Meditations in an Emergency Review

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(More customer reviews)If you wondered what Don Draper was reading and why he got that far away look in his eye then your curiosity is much like mine. I had to know. Meditations In An Emergency is that book. Frank O'Hara was the voice that spoke to the madness, the chaos, and the contradictions in the cultural transition between 50's and 60's America. He was one of the best poets of the twentieth century and along with writers like Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry.
O'Hara's poetry is vital, raw, gritty, and extremely moving.
And Don Draper is thinking:
Now I am quietly waiting for
the castastrophe 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.

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Frank O'Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry, "which, by its vitality alone, became the dominant force in the American poetic tradition."Frank O'Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in New England; from 1951 he lived and worked in New York, both for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art, where he was an associate curator. O'Hara's untimely death in 1966 at the age of forty was, in the words of fellow poet John Ashbery, "the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed." This collection is a reissue of a volume first published by Grove Press in 1957, and it demonstrates beautifully the flawless rhythm underlying O'Hara's conviction that to write poetry, indeed to live, "you just go on your nerve."

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