Sometimes you will read something that just makes the ice break. All of sudden, someone will say something that cuts through layers of crap. Today, I was reading Alice Notley's Coming After, a book that had been hiding from in a bookshelf and revealed itself to me as I was searching for another, unrelated book. At the same time, I was thinking of Margit Frenk's work on the popular lyric. I discovered that she is still alive and has published something as recently as 2018. She was born in 1925. She points out that the anonymous lyric tradition has female lyric speakers (singers) who don't follow the social norms of the time. Putting this together with Notley, I got the feeling that yes, this is what I am always looking for. The first essay on Frank O'Hara is one of the best things I've read in 2021:
"It isn't choosing one stance, or attitude, as most poetry does, it's choosing several at once, in the way my mind seems to work, but without making a stance out of multiplicity itself. The last thing an O'Hara poem is is stanceless. The stance is in the very existence of the voice in what I've called its fearlessness. Never afraid or hesitant to speak... Why shouldn't 'I' speak."
All the crappy things people think about O'Hara just drop away when you read this. Her response is genuine; she is seeing it in a direct way, as a reader. The freshness of O'Hara's voice comes through. A line like "slowly thinking of becoming a stalk of asparagus for hallowe'en" is the whole reason I decided to study poetry in the first place.
I also think of that time about 60 years ago as the beginning of my time (quite literally as I am 60). This is a period I go back to again and again, even in my Lorca work which often comes to rest again circa 1960.
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