As Planned

Anthony Wilson,

As Planned

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don’t you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?

Frank O’Hara

I love this short, quiet poem of Frank O’Hara. I first came across it a year or so ago on a Poetry Off the Shelf (Poetry Foundation) podcast about drinking. They had a lot of material to get through. Other poets (Duffy, Yeats, O’Brien) have conjured the otherness and wildness of being drunk with greater verbosity, but it is precisely the hushed, confessional tone of this poem that draws me to it.

I have a theory about Frank O’Hara, that he wasn’t a wild extrovert at all (with Kenneth Koch knocking around the place, who would need to be?) but preferred to live, as one of his poems has it ‘a step away from them’. Anyway, it’s just a theory. As they say, Discuss. I think he has a lot more in common with someone more obviously withdrawn like Tomas Tranströmer. (I could be wrong.)

I am off now to my own space of withdrawing. To see if I can (re)discover my inner Frank O’Hara. Or even Anthony Wilson. A step away from them. (You.) On the advice of a friend, I am going to read no new poetry magazines or blogs. I shall be taking only four poets with me. I’ll let you know who when I am back.

Love for now, Anthony

Art-work: The Encounter (1952)(detail), Karel Appel, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Published by Anthony Wilson

I am a lecturer, poet and writing tutor. I work in teacher and medical education at the University of Exeter. My anthology Lifesaving Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. In 2012 I published Riddance (Worple Press), a collection of poems, and Love for Now (Impress Books), a memoir, about my experience of cancer. The Wind and the Rain, my sixth collection of poems, is available now from Blue Diode Publishing. My current research project, funded by the Foyle Foundation, is Young Poets' Stories: https://youngpoetsstories.com/. This blog is archived by the British Library.

12 Comments

  1. Dear Anthony,
    Only four posts with you and yes, what a way to do.this. I shall miss your posts, but these four months are their own ongoing posts also and an inspiration and a prod to me.

    Many thanks and best on this journey within.

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  6. Really interesting little poem. I relish the opening, and then the development via detail (especially the box of matches) more than how it ends, but I like it. And the painting is extraordinary. By whom?

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