A Step Away From Them- Frank O'Hara

I first met Frank in my second year at University when I was young and impressionable. I had managed to squeak in to university without having had a proper grown-up relationship with a book but being able, for reasons still a bit unclear to me, to understand a lot of the books put in front of me. I like to think of it in those most intellectual of terms- a bloody fluke. Still, this is not a therapy session.

I still can't remember the first poem of Frank O'Hara's that I read (hence this little experiment) but I can remember first reading the one I'm going to write a bit about now 'A Step Away From Them' which can be found in a little book called Lunch Poems (part of the City Lights Books Pocket Poets Series, San Francisco 1964). I've found the poem here so you know what I'm talking about http://www.frankohara.org/writing.html#step

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In his poem Frank is walking, as he so often likes to do, in the streets of Manhattan on his lunch break, observing his surroundings with benevolence and whimsy, walking with the air of a Baudelairian flaneur (an aimless poetic narrative wanderer through urban settings, traditionally Paris). I could spend the length of a dissertation (and believe me, I tried) enthusing about this poem but instead, I'll draw out some of my favourite points.

To me, this poem feels inclusive and if poetry scares you, this is a fine example of a poem giving you a great big hug. For one thing, it's a fantastic example of 'looking around' in a city. One of the things I love about this poem so much is the continual stop /start of the observations in style as well as content: after a stanza of walking, following a series of observations down the sidewalks, O'Hara 'stops to look at wristwatches' in a split line all to itself as the cats play in sawdust at the end of the stanza, a moment for himself as his reader catches up to him, and is drawn into unity again with Frank the narrator.

The elegant synergy of language with image in the first stanza, where the skirts 'flipping/above heels and blow up over/grates', lift and swirl over three lines, like breezes stirred up by the cabs he mentions after. His choice of language is masterful- everything is 'ing', lilting and alive- you can feel it on your skin. At the end of the second stanza his use of time when 'everything suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of/a Thursday', mixes the transience of time with a particular moment- the ever-disappearing lunch break in the never-ending succession of weekdays where, for a few minutes at least, we are all free to roam around.

There is beautiful inclusiveness, mirroring the New York myth (and misnomer) even in observation: the negro, the blond girl and momentarily linked by the narrator- the unifying force, almost at one with New York itself. And yet Frank's own sense of self is not secure: when he mentions Bunny (Lang) and painters John Latouche and Jackson Pollack and asks 'But is the/earth as full as life was full, of them?', the wanderer is momentarily lost, even within the confines of his own art and the space in the city he is forging for himself. The ability to observe, concretely (subjectively) and also to question one's own existence in a changed world is something we can do, almost simultaneously. Walking around in the city certainly lends itself to this.

It is this that I also love most about Frank, and about this poem. This is not a hoity-toity ode to obscurity. This is the spontaneous act of walking out into the city. This is looking around, and feeling- as is so gorgeous to do in the summer heat- the world move and bend before us, with benevolent interest. His language is simply accessible but rewards can be obscure to his reader (I had never heard of Pierre Reverdy until this poem), or universal (with just a touch of the exotic): 'a glass of papaya juice'. It's worth mentioning that O'Hara belonged to a movement challenging the perceptions of academic poetry, of what was 'good' (high?) art or not. And yes it can be saccharine. And no this is not abject realism. But there is humanity here which struck a chord in me, and has never really left.

P.S. posts won't always be this long. I just really love this poem (see also O'Hara's 'The Day Lady Died', 'Steps')