At lunch I was thinking of Frank O'Hara (lunch poems). People associate him with a casual mode, but I was thinking of the poem "To the Harbormaster," which has some gravitas. Also, the casual poems are often elegiac, with considerable gravitas in their own right, but without that grave tone.
You can dash off a poem quickly, and it will feel dashed off, but the trick is that O'Hara's dashed off poems are actually good ones as well. The casualness is not faked, in that he really did write fast, but it is deceptive in the sense that it is hard to achieve that effect. Yeats talks about how you could write and re-write a line, but that the goal is making it seem "a moment's thought." In other words, you can simulate improvisation with a lot of work, or you can just actually improvise.
There is also confusion because he will give the exact time, "It is 12:20 in New York," that sort of thing, but it is not 12:20 when he is writing the poem. The poem recreates the events after the fact. Really (otherwise) smart readers have not seen that. Ted Berrigan started to do that, but using the actual time he was writing rather than the retrospective view.
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