Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
Published 1964 · 10,061 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · poetry, lyric poetry, New York School, avant-garde poetry
How hard is Lunch Poems to read?
Lunch Poems scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- O'Hara's vocabulary is conversational and deliberately accessible, with the challenge coming entirely from cultural literacy rather than lexical difficulty. The poems are dense with proper names — Rachmaninoff, Dubuffet, Verlaine, Giulietta Masina — and scattered French and Spanish phrases, but no rare or archaic words impede reading. A reader fluent in 1950s-60s New York art and celebrity culture finds everything transparent; a reader without that context must simply accept the names as texture.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- O'Hara writes in breathless, paratactic runs — long chains of 'and... and... and...' that accumulate observations without subordination. Sentences extend across many lines but through additive logic rather than Jamesian hypotaxis or Faulknerian nesting. The occasional absent punctuation creates slight stumbling, but the grammatical demands remain simple. 'I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S CORNER... and chocolate malted' is typical: easy to parse, difficult only if you expect lyric elevation.
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- The poems operate at the extreme concrete end of the spectrum. O'Hara records prices (35 cents, 16 cents), clock times (12:20, the 4:19 to Easthampton), brand names (Gauloises, Strega, Coca-Cola), and specific New York addresses with documentary precision. Emotional and aesthetic ideas are embedded in the concrete rather than stated abstractly. 'The Day Lady Died' never names grief; it catalogues the errands O'Hara ran on the afternoon Billie Holiday died.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Each poem compresses dozens of proper nouns, cultural references, and associative leaps into a few lines of observation. 'Personal Poem' moves from a Roman coin to Miles Davis being clubbed outside Birdland to Herman Melville to girder-walkers in silver hats within a single block of text. Tracking these associative chains requires sustained attention even though the syntax is simple. The density is cultural and allusive rather than conceptual.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- No poem tells a story in a conventional sense. Meaning accumulates through juxtaposition — the labor of reading 'A Step Away from Them' is inferring what the observed street scene says about grief and survival from the pure catalogue of what the speaker sees. 'The Day Lady Died' withholds any announcement of feeling until the final half-sentence, 'and everyone and I stopped breathing.' The reader must construct the emotional significance from the accumulated mundane detail.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Objects in O'Hara carry emotional weight without being systematically allegorical. New York itself functions as a correlative for consciousness — the city's energy matches and amplifies the speaker's states. The lunch hour recurs as a figure for stolen creative time, freedom snatched from institutional life at MoMA. But O'Hara resists the heavy symbolic machinery of Eliot or Crane; the poems prefer to let things be themselves and resonate through proximity rather than to encode fixed meanings.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- O'Hara maintains a wry, camp self-awareness throughout — 'I am really a woodcarver and my words are love' is simultaneously earnest and self-mocking. The persona knows its own enthusiasms are excessive and declares them anyway. In 'Poem en Forme de Saw,' the speaker addresses himself from the voice of a saw mill, deflating lyric seriousness mid-poem. The irony is never corrosive; it functions as the speaker's way of remaining sincere without sentimentality.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Nearly every poem ends by refusing closure, often breaking off mid-association or closing with a deadpan timestamp (1959, 1961, 1962). The collection as a whole has no arc, no resolution, no argument concluded. 'Steps' ends: 'oh god it's wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much.' The ending feels final through sheer declaration but leaves every question about the 'you' open.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- The collection is a gathering of individual poems with no overarching narrative or thematic architecture. Within each poem, the structure is digressive and associative — O'Hara coined 'Personism' to describe poems addressed directly to a specific person with all the randomness of actual thought. 'For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson' sprawls across pages of free association, shifting registers from camp to elegiac to nonsensical without warning. There are no formal verse structures to orient the reader.
How Lunch Poems is regarded
Lunch Poems holds a literary regard score of 74 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.