FRANK O'HARA and DONALD DRAPER of MAD MEN

In an episode
of the television show
Mad Men,
advertising executive
Donald Draper
reads aloud
the final section
of Frank O'Hara's
poem titled
'Mayakovsky.
This poem
is from O'Hara's
collection
Meditations In An Emergency
(Grove Press, 1957).
Here is
what Donald Draper
reads:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interersting, and modern.


The county is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.


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.

SENTENCE: an exemplary instance of

Of the weird way they cut meat in the market, of how hard it was to get milk, even finally with the assistance of Eddie Kent, of the very existence now of the flowers in the garden, the tulipan hedge that screened Eddie's lawn from the swimming pool, for instance, the zapotes like chocolate jello but tasting of delicate flavors (so she said), of all these things he would have known nothing, had she not told him.


Malcolm Lowry
from DARK AS THE GRAVE WHEREIN MY FRIEND IS LAID
(New American Library, 1968).

CAKETRAIN

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REVIEW

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The psalm is sung to that Other we will never know. The knowledge of its imparting is sorrow and joy. It tells us only of what we cannot say, what will be revealed only when there is little left of us to know. The burning bush gave something that was not a psalm because Moses carried the tablets down and the people learned the meaning of fear. The other side of that same currency is where the psalm tunes its harp. These are ancient currencies, beyond the clock’s tock, the heart’s closing gates. If poems expressed a usefulness then these would be the suits brought against such an expressiveness. Perhaps the ideal reader these poems calls to has never been prepared by an understanding of poetry or song. And so one must go to that place where wonder sets the seas on fire. There set your final self down. There take up that golden light. Be some furrowed deep, a flame of inextinguishable beauty, a sword, a chalice, a tree upon which meaning crucified by song is given flesh once more.

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