Oct 20 - 26:

Since I’m never sure the best way to broach my thoughts with the studio audience, my blog this week will be praising Frank O’Hara and his wonderful work.

To kick this blog off right, let me start by saying that I really enjoyed O’Hara’s casual tone present in all his work that we read. The pseudo joke was made in class that everyone that met O’Hara thought that they were his best friend (and they were). Reading O’Hara’s poetry made me feel like I was casually chatting with a really good friend that I hadn’t seen in forever. I liked how some O’Hara poems were almost stream of consciousness (which is definitely how some of my friends talk with me), and I really enjoyed how, in others, O’Hara seemed to be answering the questions, ‘Oh, how did your day go? What did you do?’ To risk sounding slightly cliché, O’Hara’s poems really could just be a casual phone call because you were bored, he was bored, why the heck not?

Along those same lines, I enjoyed that O’Hara’s subject matter was generally light-hearted and things I could go through in a day. It helped me to better imagine the content of his poems to be like, ‘oh... I sometimes do/see others do those actions, too!’ As someone who likes to be able to relate to poetry (and does NOT dig the really obscure/”deep”/whatever poetry), O’Hara’s ‘Hey, I’m an average guy, hangin’ out’ style appealed to me.

In particular I enjoyed the content of “Why I Am Not a Painter.” In addition to the slightly humorous story, I felt like the poem related some images of life. I know that last part of the statement sounds like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, Amanda, way to pull out some more standard clichés...’ However, after I finished reading “Why I Am Not a Painter,” I thought, ‘Yeah... Isn’t that the way it goes... You start with this really amazing concept, and then, in the end, your finished product has little to nothing to do with your original idea...’ I also felt like the idea that each person feels like the grass is always greener on the other side was present in how O’Hara says that he’d “rather be/ a painter, but [he] is not” (lines 2-3). Both concepts were concepts that I thought even Joe I-don’t-like-poetry-but-have-to-read-it-for-this-class Schmoe could appreciate and respect.

“The Day Lady Died” appealed to me in how O’Hara makes an average day for him a eulogy for Billie Holiday. People (sometimes famous) die everyday. However, I never think to myself, ‘Self... I should write a poem about my average day to convey my feelings concerning the death...’ I can’t help but step back and admire O’Hara’s poem for doing just that. At first, the poem is really, okay, this is what I did today, and I was like, come on... thought someone was dying! This doesn’t seem that sad at all! O’Hara is only setting up for the, ‘And you thought the day was going so well...’ that happens to all of us at least once in our lives. By going through what he was doing that day, O’Hara manages to better convey his depression over the death than if he had merely said, “One of my favorite jazz singers died... I’m kind of upset by that...”

Such is the beauty of Frank O'Hara.

Fin.