Understanding Poetry

To understand a work (of art, of literature, of music) one must first tap into the mind of the author (in our case) and realize his/her motivations in writing what he/she did. As readers, we must appreciate what was going on in their lives to try to understand what the author wanted us to understand, instead of proposing ideas that have little proof of validity. I mean things like location (when they wrote it), mood, political and societal situation. Most of the works we read, and I venture to say most written works are just a projection of human emotion. Human emotion is under the influence of all the things of life: the weather, where we are when we write, whether we have a tasty snack next to us when we write…, I suppose it can be said that it is the puppet of life.
Let me explain. Getting in the mindset of the author, and by that I mean imagining that we live in their time and write where they write, gives the reader great power in trying to understand the authors message. For example, knowing that Emily Dickinson lived most of her life locked in her room, writing her poetry there (according to Wikipedia), I would guess that she was an emotional wreck, or at very least mentally or emotionally skewed. Thus, her poetry must be a projection of her emotional state…her poetry deals a lot with death and distress.
I write this blog not to discuss Emily Dickinson’s bedroom life…, but to relate it somehow to our current reading assignment: Frank O’Hara’s Lunch poems. It seems the consensus has been that they random, confusing, boring. Maybe this is because readers don’t understand what Williams message is in his collection of poetry that seems to be about nothing. Or maybe I’m entirely wrong, and people do understand, but just don’t like it very much. Either way, I’m going to try to piece the things together.
What do we know about O’Hara? He wrote these poems while outside on the (what I can only assume) noisy streets of New York during lunchtime. We also read his poetry immediately following our selections of modernist poetry. Based on his style, I would assume that he took after modernistic style.
This is all I know of O’Hara. These factors suggest that O’Hara found meaning in every day, mundane, things. It can be said that he found banality interesting. Perhaps he decided to write about these banal events because he thinks that people have forgotten how to see beauty in them. Perhaps that is O’Hara’s message: to find beauty in what people have made seem ugly with time.