After all That: O'Hara himself Drops the Poetry Bomb

"Partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better, happier, Saint Sebastion"

Oh, Frank O'Hara.

2 Pics from Yesterday

Out back of 617 Midway and the Public Garden.

Moby Dick Like New Again

I have been sitting on this one for a while. Saw this diorama and did a panorama of the high-end drama that Melville built a career on.

Pics are from inside the Back Eddy in Westport.

Beach Pans

Here are a couple beach pans I have been sitting on.

Frank O'Hara: Selected Poems

I’m thinking of moving. This should be no surprise to anyone who knows me. I’m always thinking of moving. Key West; Missoula, Montana; Bozeman; Salt Lake; Cape Cod. Maybe it was all my time between places, between places on airplanes, before I became a teenager even, but I think of moving.

This time’s more serious though. There are real estate people involved. There are questions in the hallway. There are interest rates and points. There may be closing costs. There is a nagging suspicion that I need some boxes.

Question: When aren't there closing costs? What lacks the cost of closing?

Anyhow, I have even been ripping CD’s into my hard drive so I don’t have to move the scratched surfaces,:all rainbow reflected silver, or plastic boxes with crumpled liner notes. I am thinking seriously. Serious in thinking.

"EPMD’s Greatest Hits?” I’d forgotten half my life. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Too many Counting Crows albums to admit. Black Sheep, Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Buffett, They Might Be Giants, Eddie Money, Kenneth Koch reading poems, David Sedaris reading, Method Man, Sugarcult, Blink 182. Fine Malt Lyrics from House of Pain. I am listening seriously.

I am talking out loud as Microsoft Windows records my history: "Sebadoh? Lucero? The Rat Pack?"

So, I am compacting. This shirt doesn’t fit, I wish that one didn’t fit. Why didn’t I save more of those suit coats now that Draper has reinvented fashion? Did I really buy these shoes? Did I ever like this album? Who made me this mix CD?

Am I really 35?

And of course, when moving, the dread of any literary type is books. What could be worse to move than books? Why do I love books so much? What the fuck is wrong with a library card?

I remember a guy who was thinking of moving to Midway. He was unsure the floor could support his five thousand books. Five thousand books.

Me? I’m getting rid of books. I have sworn off Amazon for the time being. No, I can’t buy Cuban Linx 2 yet. Haven’t reserved the new Lethem. No, no, no. No. There is too much lifting in my possible future. Too many backaches and magic marker (kitchen) (studio) (a scrawl I cannot read) and too many trips up and down the stairs.

And then what happened? I walked into Border’s on Boylston and Frank O’Hara was staring at me.

Selected Poems.

I have every single Frank O’Hara poem ever written. Collected, Retrieved, written beside art. I have a postcard of O’Hara that stares from my refrigerator. My memory doesn’t work / in such a away that I have / every word he ever wrote / memorized, but I see things / in the sand, the tracing of his fingertips as he addresses / the sun, or the breathing at a typewriter, the sound of ice / clinking in the next room.

This data is stored inside my GPS. It tells me how to move and why. These are maps, pictures, a catalog for a show I haven't even submitted to a gallery yet, haven't painted the paintings. I am looking out my window. O'Hara tells me where to watch the buses arrive and then depart. The red lights blink.

In short, there is nothing in the Selected I haven’t read yet. There is nothing here I haven’t re-read yet. Read again, considered.

From Travel: “Sometimes I know I love you better / than all the others I kiss it’s funny”

From The Unfinished: “As happiness takes off the tie it borrowed from me”

From Ode to Willem de Kooning: “Beyond the sunrise / where the black begins / an enormous city / is sending up its shutters”

Is there any doubt that I know these poems? That they are imprinted on my canvases? That they press back from my keyboard? That they call me up at 3am and say “I miss you,” “I love you,” “I hate you,” "where are you?” They say nothing. They breathe. I know these poems. Even when they hit star-whatever and block caller ID.

From one of his titled Poem: “there’s too much lime in the world and not enough gin, / they gasp. The gentle are curious, but the curious / are not gentle. So the breaths come home and sleep.”

