the subject of Frank O’Hara than John Ashbery. He introduced the Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, which Alfred A. Knopf originally published in 1971, edited by Donald Allen. And now he’s written a short introduction to the 50^th anniversary edition of Lunch Poems, which debuted as Number Nineteen in the legendary City Lights Pocket Poets series, and is now reissued with facsimiles of previously unpublished letters between O’Hara and his editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

On the outside, though, the book looks exactly as it always has, and we learn in one of the O’Hara letters that the familiar—and to so many of us cherished—cover was the choice of the poet, “What color is lunch? Maybe some sort of lipsticky red? (My favorite colors are actually orange and blue.)” We also learn that he didn’t care about the chronological arrangement of the poems in his first major book but did want the date of composition listed after each poem “as it is in Allen’s [Ginsberg’s] Reality Sandwiches.”

“No other poetry collection of the ‘60s did more to shatter the congealed surface of contemporary academic poetry,” Ashbery writes. “Freed from his Museum of Modern Art desk job for an hour or so at lunchtime, O’Hara wanders the streets of midtown, free-associating about trips he has taken, including a recent one to Spain on MoMA business, on which I accompanied him, and to Paris, where he has many friends. . . .Frank’s disabused enthusiasm carries the reader to a marvelous half-fictive universe where we bump elbows with Lana Turner, Billie Holiday, Rachmaninoff, and the Mothers of America, whom he urges: ‘let your kids go to the movies! . . .They may even be grateful to you/ for their first sexual experience.’ Horrors! To compound this unthinkable suggestion, O’Hara even gets away with using the word ‘fuck’ more than once, and yet he’s no macho spewer of hard truths, but a kind, inquiring, deeply curious and attractive youngish man, passing a few minutes of speculative rumination before heading back to the office, like all of us.”

“Song (Is it dirty)” by Frank O’Hara:

Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that’s what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirty
that’s what you think of in the city
you don’t refuse to breathe do you

someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very
he’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes

that’s what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that’s not a thought that’s soot

and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don’t refuse to breathe do you

– 1959

(From Lunch Poems, Expanded 50^th Anniversary Edition © 1964, 2014 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Used by permission of City Lights Books, San Francisco)

Roger Grenier contemplates how writers approach death:

With certain authors, including some of the very greatest, we cannot speak of a last work. With them an entire life’s work is constantly put back on the loom, and so is condemned to remain unfinished. Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil are in this category. Nietzsche wavers between the desire to construct and a totally free form. Only death stopped Proust from pasting strips of paper onto his manuscripts and his page proofs. With Musil, we never stop digging away at the mass of unpublished pages that supplement The Man Without Qualities. Critics attribute his inability to finish to masochism. But is having more and more to say, trying to reach perfection, really masochistic?

Saint Bonaventure, the Franciscan philosopher nicknamed the Seraphic Doctor, supposedly had the unique privilege of continuing his memoirs after his death. François-René de Chateaubriand, the first great French Romantic, was jealous: “I don’t hope for such a privilege, but I would like to resuscitate at the ghostly hour—at least to correct my page proofs.”

This chimerical wish was provoked by Chateaubriand’s worries about his Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb. More than once, this monument, which he intended to be posthumous, was in danger of becoming antehumous, due to the financial problems that always plagued the viscount. He gave some readings from the Memoirs in February and March 1834, and accounts of those readings were published. One can find fragments of the memoirs in his 1836 “Essay on English Literature.” Yet he complained, “I prefer to speak from the bottom of my grave.” In 1836, he sold the Memoirs to a company that promised to publish nothing until after his death. The affair took a worrisome turn in October 1844. The company sold rights to Emile de Girardin to publish excerpts from the Memoirs in his newspaper, La Presse. An unhappy Chateaubriand later wrote about seeing his Memoirs reduced “to bits and pieces”: “No one can form an idea of what I have suffered in being compelled to mortgage my grave.”

