PicoBlog

These meditations are named after a book by Frank O’Hara. Frank O’Hara has been one of my favorite poets, if not my favorite poet, since my late teens. When I was in high school, my father gave me his college copy, an original edition, of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, which was one of the first books I purchased for my wife after we met, which includes the poem “Steps,” which ends:

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

I mean, come on!

Frank O’Hara was a New Yorker from Baltimore, a museum curator at MoMA, an incredibly urbane gay man who died on Fire Island in 1966, at forty years old, when he was struck by a dune buggy—insane.

I remember I once saw the poet Marie Howe read from a new collection, and she opened with a morbid game, using her fingers to imitate legendary poet deaths, to see if we could guess who was who. I was able to identify O’Hara, though I definitely didn’t recognize Sylvia Plath (all credit to Howe’s efforts, but it’s pretty hard to pantomine a woman sticking her head in the oven).

O’Hara’s approach to writing poetry was serious but flip, very personal but still tied to the world. John Ashbery, a friend of his, described O’Hara “dashing the poems off at odd moments—in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people—he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them.”

Basically, he was a natural. I like to picture O’Hara writing “My Heart” half-drunk at a 1950s loft party in Greenwich Village:

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one “strain” to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says “That's
not like Frank!”, all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart—
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

These meditations of mine are meant to be about beautiful things—and maybe it’s my sad-girl romantic side, gazing out windows with a (these days imaginary) cigarette in hand, but there’s very little about Frank O’Hara’s life I don’t find inspiring. He was so cool, if just going by his peers: Edward Gorey was a roommate in college, Grace Hartigan was a friend, Alex Katz was a friend. Based on the biographies, O’Hara loved to be surrounded by people, and he also craved to be left alone. Movies, drinks, writing poems on his lunch breaks—preoccupations of inward-outwards types?

I lived in Greenwich Village in my early twenties. By that point, I’d stopped writing poems and was making truly awful attempts at writing novels—I’d wake at five, write for three hours, then leave for work, a fifteen-minute walk, and my trip to the office would pass one of O’Hara’s old apartments—90 University Place (there’s a plaque), below Union Square—and sometimes I’d wonder if I’d have a shot at a similar life, all the art and friends, high-brow/low-brow fun. To be clear, I was all about appearances then, bravado and doubt. But what choice did I have? What choice does anyone at that age, always self-revising, so ardently trying to contrive a self? In O’Hara’s poem “Meditations in an Emergency,” the one these newsletters are named for, he writes, “It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.”

Though is that true? Is it easy? Maybe it was easy for him: inwardly gorgeous, outwardly unsure.

I’ll close with another favorite, “Animals,” from 1950. And if you’re at all like me, i.e., no longer in your twenties, maybe it will hit for you, too:

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

🪴 Hey. If you enjoy these meditations, here’s the truth: I’m only able to take time to write them because some of you—less than 10%—support my work.

So, if you have the means to become a paid subscriber, even for a month or two, your support would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

In tomorrow’s supplement for paying subscribers:

• Frank O’Hara resources for the curious—books, a map of his Manhattan apartments, etc.

• In anticipation of a big Japan trip, the bags I researched to replace my current travel setup

• A favorite old reggae album, a favorite new shoegaze album, and more

Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly mini-essay from writer Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with 3+ things to love, plus a monthly dispatch from the road, for some inbox wanderlust ⛰️

Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now. His most recent novel, The Last Kid Left, was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. Titles mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored on a Bookshop list, which pays a commission for any books sold.

ncG1vNJzZmiqn6iypL7Ap6pnq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZL1wstGapaRln52us60%3D