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.  Or that’s the way it reads in my Donald

Allen edited O’Hara Selected.  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!).  Is what I suppose I should really at this point relay.

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

were a (and couldn’t it easily be?) standalone.

But BEAUTY?  Pah!  I’m trying to envision it another way, but I can’t in his words
imagine it but being his.  Which would not only be so very different from mine

(and surely different from anyone else’s, I suppose, if one supposes such things),

but would also be some kind of IDEAL, his, if an attainable one.  I imagine he

had a few candidates for such an ideal, idealist that he was, able to at any

seeming moment conjure up one of his muses.  

I’m no scholar. I just have my big, awkward movements in that area. 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 him dipping his metaphorical

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

The New York School muse.

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

a note of this as well.  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 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, conjured,

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 will keep being on the record just to say that much).  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 a 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 truly knowing seeing it appear before

him in Cinemascope.  Loud and clear.  And that’s sincere.