Mad Men Book Club: Meditations in an Emergency

This week's Mad Men book club pick is Frank O'Hara's poetry collection, Meditations in an Emergency. This was my first time reading O'Hara, and I have mixed feelings -- I don't think Abstract Expressionism is really for me. I enjoyed the poems the most when they were more metrically regular and evocative of nostalgia or strong emotions; I liked them least when they were non-representational strings of striking images. Luckily, this collection had both. On one page, I'd be luxuriating in the music of the language and the complexity of the feelings, and on the next I felt my eyes glazing over. (Sort of like the most recent season of Mad Men!)

Here's the collection in context:

...In Mad Men

This book first appears at the start of season 2. A snooty hipster reads it at the bar and tells the curious (but square) Don Draper that he probably wouldn't like it. Don, ever rising to the challenge, picks up a copy for himself, and that episode ends with a voiceover of Don reading the last stanza of "Mayakovsky," the last poem in the collection, as he sends his copy off in the mail to an old friend. Later in the season, we learn that the friend was Anna Draper (she's the female connection for this particular book club selection), and we see the book in her apartment. Finally, the season 2 finale, which takes place during the Cuban Missile Crisis, is named after the book, so it's safe to say that these Meditations form a kind of theme for season 2 of Mad Men. 

There are some traces of Don Draper in Meditations. One line from the title poem seems a particularly apt description of Don: "I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love." I also enjoyed O'Hara's ode "To the Film Industry in Crisis" and his memorial poem for James Dean. These reminded me of Don's obsession with the movies and, in their aching nostalgia, recalled Don's brilliant Kodak Carousel pitch from the end of season 1.

...In the 1950s and 60s

O'Hara is known as a member of the "New York School" of poetry -- or the "New American Poetry." It's a style that continues the work of pre-war modernist poets -- with a focus on non-representational art, strange juxtapositions of images, and some surrealism thrown in, too -- but with post-war themes. O'Hara spent a lot of time hanging out with Abstract Expressionist artists, and was a curator for the Museum of Modern Art. The association between Abstract Expressionist visual art and the poetry of the "New York School" is so strong that we can learn a lot about one by looking at the other. Here's another place where Mad Men helps us interpret O'Hara's work. In the show's second season, Cooper acquires a piece of abstract expressionist art -- a Rothko painting -- and much is made among the junior executives of whether or not the painting "means" anything. Kenny, ever the poet misplaced in the body of an account man, gives this insightful analysis: "Maybe it doesn't [mean anything]. Maybe you're just supposed to experience it. Because when you look at it, you do feel something, right? It's like looking into something very deep. You could fall in."

I think Kenny's advice applies well to O'Hara's poetry (featured in the same season as the Rothko.) It's not particularly helpful to search for meaning. (Though the mind will make some meaning, no matter what.) It's better just to experience whatever emotions arise through O'Hara's word pictures and rhythms.

Today

O'Hara's not the most accessible poet for today's reader, and he's definitely not my favorite. But I do enjoy that Rothko painting (which I was lucky enough to see in person when it was at the DMA) and I can see how a similar mindset could make Meditations in an Emergency come alive for readers today. Another approach that may be helpful is the one I give my students the first time they read Eliot. I tell them not to worry too much about overall meaning, but to focus instead on the words, lines, and stanzas that they find meaningful or evocative on their own. I may never "get" The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but I'll never get over the lines, "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons." I think the same can apply to O'Hara's work, as the lines that Don Draper reads are also the lines that stick with me the most:

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.