Throughout history, food has served as subject matter, inspiration, and of course sustenance
for artists.
Food has also been the art on a number of occasions.
Today we stray from our usual exploration of the eating and cooking lives of visual
artists to delve into the culinary predilections of a poet.
A much beloved one, who was deeply enmeshed in the flourishing cultural life of mid 20th
Century New York City.
He died in an accident at the age of forty, before the wider world had fully recognized
his brilliance.
But in his life he accomplished so much... including the lofty achievement of probably
being the first to publish a poem mentioning a cheeseburger.
Poetry Cooking: Frank O’Hara
Our source material today will be two books, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, and
his book Lunch Poems, published in 1965.
And we're also going to read from Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara, edited by Mark Ford,
later on.And while poetry may often be a solitary endeavor, I won’t be alone in this one.
Joining me are my husband, author John Green and poets Paige Lewis and Kaveh Akbar, our
collaborators on the channel Ours Poetica, which this might be a very unsubtle plug for.
(Go Team.)
O’Hara’s poetry is full of references to foods!
We’ve got "instant coffee with slightly sour cream in it", and “just plain scrambled
eggs.”
There’s “a liver sausage sandwich,” “blueberry blintzes,” and “spaghetti
and meatballs and champagne.”
“I want some bourbon / you want some oranges,” he writes.
And there are numerous references to “yoghurt.”
But for our first menu item, we’ll be consulting this 1949 edition of The Settlement Cookbook.
In it, I found a recipe for an “Orange, Grapefruit and Avocado Salad” that may alert
our O’Hara fans to the poem we’ll be referencing.
But before we reveal it, let’s bring out our ingredients and get to prepping.
We’re going to need to create some orange and grapefruit segments using a technique
fancy people call supreme-ing, which involves cutting off the top and bottom so your fruit
will sit flat, and then paring away the skin and pith, preserving as much of the fruit
as possible.
Rope in your team here, and do your best to not freak out when their knife skills maybe
aren’t pro-level but neither are yours Sarah so just get over it.
When you’re fully peeled, carefully cut along the membranes so that you can release
nice clean segments with no white parts, or at least minimal white parts.
And while we hack away at these, let’s establish the basic biographical details of our man
in question.
Francis Russell O’Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926, grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts,
and served in the US Navy during World War II.
Afterward, the G.I Bill got him to Harvard, where he began as a music major but switched
to English, started writing poetry, and met poets John Ashbery and V.R. Lang.
After receiving a Masters in English at the University of Michigan, he moved to New York
City in 1951 and had begun to find his distinctive poetic voice.
He published his first pamphlet of poems in 1952 that featured drawings by Larry Rivers.
And O’Hara was enmeshed from the start in the multi-disciplinary world of artists that
surrounded him, hanging out at the Cedar Bar, writing poems “while listening to the painters
argue and gossip.”
Those would be the Abstract Expressionist painters who were then called the “New York
School,” a title that O’Hara and his poet compatriots would borrow for themselves, Ashbery
and Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler.
Alright, well that should do it for the citrus, so let’s get started on the avocados.
You’re going to want to halve these lengthwise, give them a twist to separate, and release
the pit whichever way you like, although you shouldn’t technically do this whacking with
a knife method because lots of people go to the emergency room this way.
But peel these carefully to leave the exterior as nice looking as possible, and cut them
into slices.
While this happens lets remember a time when our cutting board was clean and dry and the
perfect setting for Paige Lewis to read us a short poem that O’Hara wrote in 1959:
“This is a poem titled ‘Poem’ by Frank O’Hara…
Light clarity avocado salad
in the morning…”
You’ve by now figured out that we’re making “avocado salad in the morning,” of course,
and now that our avocados are ready, we’ll start in on our dressing.
For this we’re to pound to a paste 1 tablespoon each of pecans and blanched almonds, and we’re
using my ceramic mortar and pestle for this.
