beautiful again, & interesting, & modern

Finished watching last night's season two premier of Mad Men (see yesterday's post). Shazam! As if we needed confirmation that it is the most culturally literate show around, the writers included a voice-over reading of the fourth section of Frank O'Hara's poem "Mayakovsky" in the closing scene. Read by the main character, Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm), the poem and the scene perfectly encapsulate his day in late-winter, in early mid-life, late mid-century.

Danna just found out that Frank O'Hara's book Meditations in an Emergency (Don Draper sees a sophisticated young man reading a copy in a Midtown lunch spot; and in a later scene we see he has purchased a copy) is one of today's most-Googled items. This is such positive exposure for American poetry readership! For many, reading O'Hara might be an inroad to more experimental poetries, both contemporary and historic.

Here's the fourth section of "Mayakovsky"*:


4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

*Mayakovsky was a Russian poet whose poems O'Hara adored. John Ashbery notes in his introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara: "...Mayakovsky, from whom he picked up what James Schuyler has called the 'intimate yell.'"