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| Rivers, Larry. Detail from "The Studio". Oil on canvas. 82-1/2 x 193-1/2 in. 1956. |
Who would have thought that an exclamation point could mean to much? Still, much like the duality of O'Hara's use of the punctuation, the idea of it remains as alien to me as it does commonplace, neither feeling negating the other but intensifying the essential fruit of O'Hara's work. Such is the nature of a good paradox: It doesn't negate; rather, pushes the common boundaries of what we think to be true or, even possible, until you realize that you've never felt so human, uncertain, and sane.
For our next portfolio assignment, I'm stealing a few pages from Koch, an assignment that seems appropriate considering we just finished with O'Hara and now we're on to Koch. Koch wrote this for readers of O'Hara and is his book, Sleeping on the Wing. There's a copy of this assignment in the course packet, but some of it is cut off and a little garbled at the end.
There are two options for this opportunity.
1)
Frank O'Hara said in an essay about writing, 'You just go on your nerve.' And to get to the brilliant, concise, honest kind of sense there is in 'Sleeping on the Wing,' [note: Koch is talking about O'Hara's poem and not his own book, thankfully] you probably have to hive up advance planning and logic and restraint, and trust your nerve.
Write a poem that has a dream in it. Start from anywhere -- from a detail in the dream, or just from a thought. The important thing isn't to get the plot of the dream just right. The idea is to use the dream (some of it or all of it) to write a poem. Be as casual about the details of the dream as you are about your other thoughts. As you write, let the poem be open to thoughts, associations, whatever comes to mind, even if they seem, at the moment, trivial, strange, silly, incomplete, or disconnected. Whenever anything in the dream makes you think of something -- an idea, a feeling, a memory -- say it. Like O'Hara's poem, yours can be a combination of dreams and of thinking. One thing that might help you to get in a mood of dreamy concentration is to write while listening to music (Frank O'Hara often did this). Remember, nothing that you write has to be final -- you can always change the poem later.
2)
Another kind of poem to write is a poem in which the subject is a day, like Frank O'Hara's 'The Day Lady Died.' O'Hara's poem is about a day of doing a lot of ordinary things, then finding out something extraordinary: that someone who meant a lot to him has died...
Your poem about a day might be about a completely ordinary day or, like O'Hara's, an ordinary day on which one extraordinary thing happened -- something that happened to you, something that you thought, something you found out. If you do end with something like that, be sure to make it just one in a list with the others, described plainly and not prepared for with any special buildup. It will probably be clear which things are more and less important to you; and, also, you can refer to it in your title, as Frank O'Hara does. In any case, jsut start talking about this ordinary or mostly ordinary day without deciding in advance what is going to come next. Let the poem surprise you a little, like a walk you take when you're going nowhere in particular. Let the poem start sometime at the beginning of the day. Try making it a rule that you'll put a name of someone of something in every line -- use the names of streets, bridges, friends, movie stars, restaurants, soft drinks, rivers, magazines, whatever. This is, instead of saying "We walk down the street," say "Jennie and I walk down Cypress Road." You can write it in the present as if you were still in the middle of it, saying what you do, what you're thinking, what you remember, what the weather is like, what you're wearing, what you say, what you see. If you revise the poem, one way to decide what you really want to be in it is to decide what seems to be part of the real feeling and mood in that day. (Koch, 251-253)
Lastly, regardless of the prompt that you follow, please write a short response (1-2 pages) that details a comparison between how you intended to write and the "movement" of O'Hara's poem.
The poems mentioned in these prompts are reproduced below.
Due: 3/18
Sleeping On the Wing
Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries, "Sleep!
O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!"
that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,
veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon
does when a car honks or a door slams, the door
of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.
Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you
are over the Atlantic. Where is Spain? where is
who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,
was it? A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity
and your position in respect to human love. But
here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.
Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe
that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?
to travel always over some impersonal vastness,
to be out of, forever, neither in nor for!
The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!
and was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too. Those figures etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.
Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,
or sleeping? Is there speed enough? And, swooping,
you relinquish all that you have made your own,
the kingdom of your self sailing, for you must awake
and breathe your warmth in this beloved image
whether it's dead or merely disappearing,
as space is disappearing and your singularity.
from "Meditations in an Emergency"
The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
from "Lunch Poems"
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