Poet on fire escape

The best thing - indeed the only redeeming feature - of a snippy and essentially homophobic review in the New York Times of the new Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara (edited by Mark Ford) is this photograph, taken in 1958 by Harry Redl. If you really want to read what someone called William Logan thinks of O'Hara - when you could be reading the man himself - you can go and look up the review itself. In the meantime, the piece below is the third section of his Ann Arbor Variations, and contains a fleeting reference to a fire escape.

3
The alternatives of summer do not remove
us from this place. The fainting into skies
from a diving board, the express train to
Detroit's damp bars, the excess of affection
on the couch near an open window or a Bauhaus
fire escape, the lazy regions of stars, all
are strangers. Like Mayakovsky read on steps
of cool marble, or Yeats danced in a theatre
of polite music. The classroon day of dozing
and grammar, the partial eclipse of the head
in the row in front of the head of poplars,
sweet Syrinx! last out the summer in a stay
of iron. Workmen loiter before urinals, stare
out windows at girders tightly strapped to clouds.
And in the morning we whimper as we cook
an egg, so far from fluttering sands and azure!

Boxes, texts

I wonder how many writers would rather have been visual artists. We know that Frank O'Hara would (see "Why I would rather be a painter than a poet"), but I'm sure he's not alone. The idea of working a field (pace Olson) rather than a line, space rather than time, is something that must draw most writers, particularly of fiction, every now and again. The idea of being able to see it whole, simply by standing back. Some writers succumb to the temptation, with greater or lesser success: Sylvia Plath, David Jones, DH Lawrence. Me. I sometimes think Joseph Cornell is the mirror image of us all. The artist who would rather have written. The sense of narration in his boxed works is so strong that surely he must have been aware of it, and sometimes wondered why he didn't simply write the stuff down. Each box looks like the ideal cover for a novel that waits to be written.

Memory

This is the second poem I'm planning to commit to memory as a whole, instead of in half-recalled scraps. It also, maybe incidentally, acts as a corrective to the over-devout tones of the final verse of my first choice, by John Clare. In fact, reading it again, it acts as a corrective to the entire poem. As Joni Mitchell once, memorably, said: A little yin yang there for you, folks.' It's by Frank O'Hara.

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don't you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?

Grace... to be born and live...

Jane just sent me this photograph of a protest in Dalston Lane, in London, about houses and shops being demolished for some brand new city type development and it made me think of Grace Paley, who would no doubt be angry about such a thing.

So I looked out an interview with her, by A.M. Homes, that's a pleasure and an education to read.

The title to this post, by the way, comes from a Frank O'Hara poem, and continues... 'as variously as possible.' There can't be two writers whose lives are less similar than those of Paley and O'Hara. But I like to think that O'Hara would have endorsed wholeheartedly Paley's claim: All my habits are bad.