Tags: loving of art, sharing of art, art as object, art as experience, writing of art, ekphrastic, narrative, information management
Now, the poem that really started it all and properly inspired the title of this anthology, “Having a Poem with You”. I found and loved this poem immediately, and then of course went to read the art as object that it references and takes its name from, “Having a Coke with You”, in order to better understand the context, though I think it stands wonderfully on its own too. By engaging with this existing work so explicitly, we get a very interesting duality, which I hope you’ll be able to appreciate having already read it.
Having “Having a Coke with You” with You
Mark Leidner
You asked me if I knew the poem “Having a Coke with You”
I said I vaguely remembered it but didn’t really
so you recited it in its entirety. We were walking
from somewhere up by City Hall down toward South Street
and the whole time you were reciting it I was wondering
“Was that the last line of the poem?” after each line
and each time I thought that, I thought it even more
because as the poem got longer the fact that you were reciting it
from memory became incrementally harder to believe
until about two-thirds of the way through the poem
I stopped thinking about how long it was and just started listening
which I had been, but only a little, because of all that. Anyway
then I started listening to it completely, believing
the poem itself to be the sole reason you were reciting it
but as soon as you finished you started to talk about how
you used to think that that poem was just about how
liberatingly banal being in love with someone was
but then you said you’d started to think more recently
it was more about the idiocy of caring about art at all
when you could spend all that energy caring about someone
you loved instead, and you said you were wondering where
I stood on that question now that I had heard the poem
and I was as struck by the question as I was stunned
that you could so casually recite such a long good poem
and that you hadn’t even recited it primarily to solicit
appreciation for your recitation so much as to ask
what I thought about what you had thought about it
then, versus how you thought about it now, and this was
when I knew I wanted to be with you forever.
This poem manages to create a really interesting effect while following a true story pretty closely, meaning a lot of the work is done by information management. In particular, notice the opening description of the lover reciting this long and lovely poem, that in text also runs on and on for more lines than necessary and in doing so creates a kind of ekphrastic effect that the reader doesn’t mind sitting through because we’re following the speaker’s thought process.
We then get a really quick turn though, as soon as the poem recital finishes and the lover is now asking the speaker a sincere question about the art she’d just shared which then turns very quickly to the speaker expressing shock at this whole artistic experience they’ve gone through as well as overwhelming feelings of love largely because of it. This information management along with the run-on style of writing helps the reader experience the poem and experience in a similar way to how it was originally experienced.
Examining the narrative told throughout this story poem, there’s a lot of interplay with “Having a Coke with You” in that the lover is asking the speaker’s opinion of the poem and its relation to art and love. The poem begins with someone sharing a piece of art that they clearly are very attached to individually, which she uses to ask whether art is useless. But it’s certainly not in the sense that the speaker is able to experience a significant amount of love and emotion through the sharing of this art, so in a way the poem answers its own question for its subjects while maintaining a “liberatingly banal” tone throughout similar to O’Hara’s style. The speaker then writes this poem as a piece of art to share the experience and poses the same question to the reader who is likely enjoying the poem. And so this creates this whole complex cycle of questions and no answers in conversation with O’Hara that in a way answers itself by showing how deeply intertwined art and love and sharing all are such that it’s difficult to imagine any of them without the others.
I want to leave you with this piece of Mark Leidner talking about the story behind the poem, which I think is really beautiful when coupled with such a poem. Aside from the actual love story, it also goes into how Leidner’s grudge against Frank O’Hara as “too popular” was undone by hearing a loved one recite the piece, and I like the idea of loved ones being able to help us love art that we don’t already. In part, that is what I hope my poems and this anthology do.
Next up is my rendition of sharing this poem with someone I love!