abbattoir vigilante

I’m not sure what to think of this man. This man O’Hara. It seems to me these are not poems so to speak. Poetic journal entries maybe. But then we can argue who’s to say what is and what is not a poem. Who is to judge what is and what is not art. Well someone must judge it, because there are paintings we hang in museums and paintings we hang on the refrigerator. The classic saying “my 4 year old could have painted that” , anyone could have painted that. But they didn’t paint it, the person who painted it painted it. I could have written poems like O’Hara. Anyone could write poems like O’Hara. I guess he wrote them first. Or maybe he was only recognized for them first.
The problem I have with them is such simple poetry seems forced. O’Hara’s poems seem forced. The appears to be so much effort put into what affects to be casual. His attempts a nonchalant poetry, for the sake of being nonchalant but still notable, fall short for me.
In the poem entitled “POEM” on page 19 O’Hara starts out by saying
“Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it,” fl This line is observational and interesting. It carries the feeling I assume O’Hara had wanted to communicate. The detached and observant, the Parisian walking through life. Unfortunately though I think he ruins most of these beautiful lines by following them with insightful rhetoric I find destructive to the rest of the stanza.
“and a phone call to the beyond which doesn’t seem to be coming any nearer.”
Now this line immediately ruins the poem for me because I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about. And the line which comes after this gives no clue or explanation. When O’Hara offers lines like these it appears to me he has only thrown them in as in effort in sounding poetic, while the simple observations he starts with are for me much more poetic than the poetic attempts that follow. Read the whole poem:

Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond
which doesn’t seem to be coming any nearer.
“Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days”
on the poetry of a new friend
my life held precariously in the seeing
hands of others, their and my impossibilities.
Is this love, now that the first love
has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?

So this poem is all over the place. I find it confusing and every other lines comes off as a filler. Comes off as “shit let me throw in something that sounds intellectual and thoughtful, but also romantic and bohemian”. Every other line comes off as crap.
Here is the poem with my edits (yeah I took the liberty):

Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it.
“Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days”
Is this love, now that the first love
has finally died?

Written this way the poem has a much strong affect on me than before. To me this version is much more insightful as well. By leaving out the pointless lines of poetic explanation I think the reader is able to come to the conclusion of the poem by his/her self. What O’Hara states so obviously should be left to the discertion of the reader.