What the hell was I doing in Border’s anyway? I was walking and praying. I was being mindful and breathing. I was likely thinking things like “blame it on tequila,” or “I can’t believe she did that.” “She,” standing in for the moon, the sun, the group of bookstore girls, the pictures on the internet, my girlfriend, my ex-girlfriend, my my my. "She" was a stand-in for a poem. I can’t believe she did that. I am turning the page. I turn. I turn the page. I can’t believe. I just can’t.

And there he was on my bookstore walk, the cement squares outside, the squares of CD cases collecting in shopping bags at home (discard), the squares of parking spots that filled on Newbury (one side) and Boylston (the other). The squares of pictures you remember, the squares of pictures you forget. The squares you tap against your leg that become boxes waiting to be filled. You tape and there is that sound, that screeching sound.

The squares of cardboard, discarded after everything is empty and gone.

“Can I help you?”

Is a morning bookstore like 7:50 am outside a joint on the outskirts of Dorchester, the line not exactly collecting? No more calls to make. Who are these people? These serious, quiet, people, on the verge of shaking? Is everyone so thirsty they can’t bear to talk?

“Can I help you,” and I wondered if the book was talking to me. Frank O’Hara, young on the cover of a book of poems I had lived through and gone back to. Again.

Semi-famous words from a drunk I know: "I'm not worried about the yet's / I am terrified of the / again's."

Again.

And even with my life in boxes, mortgaged and promised, prepped for sending somewhere else. I did this on a Saturday morning. I did the worst thing anyone who is thinking of lifting things can do, who is packing boxes and boxes full of books books books:

I paid twenty bucks for a photograph of Frank O’Hara.

I didn't judge a book by, I bought a book for, its cover. OK, I judged.

I mean, it was a picture I’d never seen before. It just so happened to be on the cover of a beautiful book of poems. Larger format, the white space everywhere, the pages reminding my fingers what we came here for.

He is so young. It is like starting over, over and over again. Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems.

What we came here for.

Don't Forget, We've Got Unfinished Business

Closing Out STOP TRAFFIC at Tantric

Took down the show STOP TRAFFIC at Tantric this Thursday. Have to say it was a great success. Target/Target, Steel Heart and Food Processing, (pictured above) all from the Mirror/Image series I worked on in 2008 were sold to private collectors. In fact, it looks like Target/Target and Steel Heart my have set up permanent residence in Tantric, so stop by 123 Stuart Street in Boston to say hello to them.

It also looks like "Summer School" is almost out the door, also from the Mirror/Image series.

Thank you to Jonathan Stark for a great show together, and to Tantric and MataHari for collaborating to create such a great event.

Making Love to the Sky

Some pics I took of the sky in the last few days. No, I am not sure what the title of this post is all about, but it sounds right.

The Southeast Review

The Southeast Review has included my review of Dobby Gibson's Skirmish in their newest issue. You can check out their website here:

http://southeastreview.org/index.html

Bridge Panorama-arama

I think I mentioned recently that I have found the panorama setting on my cam and have become slightly obsessed. There is just so much bananas stuff to experiment with. Bananorama?

Anyhow, above, see some pics of the obsession with bridges and the obsession with panorama setting colliding on the 617Midway blog.

All the while taking these shots I had Cockroft's first line: "Hart Crane stepping from the prow of a boat" ringing in my head. Not because craned leaped from a bridge (he plummeted from a boat- read the poem) but because of Crane's fascination with the bridge as metaphor. This is central to Cockroft's poem.

I was going to say Berryman leaped from a bridge, but I think he jumped from a hotel next to a bridge. Or an apartment building. All of these poets and leaping!

Yes, I did run home and re-write: Hart Crane leaping from the lip of a bridge. But this should not be surprising to those who know I appropriate Cockroft's first rate lines to make third-rate poems as a rule.

In the "12 days of Xmas" it should be "however many poets leaping." Countless poets leaping (and then the background singers break-in and hum "infinity" in a case of musical one-up-man-ship).

I ran home, after the bridge, and recently reading some new Alexie (Face, which is worthwhile and wonderful in parts, and inspiring, and funny and Alexie who is humbling and amazing... check out "Villify" and "Inappropriate."), and thinking of Cockroft's line and I wrote. OK, I didn't run, but I wrote.

And I sorely needed to post on blog, so I posted. I posted these pics. I made a panorama of blogging from posting bananas bridge-oramas.

Happy Friday.

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