Lunch Poems

"I chose two books that deliver a reader into a style and worldview that is completely its own. Great poets create not just a set of discrete poems that say something about the world in which we abide, but a way of looking at the world encoded in their style. Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems are so much fun. He wrote them during his lunch breaks. What is lunch break? It’s a part of our day when we’re alive and jazzed and hungry for more, probably hungry for lunch, but also hungry for a little leisure, a little stimulation outside the office. O’Hara writes these poems in a casual voice that’s characteristically his. He called them ‘I do this, I do that’ poems. You follow him around New York City and watch his imagination hunger after and take satisfaction in things. It’s like entering into intimacy with an extraordinary human being. Poetry and other arts have been essential to each other at times in their development, including during the moment of Modernism. Modernists were reimaging the form of art, with Cubism, mobiles, and fresh poetic forms. At O’Hara’s height, during the 1950s, avant-garde poets and painters discovered each other and became friends. I love poets in whom one sees openness towards other arts. As I said earlier, Langston Hughes loved emerging jazz music. Walt Whitman loved the opera. Emily Dickinson played the piano. These poets’ conversancy with music tell us about the poems they wrote."

"The San Francisco luminary Bambi Lake gave me a copy of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems outside of the Eagle after she had been kicked out. I was 24; it was a formative book to read at that age."