I want to play now a little clip that
can be found on YouTube that comes from the television show
Mad Men, and it is basically, the central character
in the show, this guy Don Draper.
Perhaps many of you have seen it,
but if you haven't the central character
is a guy named Don Draper who is an ad executive.
The show takes place in, initially, in the late 1950s
and then moves into the early 60s and the mid-60s
as the seasons go along.
But he is an ad executive, he in New York,
he lives in the suburbs, and he's
living, what in some ways on the surface,
is a very typical American life for that time,
the surface of kind of satisfaction and conformity,
and the culture of consumption and optimism, sort
of the high-water mark of the American century
in a lot of ways.
And Don Draper is a very complicated,
literally self-invented man, and I
don't want to give too much away if you haven't seen the show
and you want to go and watch it.
But he has very much invented an identity for himself.
So I was very interested in this clip.
I hadn't actually seen it myself until I was looking around
for some recordings online of some of the New York School
poets reading their poems and stumbled on to this.
So he, in this scene, he is reciting actually a stanza.
It's the fourth section of a poem by Frank O'Hara called
Mayakovsky.
So Mayakovsky was a Russian poet who
was an influence on Frank O'Hara, and in many ways,
this is not a typical Frank O'Hara poem.
It's kind of somber, and there's a sense
in this clip of a kind of dark undertow
and it's not the sort of, simple sort
of, sense of this character's life having a character,
personal life having a kind of undertow to it,
but the sort of life of the culture having an undertow.
And I think in some ways, you can feel O'Hara
like putting his fingers on it, although it's quite
personal I think in some ways.
And there's something in the last couple of lines
of what he's reciting that made me think of the Creeley poem,
and I'll say what that is as soon as it's over.
So this is it.
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
The country is gray, and brown, and white, and trees.
Snows and skies of laughter, always diminishing.
Less funny, not just darker, not just gray.
And 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.
So you know, it's very interested in those lines.
You know, what does he think of that?
I mean, what do I?
And if I do, perhaps I am myself again,
because I think that they, in some odd,
offhand way embody this thing that Creeley is also
talking about, which is that one returns
to oneself through poetry.
I mean, Creeley has literally talked about that,
that poetry is a kind of returning to oneself refreshed
hopefully, often I think.
And certainly, in the work of the New York School
that is a fact, but that when one
is in contact with oneself one feels themselves.
I mean, it's a sort of tautological you know, premise,
but I think in the hands of the New York School poets, what
it's about is a kind of immediacy,
and a sense of aliveness, and the sort of, value
of ordinary life, not extraordinary life,
ordinary life, OK.
So I'd like to talk about that tonight,
and O'Hara has this great, great line in a poem
that I've actually sort of, forgotten in which he says,
it's only ever about being more alive.
And I think that alone is enough to kind of point
us in the direction of a poetry of risk,
that it's not simply about recalling
the pleasures and the sort of wonderful moments in life.
But that also what he's registering
is this sort of sense that those things are rescued, in part,
you know, because he was living in a culture
that he understood was false, and that he understood
had many things wrong with it.
But he never really registered those things directly,
and that's kind of one of the things
I want to get at tonight.