WEBVTT

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I want to play now
a little clip that

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can be found on YouTube that
comes from the television show

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Mad Men, and it is basically,
the central character

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in the show, this
guy Don Draper.

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Perhaps many of
you have seen it,

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but if you haven't
the central character

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is a guy named Don Draper
who is an ad executive.

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The show takes place in,
initially, in the late 1950s

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and then moves into the
early 60s and the mid-60s

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as the seasons go along.

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But he is an ad
executive, he in New York,

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he lives in the
suburbs, and he's

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living, what in some
ways on the surface,

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is a very typical American
life for that time,

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the surface of kind of
satisfaction and conformity,

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and the culture of
consumption and optimism, sort

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of the high-water mark
of the American century

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in a lot of ways.

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And Don Draper is
a very complicated,

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literally self-invented
man, and I

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don't want to give too much away
if you haven't seen the show

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and you want to go and watch it.

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But he has very much invented
an identity for himself.

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So I was very
interested in this clip.

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I hadn't actually seen it myself
until I was looking around

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for some recordings online of
some of the New York School

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poets reading their poems
and stumbled on to this.

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So he, in this scene, he is
reciting actually a stanza.

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It's the fourth section of a
poem by Frank O'Hara called

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Mayakovsky.

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So Mayakovsky was
a Russian poet who

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was an influence on Frank
O'Hara, and in many ways,

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this is not a typical
Frank O'Hara poem.

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It's kind of somber,
and there's a sense

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in this clip of a
kind of dark undertow

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and it's not the
sort of, simple sort

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of, sense of this character's
life having a character,

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personal life having a
kind of undertow to it,

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but the sort of life of the
culture having an undertow.

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And I think in some
ways, you can feel O'Hara

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like putting his fingers
on it, although it's quite

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personal I think in some ways.

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And there's something in
the last couple of lines

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of what he's reciting that made
me think of the Creeley poem,

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and I'll say what that
is as soon as it's over.

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So this is it.

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Now I am quietly waiting for the
catastrophe of my personality

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to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

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The country is gray, and
brown, and white, and trees.

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Snows and skies of laughter,
always diminishing.

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Less funny, not just
darker, not just gray.

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And it may be the
coldest day of the year.

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What does he think of that?

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I mean, what do I?

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And if I do, perhaps
I am myself again.

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So you know, it's very
interested in those lines.

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You know, what does
he think of that?

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I mean, what do I?

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And if I do, perhaps
I am myself again,

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because I think that
they, in some odd,

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offhand way embody this
thing that Creeley is also

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talking about, which
is that one returns

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to oneself through poetry.

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I mean, Creeley has
literally talked about that,

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that poetry is a kind of
returning to oneself refreshed

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hopefully, often I think.

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And certainly, in the work
of the New York School

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that is a fact,
but that when one

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is in contact with oneself
one feels themselves.

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I mean, it's a sort of
tautological you know, premise,

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but I think in the hands of
the New York School poets, what

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it's about is a
kind of immediacy,

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and a sense of aliveness,
and the sort of, value

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of ordinary life, not
extraordinary life,

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ordinary life, OK.

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So I'd like to talk
about that tonight,

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and O'Hara has this great,
great line in a poem

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that I've actually sort of,
forgotten in which he says,

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it's only ever about
being more alive.

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And I think that alone is
enough to kind of point

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us in the direction
of a poetry of risk,

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that it's not simply
about recalling

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the pleasures and the sort
of wonderful moments in life.

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But that also what
he's registering

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is this sort of sense that those
things are rescued, in part,

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you know, because he
was living in a culture

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that he understood was
false, and that he understood

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had many things wrong with it.

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But he never really registered
those things directly,

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and that's kind of
one of the things

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I want to get at tonight.

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