meditations in his own emergency.

I started reading "Meditations in an Emergency". It's a book of poetry written by Frank O'Hara in the late 1950s. I first learned of the book after seeing it in an episode of Mad Men.

The poems vary in length and meaning. Some are pretty short, and some require a comfortable chair. But you can't help but feel some similarities between them. Frank's voice becomes yours when you're reading them.

To me, they speak to the helplessness we feel from our environment. Our internalized disconnections we place on ourselves.

That feeling you get when you're at a party and you don't know anyone.

When you're laying in bed and you realize how quiet your world is.

I think that's what he meant by "meditations in an emergency". Those times when you are lost in translation with your own thoughts. Staring off in the distance trying to find an answer to a question you're not even asking yourself. We meditate for answers.

It's hard to tell what it was Frank felt disconnected from. But I wish I knew. An unfortunate car accident ended Frank's life in 1966, so we may never know what Frank felt when he wrote this book.

I jumped around, but the first poem in the book is definitely my favorite.

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To the Harbormaster

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught  
in some moorings. I am always tying up  
and then deciding to depart. In storms and  
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide  
around my fathomless arms, I am unable  
to understand the forms of my vanity  
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder  
in my hand and the sun sinking. To  
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage  
of my will. The terrible channels where  
the wind drives me against the brown lips  
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet  
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and  
if it sinks, it may well be in answer  
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

          -Frank O'Hara

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-Ryan