Comments on: The soul grows refined

By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:17:10 +0000

"I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love." Frank O'Hara (yes?), "Meditations in an Emergency," November 1954 issue of Poetry.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:03:27 +0000

You’re all mistaken. “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” was obviously written by Sir Francis Bacon, later plagiarized and published by Sir Francis Drake, after which it was lost and forgotten, resurfacing in 1932 when W.H. Auden was rummaging through a trunk he’d found at the bottom of the English Channel during one of his many famed diving expeditions. Auden, hating the poem but realizing its potential historical value, kept it secret until a young student named Frank O’Hara came along, at which point Auden, feeling mischievous one day, slipped the poem into one of O’Hara’s notebooks while he wasn’t looking. O’Hara never noticed it, however, and the poem was only rediscovered in 1989 by a less-than-reputable Daytona Beach-area antiques dealer, who mistakenly attributed it to O’Hara. The poem was then published under O’Hara’s name for the first time, in the April 2, 1990 issue of The New Yorker, which was, you’ll remember, just a few weeks before Noah’s Ark was found inside the basement of the Empire State Building.

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:41:14 +0000

>Kent, I thought Joshua Clover wrote “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” At least that’s what Tosa Motokiyu told me when I had a Coke with him not long ago…
Now there’s a picture for you: The baby Clover, pounding away at his portable Royal, in his red diaper!
Kent

By: Doodle

Doodle — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:09:36 +0000

Kent, I thought Joshua Clover wrote “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” At least that’s what Tosa Motokiyu told me when I had a Coke with him not long ago…

By: Michael Gushue

Michael Gushue — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:41:43 +0000

Here, here.

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:22:18 +0000

One of the deepest and most beautiful acts of friendship in poetry may have been Kenneth Koch’s composition of “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” and then attributing the poem to his beloved late friend, Frank O’Hara.
Kent

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:13:36 +0000

(I sent this in yesterday – guess it got lost.)
Thanks, Unreliable, that really made me laugh! Goodbye, the last of my midnight blues. Here’s one for you.
Don, something about the way you referred to extravagence made me think you had changed the sense of it. In Gornick’s sense, I think of the emotional extravagence of romantic friendships between women, before such extravagence was turned into “sickness” around 1900.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:40:27 +0000

P.S. That tear blurred my vision, evidently; sorry for the typo up there, friends!

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:07:53 +0000

John, thank you for so aptly remembering the Golden Anniversary issue of Poetry! Here’s what Henry Rago said in the foreward:
“This issue of Poetry celebrates fifty years of uninterrupted monthly publication. Its editor dedicates it to the memory of the founding editor of this magazine and his first friend in the world of poets, Harriet Monroe.
What seems most personal in this dedication – an act of piety that has been the chief hope of more than seven years – may also suggest the broadest public meaning: this anniversary will commemorate countless other such friendships, and with them the austere devotion at their center. A few years before his death Wallace Stevens called Poetry “a kind of hearth”: “It gives us in return for our daily support chiefly itself but in addition it gives, what every hearth gives, a familiar fellowship.”
For Aristotle the word “friendship” was sufficiently free of any hint either of solipsism or of collusion to suggest a systematic treatise, the gentlest moment of his Ethics. They are freinds who share a friendship for what is good, and in that good…”
I had to wipe a tear away as I typed that!

By: john

john — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:25:29 +0000

I’m visiting family & friends at my ancestral home, and so away from my books, but the comments here recall to mind words of wallace Stevens, quoted by Henry Rago in the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of “Poetry” magazine (forgive my ineptitude with code for italics), which, alas, I will have to paraphrase,
“We return to ‘Poetry’ as to a kind of hearth, for the fellowship and friendship that is found there.” (Too many “f”s — forgive me, dear readers, and forgive me, shade of Wallace Stevens.)