LUNCH POEMS

First edition, first printing. Number 19 in the Pocket Poets Series. Original orange, blue and white card wrappers. A better than very good copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Light rubbing to edges, tips and corners, a couple of small surface tears to the spine (barely noticeable and without affecting the binding), a few small marks to the rear panel, light diagonal crease to the lower corner of the front panel. Correctly priced $1.25 to the rear panel. A very presentable copy of O'Hara's signature collection.

Published in 1964, 'Lunch Poems', O' Hara's most perfectly formed slim volume, was commissioned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti for his iconic Pocket Poets series as early as 1959. In the introduction to the huge, posthumous, Collected O'Hara, Donald Allen, the poet's friend and editor, recalls that "Between 1960 and 1964 O'Hara and I worked intermittently at compiling Lunch Poems, which in the end became a selection of work dating from 1953 to 1964." The delays were not down to productivity. O'Hara was always prolific, famously able to write poems on the hoof ("any time, any place", as his friend and fellow poet James Schuyler put it). Indeed, the title and contents of 'Lunch Poems' suggest that many of the poems were written during the poet's lunch hour, while away from his desk at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 'The Day Lady Died', one of O'Hara's great "I do this, I do that" poems (his own phrase) begins "It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes / it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine / because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton / at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner / and I don't know the people who will feed me". Deceptively artless, the poems at their best are, as John Ashbery has it, both "modest and monumental [, h]alf on contemptuously familiar terms with poetry, half embarrassed or withdrawn before its strangeness[. T]he work seems entirely natural and available to the multitude of big and little phenomena which combine to make that almost unknowable substance that is our experience."