Poems Katie Couric Would Like: Frank O'Hara's Meditation in an Emergency

WHEN THE SEASON TWO premiere of Mad Men made Frank O'Hara's 1957 collection of poems, Meditations in an Emergency, a major point in one of its subplots, the unlikliest of poets was, overnight, thrust into American popular culture. Immediately following the show--and even during the program--viewers all over America were typing "Meditations in an Emergency" into Google. When the search engine kicked out "Frank O'Hara" and the accompanying smattering of poems, Mad Men aficionados were no doubt puzzling over what the possible connection might be between this poet and their beloved show.

Perhaps even Katie Couric was wondering about O'Hara and if she'd like his poems.

"In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love." That's O'Hara with one of the best lines in one of the best poems from Meditations. It's a line that, when taken out of context (like in a blog), appears to be about romantic relationships in a time of war, or the complexities of divorce, or love and death during the Great Depression. But, one reason O'Hara is great is the simple fact that this line refers not to any economic, natural, or emotional disaster but to movies!

It's true.

This line is the catalytic moment in a funny, goofy, over-the-top poem called "To the Film Industry in Crisis." Had Walt Whitman been around in the 1950s and been obsessed with Johnny Weissmuller, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe, this is the poem he would have written. Expansive and ambulatory, its catalogs of names and notions actually make you believe that Hollywood is/was in crisis.

No American poet was more enamored with visual culture than O'Hara, and no poet would have loved contemporary TV (and having his poem appear on TV) more than he. Many of the poems in Meditations are homages to celebrities (James Dean), to the love of celebrities, to love itself as embodied by celebrities.

Obviously, this awareness of celebrity presence is one reason Katie Couric would like O'Hara's poems, but she (and most readers) would also be attracted to O'Hara's love of attraction. Drawn to everyone and everything, O'Hara looks at everything through the lens of love:

O boy, their childhood was like so many oatmeal cookies.
I need you, you need me, yum, yum. Anon it became suddenly.
(Blocks)

Love, love, love,
honeymoon isn't used much in poetry these days
(For Janice and Kenneth to Voyage)


I am moved by the multitudes of your intelligence
and sometimes, returning, I become the sea--
in love with your speed, your heaviness and breath.
(Ode)

One thing I love is O'Hara's knack for playing with easy assumptions and cliches about authenticity, depth, and what we might call "appearances." O'Hara is a master at teasing out the nuances of interior and exterior. "It is easy to be beautiful;" quips O'Hara, "it is difficult to appear so."

Indeed!

No doubt Katie Couric thinks something like this every day, just before that red light atop Camera 1 flashes on.

Robert Rauschenberg: The Most Poetic of Painters

WHEN ARTIST ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG died last week, America lost one of its most inventive visionaries. While Rauschenberg was not as overtly literary as someone like Robert Motherwell, Rauschenberg's work was notably poetic. Like no other painter, he fused collage and lyricism, visual culture and high culture, pastiche and poetry.

Rauschenberg's work was important not simply because of its artistry, but also because one could see the artist grappling with the increasingly prevalent and provocative pull of popular visual culture like television, advertising, and film. In this sense, he resembles some of the New York poets like John Ashbery and in particular, Frank O'Hara, who were also interested in the iconography of contemporary American culture. In a piece like Retroactive I (1964), the artist juxtaposes symbolic imagery of JFK and the Apollo space mission while also manipulating their color, detail, and meaning. Ashbery does something quite similar in his classic poem "Farm Implements and Rutabaga in a Landscape," when, in a very painterly manner, he plays with the ubiquity and popularity of the characters of the Popeye cartoon within the framework of a classic still life painting. Just as Rauschenberg juxtaposes seemingly unrelated images in Retroactive I and Untitled (1955) (to the left), so, too, does Ashbery. Playing with icons, taking them out of context and re-presenting them forces us to think about language (both visual and verbal) in new ways. Similarly, in "Ave Maria" and "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed)," O'Hara goes Rauschenberg, funking up icons, undermining expectations, and de-poeticizing poetry.

Rauschenberg's poetic leanings don't stop there, though. Like a poet, Rauschenberg pays close attention to grammar. In fact, in many ways, his work turned on linguistic structures. Graham Coulter-Smith argues that Rauschenberg utilizes "linguistic abstraction" rather than visual abstraction. Indeed, like many of the poets from the 1950s and 60s who moved away from abstract poetry in favor of writing about real people, celebrities, and social issues, Rauschenberg 's images tell a story rather than simply express.

Persimmon (1964), is arguably his most famous piece. Riffing on the iconic painting, Venus at Her Toilet, by Peter Paul Rubens (not Pee-Wee Herman), Rauschenberg participates in an early form of sampling, mixing in the old with the new. T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others made this practice the most important part of their poetry, and Rauschenberg imports that tendency into his own work. Here, he plays with high vs. low culture, a lot like Eliot in The Wasteland, when he mixes in folk songs, German, and slang.

Along with Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg put post-Abstract Expressionist American Art on the map and gave us a new kind of abstraction that helped bridge the always precarious gap between high culture and popular culture. His passing is a loss, but, perhaps it will now refocus a new generation on his revolutionary work.