(The grave of Marcel Proust, via Wikimedia Commons)

A reader makes a nuanced argument:

There are some real problems with Miller’s position. Men increase their hours, while women reduce theirs. As a rather natural consequence, men get bonuses and raises. This happens when one works longer hours and work harder. Women want to work less. As a rather natural consequence, women have trained employers to be suspicious of women after they have children. Even if a particular women works longer and harder, she is tainted by the general reaction. I don’t think this is the fault of employers. Employers have the rather sad duty of living in the real world where economic decisions actually matter and have consequences. Thus, they are typically a conservative (in the traditional sense) bunch who go with what mostly happens: a women will work less and want more time off.

What we really need to do is to stop being a society that demands that the adults in a two-parent family both work. We need to re-organize back to the idea of one parent works to support the family and one stays home. We should be egalitarian about which one stays home and encourage fathers to stay home as much as mothers.

But we need to give employers both the message that the working parent can be fully counted upon to work and the stay-at-home parent can take on the real responsibility of raising children (which is wildly hard work, so much so that I would never, ever do it; even the sight of a day care center is enough to make me queasy).

The easiest way to do this is to credit the stay-at-home parent with Social Security credits equal to the working parent. The bonus for society would be fewer workers, higher wages for the remaining workers, and neighborhoods with adults home to keep track of the children. The time from after school to parents return is the most dangerous time for children and, with a parent home, that would end. Not only do studies clearly show children do better in two parent families (the sex of the two parents really doesn’t matter), but that children do even better in two-parent families where one stays home and takes on the daily task of raising the children (please see: Family Structure and Children’s Health in the United States: Findings From the National Health Interview Survey, 2001­ – 2007, published by the CDC).

For far, far too long, we’ve allowed our society to be organized to optimize what is best for corporate profits. We need to organize around what is best for our citizens, particularly families. I write this as a single gay man without children, but someone who fully recognizes a society that puts children and families first will be a healthier one.

Robin Lane Fox surveys a history of plants in poetry:

Surprisingly, the poetry of flowers is often patchy and ill-informed. None of the ancient Greek poets mentions the brilliant wild tulips that run like red rivers through parts of the Greek landscape. Chinese poets focus on a narrow canon of flowers, soaked in symbolism and hidden meanings. They say nothing about the heavenly wild flora, the superb shrubs and mountain flowers that have transformed Western gardens since their collection and introduction by Europeans. John Milton’s poetry describes bunches of flowers that would never flower during one and the same season. No gardener, especially in Britain this year, would agree that April is “the cruellest month” and in no gardens or landscapes known to me does April breed “lilacs out of the dead land,” least of all on the American East Coast within range of the young T.S. Eliot.

The exceptions prove the rule. Sappho had an engagingly sharp eye for the flowers of her native Lesbos, including milk-white pansies. Theocritus’ poems, some three hundred years later, include particular flowers from his second home, Cos, and also from Sicily or southern Italy that he probably therefore visited. Shakespeare of course observed and included many flowers, and D.H. Lawrence was also unusually alert, not just to dark blue Bavarian gentians but to the dark trunks of almond trees, which he acutely observed during his time in Taormina and rendered in poetry there. William Cowper could garden well, but among living poets, only James Fenton has had a garden that challenged expert gardeners with its assemblages of snowdrops and highly unusual plants.

(Photo by Susanne Nilsson)

Colin Marshall introduces Dripped, an animated tribute to Jackson Pollack:

In its 1940s New York City setting, painting-swiping protagonist Jack lives not just to make world-renowned canvasses his own, but a part of him. When he gets these works of art back to his apartment, he doesn’t even consider selling them; instead, he chews and swallows them, thus enabling him to assume in body the forms and colors famously expressed in paint on their surfaces. We are what we eat, and Jack eats art, but even becoming the art of others ultimately leaves him unsatisfied. Determined to paint and eat a canvas of his own, he finds his stomach can’t handle his work in progress. Thrown into a bout of frustration, an angered Jack tosses one of his paintings to the ground, randomly splattering it with every color at hand. And thus he discovers, in this animated fantasy, the technique that Jackson Pollock would pioneer in reality.