mmmmmcviii

The Whole, Entire Quote

For the record?  Anyway, it goes this way:

       It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.  I admire you, beloved,
     for the trap you’ve set.  It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is
     over.
                         —Frank O’Hara (from “MEDITATIONS ON AN EMERGENCY”)

That is how I just typed it up, anyway.  Given my current vision and need

for a new pair of glasses, it could be a bit off.  Which is, of course, saying

something, but, these days, is really saying something.  And that’s not a good

thing to say (as in No way! I like being able to see!).  Neverteless, this is the 

nitty-gritty of what I want to focus on here today.

So, as I say, to my eyes, that’s the way it reads in my Donald Allen edited O’Hara

Selected.  

And let me also say that I am taking this stanza, this paragraph, completely as 

if it were a (and couldn’t it easily be?) standalone.  As something profound 

unto itself.

But BEAUTY?  Pah!  Trying to envision these words without attempting to look

through the eyes of this particular poet is something, but it is not easy, it starts

out to be quite a feat.  Especially because they would MEAN something so 

very different than if the words had come from me (and surely different from 

what you might come to, I suppose, if one supposes such things).  His, I 

assume, might have been some kind of almost universal IDEAL, but based in

reality, upon those he knew.  An attainable one ideal?  He no doubt had one or

two candidates ind mind with whom he was well acquainted.  Idealist that he 

was, it would have been a cinch for him to have conjured up one of his muses.

I’m no scholar.  I have simply had some big, awkward movements in that arena.

Which, without picking up anything except, again, this particular Selected,

has me thinking O’Hara had in mind as representative of beautiful that 

New York School muse that we would often find him dipping his metaphorical

ink into, Jane Freilicher, perhaps.  Or it could be any number of such muses.  

But Jane, The New York School muse.

Except...O'Hara was gay, I might point out (as I do, and surely others have made 

a note of this as well with regard to his idea or ideal of beauty.  Or have they? 

This is how much I am NOT a scholar.  I’ve made it loud and clear so often

over the years, that he’s my favorite poet out of all of them, yes, the audacity,

and I stand by it) – oh, if I could even be a smidge as dishy and pithy and have

even a tenth of whatever must have generally floated around behind that tall

young forehead.

So, beauty; back when it meant something.  Perhaps towards the tail-end of 

when it might have, just to add that, as if it were something that we knew. 

But those three sentences.  That singular paragraph (I love to imagine that

final word, over, as it stands by itself on its own line, as intentional 

enjambment; form might have been something that was beginning to also 

lose meaning, by this time, which I say as if it means something, but as far 

as I can tell, scholar that I ain’t, it still was a veritable ruler, a stick that 

might be, ahem, shoved up something, and surely often and (even today)

sometimes  happily.  Someplace.  It seems so ... and would he not have

appreciated the word that just came to my mind ... ineffectual?

But a philosophical bent seems clear to me, in that he wore his ideals upon 

his sleeves, if you ask me, but why would you?  AND he was gay, so any 

concept of beauty he goes on to reduce in whatever way gets fractured 

in so many of the ways and means of BEAUTY, at least to this small reader, 

when it comes to how to interpret what the writer literally meant when HE 

wrote the word.

But the simplicity of how those three sentences can, for me, indeed, conjure,

perhaps in pieces and parts deliberately Doctor Frank’ened (har har!) hap

hazardly together, building someone in particular I’ve never met, or just as

easily suggesting a particular half a dozen or more with whom I am at least

acquainted.  How EASY that lovely paragraph can mean.  And if that is what

happens when I read it, it would likely be just as magical to anyone else

who does.  Try, it.  You can, you know.  Let me know if it works.

If so, just look how many of us are getting presently all bent out of shape,

getting giddy within our own recollections or collections.  Our own selections

conjured from just a few lines in this particular selected poems, by my favorite

poet all time (I have no problem repeating for the record that much).  It is a

quote that appears in one of my favorites poems by him, “MEDITATIONS ON 

AN EMERGENCY.” 

I mean, (Call 9-1-1!), who else but the man who not only put New York City 

on the postmodern map, but turned it into an ideal—a place in which I’ve 

never lived, have but taken up space within for no longer than a week or 

two at a time.  Such a beauty.  (“Aw, shucks!  Really?”)

But yet from the distance of all of the vast expanses from him and his words to

here, he can yet today have an unscholarly hick sitting in San Francisco 

seeing BEAUTIFUL, seeing BEAUTY, as if I truly know what they are; and it

appears before me as if in Cinemascope.  Loud and clear.  And that’s sincere.