POEM OF THE WEEK

Frank O’Hara (1926-66) liked to make poetry look easy. His best-known collection, Lunch Poems, was supposedly written on his pre-prandial strolls while working as a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It’s a stance that has proved infectious; the most recent anthology in the popular Staying Alive series had a whole section dedicated to poems inspired by O’Hara, and many young poets imitate his flip, casual tone. Who wouldn’t want to glimpse a newspaper headline – “Lana Turner Has Collapsed” – and instantly come up with something as witty as his “Poem” (“o Lana Turner we love you get up”)? O’Hara claimed he knocked that one out on the Staten Island Ferry on his way to a reading.

O’Hara’s immersion in the stuff of urban life – brand names, high culture, lowbrow celebrities – makes him both modern and a creature of the booming, consumerist mid-century USA. Few poets before him could (or would) title a love poem “Having a Coke with You”. It’s no coincidence that, in Mad Men, advertising guru Don Draper is seen reading O’Hara’s 1957 collection, Meditations in an Emergency. But that book – finally published in the UK for the first time this week – opens with a poem that shows O’Hara in a very different light.

“To the Harbormaster” is a quiet, tentative poem, self-accusing and vulnerable.

There’s no topical name-dropping here; its central image of a troubled sea journey is timeless. Coming from a less secular poet, lines like “To/ you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage/ of my will” might be read as an address to God. As it happens, O’Hara has another kind of faith in mind. The poem was written for his lover, the painter Larry Rivers. It grapples with the difficulty of romantic commitment – “I am always tying up/ and then deciding to depart”; there may be stormy weather ahead. Tristram Fane Saunders