The 50th anniversary celebrations of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems roll on with a terrific-sounding event, to be held at the University of California, Berkeley this week, featuring some great poets reading poems from the book.
On October 2, 2014, “Lunch Poems: A Noontime Poetry Reading Series” — a long-running series at Berkeley directed by Robert Hass that takes its name from O’Hara’s famous book — will host “FRANK O’HARA’s LUNCH POEMS TURNS 50: AN ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION.” Here’s how they describe it:
In partnership with City Lights Books, who first published Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems 50 years ago, we present a special event featuring readings from a newly expanded edition that also includes communiqués by O’Hara pulled from the City Lights archive housed at the Bancroft Library. Participants include: Garrett Caples, C. S. Giscombe, Jayne Gregory, Robert Hass, Owen Hill, Elaine Katzenberger, Evan Klavon, giovanni singleton, Juliana Spahr, and Matthew Zapruder.
The event will be held in the Morrison Library at 101 Doe Library, and begins at 12:10.
This rather precise start time seems like an auspicious moment to begin a tribute to O’Hara, one of whose poems begins:
It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering
if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch
ah lunch! I think I am going crazy
what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up
at excitement-prone Kenneth Koch’s…
Andrew Epstein
Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets 