I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
Ever been bemoaning the state of your circumstances and you hear breaking news that suddenly makes you realize your complaints were so trivial? That is precisely what this poem is about. This quote is all one sentence; a sentence that mingles the past and the present, the trivial and the tragic, the personal and the universal. The speaker does not actually known Lana Turner, one of the most popular movie starlets of the 1940’s, but he does feel as if she is his friend in the way that we all feel like we know the famous. What’s a little pop of ice on the head compared to the potential for death?
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
These are the actual opening lines of this poem, punctuation included. Essentially, the entire body of the poem becomes the predicate of the subject of the sentence which makes up the title. These lines and everything else that follows are all compared to the simple joy and rapture of just being with someone and sharing a soft drink.
Days go by
This is another example of a poem in which O’Hara uses the body text as commentary upon the title. The speaker visits an artist friend who is working on a painting and comments upon the word “SARDINES” within the image. Days go by and he visits again and now the painting is just letters; SARDINES is gone. The speaker then muses over his own process of writing the poem titled “Oranges” and, once again, days go by before it is completed to his satisfaction. The message of “Days go by” is that creativity is not dependent upon some mysterious “spark” but is simply another kind of working process.
So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut?
Ironically, one of Frank O’Hara’s duties when he enlisted in the Navy was acting in his capacity on the shore patrol to keep his fellow gay sailors from making the huge mistake of giving in to the temptation of entering gay bars. The title of this poem is fairly unambiguous which is also somewhat ironic considering that the opening line speaks directly to the ambiguous lifestyle required even of gay poets in the 1954 when this poem was published.
