Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems

All summer, I’ve been obsessing over the ghosts of old New York, lamenting the loss of iconic diners and landmarks that maybe never existed and thinking of Frank O’Hara. O’Hara, a poet who lived in New York in the 1950s and ’60s and who died young, as the great ones do, in an accident on Fire Island at age 40, was a jauntily heartbreaking chronicler of everyday life and the small details that make the city sing.

(You might know his work if you’re a Mad Men fan and remember Season Two’s plotline hinging on the book Meditations in an Emergency, read by dreamy Jon Hamm.)

But why am I telling you all of this? We’re a food site, not American Lit 103. Well, my dears, instead of wolfing down some halal chicken from a street vendor during his lunch breaks at the Museum of Modern Art, Frank used the time to write poetry at breakneck speed. His 1964 tome Lunch Poems was thus named by City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (the same man who published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and defended the book against obscenity charges) for the provenance of its contents.

And so, for all you readers dreaming of the freedom of your lunch hour, here’s one of my favorite pieces summing up New York in summer, celebrating those few shining minutes when you’re released from your windowless cubicle and are able to immerse yourself in a glass of papaya juice and the crowded lifeblood of the city.

A Step Away From Them

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.
———————————-On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
————–Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice.

And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.
————–There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they’ll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.
————–A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

(1956)