Memorable Poem #2
Sometimes ideas arrive fully formed, as if they were accessed in sleep. Maybe the intuitively written poem comes from the same part of the brain as the content of our dreams. Maybe poems that access intuitive magic use the same process as remembering a dream. These poems insist upon their own trajectory, and it requires a certain fearlessness to let what seem eccentric turns stand. There is a tendency to revise the memorable qualities out of a poem, out of fear, timidity, a desire to control. We want to use our minds to write; we don’t want our minds using us to write. The danger is in ending up with something controlled, beautifully structured, smart, and completely forgettable.
This obscure Frank O’Hara poem vibrates with intuitive energy. It takes two surprising turns at the end that, I think, lift it into the realm of the memorable.
Frank O’Hara
Prose for the TimesYesterday I accepted an invitation to a party. But I had no sooner arrived and let my coat tumble, exhausted, onto a bed, when a perfect stranger whom I immediately and unwittingly admired asked me if I were a poet.
Many guests crowded around the two of us, as at a wedding. “I suppose I am,” I said, “for I do write poems.”
“Well write one now, will you?” he said, smiling fiercely, faces aureoled at his shoulders and elbows. A few tendrils of hair escaped the opening of his shirt, fled upward to his neck, and they were not the color of his eyebrows!
“I’m sorry, but I don’t feel like one just now, if you don’t mind,” I said, thinking of many things, chiefly, perhaps, of childhood, when I would make myself vomit so I wouldn’t have to go to parties.
“Well, what makes you feel like writing one?” he said, and kicked me in the balls.
Ugh!
As I hobbled to a chair, however, I managed to somewhat regain my composure. “You needn’t be afraid of me,” I said, turning. “I don’t love you.”[New York, 1952]