Burbank Versifier: Alcohol and Womanizing Makes You a Deeper Person

Who said poetry has no place on TV? Don Draper on AMC's "Mad Men" intoned Frank O'Hara in an episode named after a volume of O'Hara's poetry. And show creator Matt Weiner gave an interview where he compared the effect and techniques of poetry to Draper's personality - saying a lot in a very little space. 


It's a pretty effective reading, too. If this whole second-leading-man movie star schtick comes up short, Jon Hamm can make a few shillings reading on CD. I'm thinking Wallace Stevens, a little Bukowski with some Robert Lowell thrown in. Actually, I think Lowell and Draper would be an awesome match-up on the classic game show "Whose Ego is Bigger!"

Mayakovsky

Frank O'Hara

1
My heart's aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it's throbbing!


then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.


2
I love you. I love you,
but I'm turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.


Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,


and I'll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.


Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick


with bloody blows on its head.
I embraced a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.


3
That's funny! there's blood on my chest
oh yes, I've been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea


4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.


The country 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. 

The poem itself is named and perhaps evocative of Vladimir Mayakovsky, a famed Soviet avant-garde poet. What's that you say? Tyranny and the avant-garde don't make good bedfellows? Ordinarily you're right, but if you kiss the rod sometimes you can get away with murder. As an example, here's a propaganda poster Mayakovsky  was involved with creating.

1. Under capitalism the worker toiled underneath the club. He was just a pitiful appendage to the factory. 
2. No matter how much sweat he put into it, the worker’s work just went to the capitalist. 
3. But now, proletarian, all is yours! (ribbon on the globe reads, “everything to the laboring people”) 
4. If you work with the machinery, care dearly for it, lift it up


Mmm, now that's good agit-prop!