As the collection’s title suggests, most of the poems in Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems were supposedly composed on O’Hara’s lunch hour during the years he worked at the Museum of Modern Art. In the introduction to O’Hara’s collected poems, John Ashbery remembers that O’Hara would “put [his poems] away in drawers and cartons and half forget them” and that he wrote each piece quickly in the moments available to him. The collection was commissioned in 1959, but took O’Hara almost 5 years to assemble his poems. Friend and poet Donald Allen, who assisted O’Hara during this process between 1960 and 1964, writes that O’Hara “tended to think of his poems as a record of his life.”
Even though Lunch Poems is now over 50 years old, Micah Mattix writes in his article “Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems: 21st-Century Poetry Written in 1964”, that “the book has an appeal that reaches beyond the time and place it was written in… Casual, sardonic, funny, and full of pop-culture references, Lunch Poems has all the brevity, informality, irony, and at times chatty pointlessness of modern discourse without having been influenced by it.”
Mattix is right: Lunch Poems, in the context of contemporary culture, feels undeniably present. O’Hara’s voice and unadorned poetic style create a sense of urgency and immediacy, an impression of universal truth revealed through plainly-stated personal experience. Lunch Poems remains beloved because readers can see themselves in O’Hara’s lines: from love to its loss, and from the day-to-day busyness to celebrity culture, the collection maintains a hold yet to be loosened by age over its audience. O’Hara’s verse mirrors the fragmented rhythms of contemporary life, reaching new readers generations past its time.
“Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]” is one of the works in Lunch Poems that epitomizes the spirit of the collection, and its enduring relevance to contemporary life. From its opening exclamation, the poem immerses its readers in the bustle of New York City life, dramatizing mundane details about traffic and the weather as essential elements of its story. The role of celebrity culture, and the way in which the speaker stumbles upon sensational news, parallels social media outlets today. The familiarity with which the speaker addresses Turner echoes the way we may speak of Hollywood stars today—as if we know them personally. The universe contained in these lines functions as a microcosm of modern life and all of its juxtapositions and contradictions.
