#o hara

[dragarchive]

Asia O'Hara, Miss Gay Texas 2007

[simgiirl]

The oldest family in Town is the Kuran family and no one knows how old lady Cassandra Kuran really is. But it was the O´Hara and the Butler family who rebuild the town after the war.

[desideravitrend]

[tobinbae1723]

Let’s go Utah

Pressure is definitely mad lol 😂

[uutpoetry]

Social Media and the Poetic Life

I’ve been intrigued by how many of my composition students write critically about social media. For them, its antithetical to happiness and health: human exchange on the internet is somehow ontologically distinct from “the real world” and these two ontologies are opposed.

Curious to me though, given the transparency and authenticity with which they write about and through their deep ambivalences about these new media, is their complete complicity in perpetuating the behaviors they condemn: they are ravenous consumers of the media they allegedly hate.

While I don’t fully understand this duplicity, I have grown skeptical of the rationale that critiques our new digital society. Think, for a moment, about one of the most common criticisms of social media behavior—incessant sharing of mundane everyday experiences. “No one wants to hear about what you had for breakfast.” But consider that the vast majority of these instances of sharing the “everyday” were executed in a state of happiness, in an uncritical and unselfconscious state of joy. Perhaps in our more introspective moments we find the innocence of this behavior nauseating, but that does not change the intrinsic positivity of these moments.

When we act this way as writers, nobody objects. To me the golden age of modern American poetry is the lucid, bright lines of Frank O’Hara’s lunch poems and other New York School figures who allowed the everyday to seep marvelously and effortlessly into their lines. Like Instagrammers of the 21st century, these individuals were recording and celebrating the joys of everyday life.

The differences, of course, are important too. They were packaging the several and various moments into a list and a continuum that captures the temperament of energy of life—something perhaps more difficult to see in aggregated social media feeds. (Or is it? The Facebook dashboard could theoretically a veritable smorgasbord of collective human activity, ripe of the poet’s taking.) Also, a key to O’Hara’s urbane magic is the reflective pause he takes in the middle or end of his poems—the momentary reflectiveness that is authentic but lighthearted, never halting the flow of chaotic experience for more than a second or two, such as this short section of “A Step Away From Them,” when he pulls back his series of observations of street life to contemplate metaphysics:

                                        First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them?

But, minus a few poetic gestures, the activity is essentially the same: identifying and capturing in a concrete way specific moments that demonstrate and celebrate life as it is experienced.

On one hand, I think this means we need to go a bit easier on ourselves about those food shots, cat videos, and selfies. On the other hand, we might try re-seeing these moments and imagining new ways to aggregate and present them—new ways to convey the scope and totality of what they collective point to. If you are not feeling the liberating power of the everyday, you may need to renew the form and temperament of your social media “writing” (whether alphabetic, photographic, or otherwise), but consider that something authentic and validating may reside not so far beneath the surface.

[stayfr-sh]

Lake-O'Hara

[uutpoetry]

I Don't Like That Stranger Sneezing Over Our Love

You have a journey in your mouth. It is the punch of a kind wasp leaking symmetry on our bed which is a Levine briefcase wrapped in the windpipe of Lamborghinis.

No I have not succumbed to the eternal dream of music. I have a temple of fine linens on which I chew.

In real life I get caught by a hanger between the first and second floor.

Shucks is a lumberjack for sale in the Bank of America's flaccid afternoon jukebox.

I point at you with five certificates.

There is a world out there and its sound is go.

art by NikoIkon

[aliyamustafina]

I love USWNT fandom

I’m not part of it, just follow a couple of users but they are hilarious, even more when it's“mother fuckin game day” LOL