“She is a beautiful piece of broken pottery, put back together by her own hands. And a critical world judges her cracks while missing the beauty of how she made herself whole again.”
“Frank O’Hara’s poem “Katy,” written in 1953… was written either about or with Katherine Porter, the young daughter of O’Hara’s friend, the painter Fairfield Porter. In his biography of Porter, Justin Spring notes that this poem stemmed from a two-week summer vacation O’Hara took at the Porter’s home in Maine. “O’Hara’s charisma was such that the young Katie Porter, then six, doted on him. The two wrote a poem together, entitled ‘Katy,’ which [James] Schuyler saved among his papers.”’ (source)
to the poets who die unknown who live their poems day by day bare the chaos of lost words Here’s to the poems that never get published that lie fallow in someone’s veins that burned in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Vietnam New York City Portland, Maine Here’s to the poets in Nicaragua Cuba South Africa El Salvador in the southern countryside of all the Americas and in the northern cities too Here’s to the women and men who never even knew they were poets had no one to tell them didn’t know how to tell themselves Here’s to the millions of words buried in a million places all over the globe the mouths and hands silenced forever Here’s to all that magic music beauty surprise that died unsung that dies everyday that blood that moves us forward that holds back the tide
You could sit on your chair and pick over the language as if it were a bowl of peas. A lot of people do that. It might be instructive. You don’t even need the chair, You could juggle plates of air.
You could poke sticks through the chain-link fence at your brain, which you keep locked up in there, which crouches and sulks like an old tortoise, and glares out at you, sluggish and eyeless. You could tease it that way, make it blunder and think, and emit a croaking sound you could call truth. A harmless activity, sort of like knitting, until you go too far with it and they bring out the nooses and matches.
Or you could do something else. Something more sociable. More group-oriented. A lot of people do that too. They like the crowds and the screaming, they like the adrenalin.
Hunker down. Get a blackout curtain. Pretend you’re not home. Pretend you’re deaf and dumb. Look: pitchforks and torches! Judging from old pictures, things could get worse.
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