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.

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.