BOOKS
131
city
has
qualities that don't lend themselves easily to lyric expression.
I think Mr. O'Hara is the best writer about New York alive, per–
haps the only good one; he succeeds in conveying the city's atmo–
sphere not by writing directly about it but by writing about his emo–
tions, all of them somehow filtered through its paint supply stores
and its inspiring April smog:
My hands are Massimo Plaster, called «White Pin in the Arm
of the Sean
and I'm blazoned and scorch like a fleet of windbells down the
Pulaski Skyway,
tabletops of Vienna carrying their bundles of cellophane to
the laundry,
ear to the tongue, glistening semester of ardency, young-old
daringness
at the foot of the most substantial art product of our times,
the world, the jongleurs.
. ..
This poem is the most beautiful and convincing evidence I have
read of what it is like to have a body and soul here (more so even
than Lorca's marvelous
Poet in N ew York,
which is program–
matically hallucinatory as
Second Avenue
is not).
Second A venue's
language has a good deal to do with its suc–
cess. Like that of Dr. Williams-from which it differs in other re–
spects-Mr. O 'Hara's language is convincing and natural. (There
isn't a tedious "literary" use of a word in the whole poem, except
when Mr. O 'Hara
is
parodying the built-in solemnity which has
been a chief horror of our poetry for twenty years.) Stilted aca–
demic language (in which animals are "beasts" and "trust" means
only "have faith in" and not "a bank") has never been able to say
anything about New York. "Beat" language has done a little better;
but, accurate as it may be, it remains a jargon which limits tlle
meanings of words
(cool, bust),
and which is not nearly com–
prehensive enough to deal with "the most substantial art pro–
duct of our times." Mr. O'Hara's language is hugely comprehensive
and capable of the widest and most surprising effects-from "They
are bashing the seals over the head with coke" to
Perk quietly, don't, pension me and ply me with love that's
droll,
noose light harms and nutty bathers, use, sip, alarm, and pet,