There’s a fair chance that what O’Hara meant by an avocado salad in 1959 was a gelatin-based
concoction of some sort, you know something horrific like this, or possibly a salad served
in a little avocado boat.
But the citrus avocado salad seems to have been in good rotation by this time and the
poem was written in December, which is indeed citrus season.
And while it would be great fun to spend all morning on a layered avocado jello mold, it
seems not at all in the improvisational O’Hara spirit.
He wrote a tremendous number of poems in his short life, once even while riding the Staten
Island Ferry on his way to a reading.
And he’s known to have been rather reckless with them, shoving them unceremoniously into
drawers and pockets.
And ok, once we’ve got a rough paste, we’ll add half a teaspoon each of salt and paprika.
To this we’ll add two tablespoons of lemon juice and curse ourselves for getting seeds
everywhere.
Remove the seeds, and add two tablespoons of oil--we’re using avocado oil, which seems
appropriate--and then mix this thoroughly until it comes together and looks like a dressing.
Now we’re finally ready to assemble our salads, and to do so we’re going to alternate
avocado slices with our citrus segments to the best of our abilities.
What O’Hara had, in both his personality and in his writing was a sense of ease, or
what his friend Kennech Koch called “a way of feeling and acting as though being an artist
were the most natural thing in the world.
Compared to him everyone else seemed a little self-conscious, abashed, or megalomaniacal."
And that’s why, as we spoon a bit of dressing over each, and give it a fresh grind of sea
salt overtop, we realize that a layered gelatin salad would have been way too contrived here,
too fussy, too much like people’s worst conceptions of poetry --careful and slow and
designed to impress.
We all dig in and enjoy our light clarity avocado salad in the morning, savoring its
contrast of creamy and bright flavors, and appreciating the true beauty of the poem that
inspired it.
It’s a love poem, of course, written expressly to another person.
In this case Vincent Warren, a dancer with the New York Ballet, to whom O’Hara would
address a number of poems.
This one gives us a window into one particular and unprecedented moment of loving, of the
heightened awareness it brought about, like a chemical dropped on paper, making something
special--monumental even--out of an event as seemingly inconsequential as eating an
avocado salad.
To commence our next course, Kaveh is going to read some excerpts from a poem O’Hara
wrote a few years prior, in 1956:
“This is a poem called A STEP AWAY FROM THEM by Frank O’Hara…”
It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs...
... Everything suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
Neon in daylight is a great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at juliet’s corner.
Giulietta Masina, wife of Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice.
And chocolate malted.
A lady in foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.
... A glass of papaya juice and back to work.
My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.
And yes that’s right we, too, are going to stop for a cheeseburger and a malted, alas
not at Juliet’s Corner, but in my kitchen.
We’re going to do our best to recreate a classic diner cheeseburger from the 1950s,
which research tells me would have involved quarter pound of not-lean ground beef, handled
lightly, spread into a very thin disk, and placed atop a hot griddle.
Kaveh and I are taking different approaches here, and you can of course make your burger
however you’d like.
But this poem comes from the collection Lunch Poems, named after O’Hara’s penchant for
writing poetry during and about the lunch breaks he took from his job at the Museum
of Modern Art.
He started out selling postcards at the front desk, but eventually became an assistant curator
for MoMA’s International Circulating Exhibitions that traveled through Europe.
He was curator for the New Spanish Painting and Sculpture in 1960, and later became associate
curator in the Painting and Sculpture Department.
O’Hara curated the 1965 David Smith exhibition that traveled through Europe, the 1965 Robert
Motherwell retrospective, and MoMA’s 1966 Reuben Nakian retrospective.
News of a fresh generation of American poets was similarly spreading, thanks in part to
the 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, assembled by Donald Allen, which included
of course the work of O’Hara.
You’ve no doubt noticed by now that we’re using Kraft Singles for our cheese, that most
American of foods, first introduced in 1949, and also grilling on the side a couple of
frozen veggie burgers, which first hit grocery freezer aisles in the 1980s.
