Lunch Poems: The Case for Writing Fast

Frank O’Hara wrote most of these poems in the time between leaving his desk at the Museum of Modern Art and returning to it. That fact is usually offered as trivia. It should be offered as the whole argument. Lunch Poems is not a book about lunch breaks — it is a book that insists the lunch break is enough time, enough occasion, enough life, to make a poem worth keeping.

The Poem to Start With

Begin with ‘A Step Away From Them.’ It is O’Hara walking through midtown, naming the things he passes — a hamburger, a construction worker, a headline, a friend recently dead — and it does not build to a revelation so much as arrive at one sideways, the way grief actually arrives when you are on your lunch hour and not expecting it. The poem trusts that noticing, done precisely enough, is already a kind of feeling. It is the best single entry point because it shows you the method before it asks you to admire the results.

From there, ‘The Day Lady Died’ makes the same case with more grief in it, and less explanation.

The Argument for Casualness

The case Lunch Poems makes — and it needs making, because plenty of people still don’t believe it — is that offhand is not the same as unfinished. O’Hara’s poems read like talk: run-on, name-dropping, interrupted by the weather or a friend’s phone number. But the looseness is a technique, not an absence of one. He is doing something difficult, which is making attention itself the subject, without dressing attention up as insight. The poems don’t perform depth. They perform a Tuesday. That a Tuesday, rendered exactly enough, turns out to hold real weight — that’s the whole demonstration.

This is why the book sits oddly next to more self-consciously major work of the period. It doesn’t want the job of being major. It wants to have been an accurate hour.

The Reservation

Here is the honest problem: not every poem in the book earns its casualness. Some read like exactly what they were — notes jotted between errands, interesting mainly because O’Hara wrote them and not because the poem itself does much. The name-dropping, charming in small doses, becomes a barrier if you don’t already know who Larry Rivers or Bill Berkson were to him; a few pieces feel like private mail that got published. Read the whole collection in one sitting and the effect can flatten rather than accumulate.

Read a third of it, though — the poems people actually return to — and the argument holds. This is for readers who’ve been told poetry requires occasion, and who’d like to be told otherwise, briefly, on a lunch break of their own.