Moving from column A to column B

On this day 54 years ago, Frank O’Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery in Springs, Long Island. (More about that here )

 A 2008 Article in The New Yorker ( Fast Company ) calls O’Hara a “self elegist,” moving his own fleeting life by means of poetry into the timeless:

“His poems, so full of names and places and events, are exquisite ledgers for the tallying of reality. They all attempt to move the vital but fleeting items in Column A—sandwiches and torsos, lunch hours and late nights—into Column B, where works of art stand, “strong as rocks,” against the ravages of mortality. The attempt to move people from Column A to Column B is called “elegy,” and, while every poet tries it, few have done so with the illusion of real-time improvisation that makes O’Hara’s poems so risky and so satisfying. Although he wrote his elegies for both the famous (James Dean, Billie Holiday, Jackson Pollock) and the obscure (many of whom, like O’Hara’s Boston friend Bunny Lang, have become almost famous for their part in his poems), O’Hara was essentially a self-elegist: poem after poem explores that darker sense of his “own ceaseless going”—his presence, a moment ago so real and vital, now going, now gone. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,” Robert Frost wrote, “the poem must ride on its own melting.” This is the story of every O’Hara poem, which simultaneously moves forward and disappears, delighting in its speed and despairing of its brevity.”