But when Lunch Poems was first published in 1964, it included a description on the back
that we now know was written by our man O’Hara:
Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has
paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering
more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings
of the eternal questions of life, co-existence and depth, while never forgetting to eat Lunch
his favorite meal….
O’Hara called these works his “I do this I do that” poems, for that is indeed what
happens.
We follow him through the city on a particular day, noticing what he notices, following his
mind as it pings among the stimuli and landmarks that he passes.
We follow as he free associates between Juliet’s Corner the restaurant and the unrelated actress
Giulietta Masina, trivia that bubbles up unbidden from his active and highly educated mind.
While one negative reviewer in 1966 called this work a “wearisome cataloguing of personalia,”
many more responded with glee and adoration, thrilled to be along for the ride.
And it would be a shame if we didn’t chase our cheeseburger with a malted, wouldn’t
it?
So let’s do that, starting with a few scoops of good vanilla ice cream, following with
an ounce or two of chocolate syrup, three tablespoons of malted milk powder, which I
now have a lifetime’s worth, and then following up with some quality whole milk almost to
cover but not quite.
Then we’re going to blend this all up, but instead of listening to the music of the blender,
we’re going to hear about the importance of music to O’Hara’s life.
Before he turned his attention to writing, Frank was a serious music student, taking
courses at the New England Conservatory and studying to be a concert pianist.
He loved the work of Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, and after O’Hara turned his
attention to writing (which he called “playing the typewriter”) he wrote no fewer than
seven poems all titled “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday.”
But along with references to musicians and music, the poet’s musicality can be felt
in the syncopation of his poetry, which moves fast and then slow and then fast again, keeping
time with the quick movement of the city, and also the experiences that punctuate it
and make us pause and appreciate the texture and detail and taste of life.
Like, sharing chocolate malted milkshakes with friends.
Yummm…
And we can’t end this meal without hearing from Frank O’Hara himself, so why don’t
we grab a drink and listen as he read his own work, written in 1960: “The poem’s
called Having a Coke with You…”
Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian,
Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera
de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look
like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly
because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips
around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take
on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you
that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary
when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we
are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through
its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces
in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone
ever did them I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous
experience which is not going to go wasted on me which
is why I am telling you about it
After O’Hara died in 1966 in a freak accident, when a beach taxi ran him over on Fire Island,
Peter Schjeldahl titled his obituary in The Village Voice: “Frank O’Hara: He Made
Things & People Sacred.”
And as we share our Cokes and think about his work and life, that is in essence what
O’Hara’s work did then and still does now.
He called his approach “Personism,” likening a poem to a telephone call, positioning it
squarely between and among two people.
This direct address gives his work a rare immediacy and intimacy.
And blending in references to places near and far, and culture high and low, O’Hara
put the process of writing into the writing.
Kind of like the Abstract Expressionists were putting the process of painting into painting,
showing us their gestures and actions.
Nobody else was writing about avocado salads and cheeseburgers and chocolate malteds and
Coke.
And even today, alone once more in my kitchen in 2019, his poetry still feels very much
alive, overflowing with the granular details of his well-lived but too short life.
And I might as well have a snack, too, partly because of your love for yoghurt.
Ours Poetica brings you a new poem three times
a week, read by poets, writers, artists, and unexpected but familiar voices.
Like Shailene Woodley reading Kahlil Gibran, and Sarah Kay reading her poem “Forest Fires,”
and this episode’s own Kaveh Akbar reading Mahmoud Darwish.
Poet Paige Lewis, whose hands you also met today, curates the series, which is a co-production
of Complexly and The Poetry Foundation, and which you should 100% subscribe to right now.
Thanks to all of our patrons for supporting The Art Assignment, especially our grandmasters
of the arts Vincent Apa, Josh Thomas, and Ernest Wolfe.