In Memory of Frank O'Hara (And MY Feelings)

By Jenni Olson | March 06, 2009 @ 01:31 pm

I am sitting here blogging when I should be working. It's 1:30 in the afternoon and I'm listening to a podcast from MoMA in celebration of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems. Although I am not in the mood for writing an actual poem right now I am in the state of mind where I don't want to work. Hence blogging. 

And the urge to share a poem which has nothing (and yet everything) to do with my work as a filmmaker. Like O'Hara I want to observe the mundane details of the world, and convey them in compositions so simple that they seem to arise effortlessly, guilelessly, as portrayals of what is simply there.

Here is a fragment of one of my favorites [The Light Comes On By Itself] and then I am off to the dentist:

"I have a penchant for sad red bricks

and the sun burning itself up out there

for toll booths and water towers and

I am waiting for you to love me."