Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate the leonine > ovine month of March; also, since 1 March is St. David’s Day, to bring us a red dragon bearing leeks and daffodils, how wonderful; and the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and the dragon with the rabbit (culinary note: the leeks are delicious, but don’t eat the daffodils, or let your pets eat them, ’cause they’re gorgeous but toxic)

And so I slide into part three of a celebration of the poets Jack Spicer and Frank O’Hara, who came to me as a gift from my first male lover; Larry brought me both Spicer and O’Hara, and steered me to Stephen Sondheim as well.

Friends share their enthusiasms — that’s one of the benefits of friendship — but with lovers this sharing can become an intimate connection of its own, a lover’s gift, a lover’s grace. (That was over 50 years ago, and our romantic, intensely sexual, and intellectually passionate coupling long ago morphed into a loving friendship that has lasted both of our lives.) Of course, we exchanged gifts, as lovers do; here I talk about some of the things that Larry gave me.

As overall background, from my 9/8/22 posting “Of great age”:

Another birthday message arrived yesterday from my first male lover (from roughly 50 years ago, some years before Jacques), the pseudonymous Danny Sparrick in my writings about my sexual life. [Larry] noted, among other things (like the mutual regard and deep affection that have endured through all those years), that we have both somehow managed to survive to a great age (me 82 on 9/6, him 75 on 10/16), citing the Follies song “I’m still here!” (alas, Stephen Sondheim is not).

We’re both much damaged, and both live in medical peril, but we’re still here.

Background on the two poets. Part 1, from my 2/23 posting “Poet to poet”, extracts from a Billy Collins poem on Jack Spicer:

To come: a much more personal posting about how the poetry of Jack Spicer and Frank O’Hara came to me, through my first male lover, a gift that has resonated with me for over 50 years now.

Part 2, from my 2/24 posting “Jack Spicer’s California summers”, comparing the two poets:

Spicer and O’Hara share four notable things, beyond their being extraordinary poets: they were almost exact contemporaries (and at one point in their lives went out drinking and dancing together); both their lives were cut off early (at the age of 40; Spicer drank himself to death, O’Hara was killed in a freak accident); they were both openly, defiantly gay (in the 1940s to 1960s, yet); and they both pursued their craft doggedly, compulsively, as if it was something they couldn’t not do.

Their poetry came to me together through the same route, my first male lover, and it was a great gift, but the two men could hardly have been less similar. O’Hara was ebullient, gregarious, self-assured; Spicer was unsure of himself, inclined to depression, a natural loner (who also, however, craved social connections of many kinds). O’Hara’s poetry is famously spontaneous, improvised in the moment, while many of Spicer’s poems were reworked and elaborated over time, though he also longed for poetry that would just come to him through the air, like radio waves. Yes, a bundle of contradictions.

And now Frank O’Hara. I’ve held back on writing much about O’Hara in recent days (though I’ve posted a lot about him on this blog over the years), because of a final contrast between the two men: Spicer was the most earnest of poets — capable of great lyricism, but never performing frivolously or playfully; in contrast, O’Hara was a fireworks display, throwing off bright light and campy extravagance, as in his fabulous “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)”, from Lunch Poems (1964):

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed

Spicer could not possibly have written anything like this. So if you weren’t already familiar with the two poets — they’re both famous in a way, but not famous like, say, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, or W.H. Auden, or, for that matter, Mary Oliver or Billy Collins — I wanted you to appreciate Spicer before you were stunned and overwhelmed by O’Hara. The thing is, Larry gave me both of them, and they both spoke to me deeply, so I wanted to incorporate both of them into my self. Along with Sondheim’s delightful cleverness and great humanity.

From my 12/25/11 posting “Poet among the painters”:

O’Hara (1926-66, struck down by a dune buggy on the beach at Fire Island, of all things) was a writer, poet, and art critic, associated with the “New York School” of painters (largely abstract expressionists), but also poets, dancers, composers, and musicians, in the 1950s and 60s. The central poets were O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery, with connections to the beat poets.

O’Hara dashed off poems at great speed, often during his lunch hours. The result was a few spectacular poems, many very good ones, but also a fair number of mediocre ones.

The piece goes on about his extraordinary intelligence, the aura of electric enthusiasm that surrounded him, his great talent for friendship and collaboration, his advocacy of artists he admired, his outflowing of short poems every day, and his enormous passion for sucking cock (the last famously celebrated in his poem “Une Journée de Juillet”, a little hymn to the pleasures of gangsucking and to its restorative powers).

From an appreciation by Peter Schjeldahl:

O’Hara’s life was measured out in a sort of endless homage to his heroes — the great exemplars of personal and artistic integrity like Pollock, Franz Kline, and especially Boris Pasternak; the revolutionaries of poetic attitude and style like Apollinaire and Mayakovsky, and the forms of emotional identification, the movie stars like James Dean, Carole Lombard, and so many others, whom he celebrated bril­liantly without embarrassment and with only the slightest, functional trace of irony.

You might not have imagined that a poet of pop-cultural frivolity and sexual excess would also come with a passionate commitment to moral principles — nobody expects Boris Pasternak, the ethic of his work at MoMA, or his devotion to friends and colleagues — but there it is, as urgent and earnest as anything in Jack Spicer, but without Spicer’s self-destructive urges and preoccupations (among them, with death). In any case, a lover’s gift to me not only of some amazing poetry, but also of a moral model, someone to learn from.

This entry was posted on March 1, 2024 at 10:39 am and is filed under Holidays, Homosexuality, My life, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.