Lunch Poems

What a great month for reading!  Maybe we should rename October to Readtober, for at least me.  I have been steam rolling through the list (Luckily a number of the new books are short which certainly helps!).  This time poetry!  Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems is a collection of short poems written in a “casual style” that captures the 1950s hard working blue collar NYC attitude.  O’Hara is believed to have written these short snippets while eating his lunch in Times Square, the West Side, or the Bronx.  Yes, he has a reference to my alma mater, Fordham University’s well known seismic observatory, which every good alum well remembers from our tours of the campus (The oldest recordings in US history were recorded there.).  Always fun to read about someplace you’ve been and the images that it brings from the past.  O’Hara’s style seems to be so ordinary that he actually calls half of his works “Poem.”  I wish all authors were so creative.  45 minutes and you’ll be through this one.  New Yorkers may want to put this one in the middle of their list, others, probably not so much.