Frank O'Hara's <em>Lunch Poems</em>: 21st-Century Poetry Written in 1964

Some poets shape how we speak. Others use an idiom that, through some combination of chance and insight, anticipates changes in a language. Frank O’Hara is in the second group: When O’Hara’s Lunch Poems was published 50 years ago, novelist Gilbert Sorrentino wrote that it had a “strictly New York joie de vivre: slightly down at heels and rumpled, but with the kind of style always a step above current ‘style’.”

With its references to Park Avenue, Times Square, Pennsylvania Station, liver sausage sandwiches, the Five Spot, the Seagram Building, the opening of the American Folk Art Museum, and much more, it a very New York book. O’Hara walks around the buzzing city, buys “a chocolate malted” or “a little Verlaine,” remembers a friend’s birthday, and talks to the Puerto Rican cabbies before rushing back to his desk at the MoMA with a copy of Reverdy’s poems in his