Lunch Poems

Lunch Poems is a book of poetry by Frank O'Hara published in 1964 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, number 19 in their Pocket Poets series.

The poems contain numerous references to pop culture and literary figures, New York locations, and O'Hara's friends.

[4] The following are examples of this: “A Step Away From Them” begins, “It’s my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk among the hum-colored / cabs.” He references Edwin Denby, Federico Fellini, the Armory Show, and Pierre Reverdy, and New York locations like Juliet’s Corner and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse.

At the end of the poem, he discovers that Billie Holiday is dead and remembers having heard her sing, recalling that “she whispered a song along the keyboard / and everyone and I stopped breathing.” “Personal Poem” begins, “Now when I walk around at lunchtime / I have only two charms in my pocket.” It is about O’Hara’s conversation with LeRoi Jones about Miles Davis, Lionel Trilling, Henry James, and Herman Melville.

At the end, he says, “I wonder if one person out of 8,000,000 is thinking of me.” A 50th Anniversary Edition of Lunch Poems was released in 2014 (City Lights Publishers.)