Lunch Poems

Lunch Poems -- so-called because O'Hara wrote many of them on his lunch breaks when he worked at MoMA -- contains some of the poet's best-known work, such as "A Step Away From Them," "The Day Lady Died," "Personal Poem," "Ave Maria," and "Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]."

Frank O'Hara was, along with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, a leading member of what came to be known as the New York School of Poets. Closely associated with the Abstract Expressionist painters of the 1950s (and acting as a sort of alternative to the Beats), the New York School poets "favored wit, humor and the advanced irony of the blague (that is, the insolent prank or jest)" (David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde).

O'Hara was an assistant curator as the Museum of Modern Art and wrote for Art News as well. Many of his poems have a jaunty, dashed off feeling that belies their Romantic leanings and intricate aesthetic and social arguments. Pop culture and his enormous circle of friends often enter O'Hara's "I-do-this, I-do-that" poems. The New York School sought to inject a spirit of irreverence and fun into poetry via their Surrealist influences that they felt was sorely missing in the mid-20th-century. In his famous mock-manifesto "Personism," O'Hara wrote: ". . . I don't even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.' "

Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places.

Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal.

Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Distributor: Perseus Distribution
Publication Date: 01-01-2001
Pages: 76
Measurements: 6.20in X 4.90in X 0.20in X 3.00oz