Ron Padgett on Frank O'Hara

Excerpt (Library of Congress website)

Hi, my name is Ron Padgett. I’m an American poet, and I’ve been invited by the Library of Congress to read a poem that somehow deals with the idea of the “American identity.” I chose a poem by the poet Frank O’Hara, an American who was born in 1926 and died in 1966, called “A Step Away from Them.” I chose this poem not because Frank O’Hara in it talks about the American identity or discusses this concept, but because the poem itself is, I think, an embodiment of a particular kind of American identity; that is to say, the identity of Frank O’Hara, who was extremely American. And it’s just such a perfect example of a poem that, I think, well, I was going to say couldn’t be written anywhere else, but that’s an assumption I can’t make. I’ll say, though, that it wasn’t written anywhere else up until the time Frank O’Hara wrote it.

Frank O’Hara wrote this poem in 1956 at a time when, well, a lot of people knew who Jackson Pollock was, but not a lot of people knew who Bunny was, or John Latouche, or Edwin Denby, or even in America, Pierre Reverdy. But Frank O’Hara knew who they were, and he put them in this poem because they were either friends or someone he felt close to in some way. And it’s that closeness that I want to talk about here. That this poem, to me, sounds almost like a letter to a friend: it has a personal tone, it’s conversational, it’s very open and unguarded. So it’s kind of vulnerable in a way that European poetry, for example, at the time wasn’t, and, in fact, still isn’t often. So it’s particularly American in its willingness to be open to people and places and of course he’s totally open to his lunch hour [laughs]. That is to say, he has a lot of experiences during this lunch hour, and he puts them all in to let you know what they are. So, other things that make this poem “American” in particular are, well, first of all, the idea of the “lunch hour,” and then the product such as Coca-Cola, and a location such as Times Square, and then the sort of melting pot that America is supposed to be, and sometimes even is. In this poem there’s several Puerto Ricans, there’s a black guy, there’s a blonde girl, there are construction workers with no shirts on, there’s a woman wearing foxes. So there’s really a tremendous mix of people, which, again, in a lot of other countries at that time you didn’t find such an obvious international, multi-cultural setting.

Other things about this poem that make it particularly American are these: for instance, he doesn’t use any rhyme in this poem; he doesn’t use any set, metrical, or rhythmical patterns; he doesn’t use any metaphors; he doesn’t use any so-called “poetic” language; he doesn’t try to compress the issue down to this very fine, dense, cryptic, sort of “diamond-like” that people often describe poetry as having. And on the other hand, it goes the other way: it’s quite open and expansive, and a little bit influenced, I guess, by Walt Whitman. But I think also, maybe, it was influenced by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote a poem called “Zone,” which is kind of an account of Apollinaire’s walking across