Modeling Poem #2

“Long Walk Home”
Amanda Zalud

Hey Mom
It’s me
It’s 3:10 on a Wednesday
And I’m walking back
And the weather hates me.
Well, not just me.
The weather hates everyone.
But it’s October
And if I were October
I’d hate everyone too.
And it’s cold.
And I’m sweating.
Which is weird.
And it makes my coat useless
Because it’s supposed to keep
Moisture out, not in.
And some girl walks by in a sweatshirt
And some other girl with a cigarette
Smoker tells sweater to put on a coat—
She’ll get sick.
I want to tell smoker to put out her cigarette—
She’ll die.
But I keep walking.
And I suppose I’m really calling
To hear you tell me that you love me
Because I’m an adult
And things haven’t been going how I imagined
And at the end of the day
The only one you still have is your mom.
Hello, you’ve reached…
I guess you’re busy.
I wish you answered.

Discussion:

My poem is styled in the manner of Frank O’Hara. Like with my last modeling poem, I tried to take various elements of O’Hara’s poetry to try to create a poem that echoes his work, but does not completely copy it. As with before, I feel this method more closely resembles what the contemporary poets we are studying have done.

As we discussed in class, O’Hara once described poems as little phone calls. “Long Walk Home” takes this idea and is literally a phone call to the persona’s mother while walking “back” (line 4). The phone call is casual and what a reader might expect a bored phone call to your mom to be like. The poem maintains this casual tone until the end of the poem when the reader discovers that the conversation they thought was taking place with the persona’s mom, is actually taking place in the persona’s head as the persona waits for the mom to answer.

By starting the poem with an offhand, casual conversation, the poem’s mood switch at the end of the poem becomes a little more pronounced. The persona does not start the poem by stating depression, nor do they state it after the switch in tone occurs. However, it is because this switch occurs so subtly that the switch is noticed. O’Hara does something similar in “The Day Lady Died.” O’Hara’s poem starts offhand and casual, telling the reader about his average day. However, when O’Hara sees that Billie Holiday died, the tone of the poem shifts from casual tone to a bit more meaningful of a tone as O’Hara contemplates the death of the jazz singer. In “Long Walk Home,” the tone change is due to a combination of the persona admitting the real reason for the phone call and that the persona’s mother does not answer the phone call. While not as sobering for the reader as a death, the depression present should still be relatable as a negative force within the persona’s life.

I also tried to recreate the flowing, almost stream of consciousness story that I feel like O’Hara definitely creates in his lunch poems. To try and achieve this, the persona talks about what is happening around them as they walk on the phone. The events are spilling out from the persona as the events are occurring, which gives a bit of a flowing feel to the walk. While the persona is walking, we are walking with the persona and seeing everything that the persona is. Sometimes the topic seems a bit random and a little rushed, but because that is the case, we as readers are better able to relate to the walk and imagine the walk actively happening. O’Hara employs this technique in “Poem,” “A Step Away from Them,” and “The Day Lady Died.”

O’Hara does not seem to rely on a rhyme scheme, so I tried (and succeeded) to stay away from rhyming at all within the poem. In place of rhyming, O’Hara creates a flowing stream of words. As previously stated, I attempted to recreate this flow in “Long Walk Home,” but with varying results.

While the finished product was rough, I felt like “Long Walk Home” could be considered in the style of O’Hara for all of the little nuances that make O’Hara’s poetry enjoyable.

Fin.