Lana Turner Has Collapsed / Frank O'Hara

I love Frank O'Hara's poetry and I wrote an IG post on his birthday a few months ago.

"One of the most delicious and intoxicating poets I know. Reading an O’Hara poem is like being swept up into the fizzy, witty, campy motion of his life.

He was a curator at MOMA and a champion of the New York Art world. Gay and cultured and incredibly sociable.

It’s tragic but it strikes me as fitting that he was killed in a freak beach buggy accident on Fire Island in 1966. "

There are innumerable poems I could pick but this one sums up his "Lunch Time" poem - literally written in the break of his museum day. But so carefully constructed despite the apparently throw-away quality of their surface.

Prompted in part by keen poetry-lover Susanne

Lana Turner has collapsed!

I was trotting along and suddenly

it started raining and snowing

and you said it was hailing

but hailing hits you on the head

hard so it was really snowing and

raining and I was in such a hurry

to meet you but the traffic

was acting exactly like the sky

and suddenly I see a headline

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

there is no snow in Hollywood

there is no rain in California

I have been to lots of parties

and acted perfectly disgraceful

but I never actually collapsed

oh Lana Turner we love you get up