Getting Dirty With Google Books

Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, available from City Lights Books

I had my first experience with Google Books tonight. I was searching for the text of a poem to email to a friend. All I had in my head were the first two lines: “Is it dirty / does it look dirty”. That string plus “O’Hara” was enough to get me on track. I got the text I wanted, but I’m never really sure that people who repost poems have the line breaks and punctuation right. With poetry that stuff matters a whole lot, so I was pleased to find links to the Google-cataloged version of the book Lunch Poems, where the poem originally appeared.

It’s an entirely different experience to read the poems from the scanned book pages rather than looking at reproduced text on some random web site. This might be specific for me to this volume since I own it, carry it around and have read the poems in it a million and one times, but it made me realize all over again just how different it is to read from a book rather than a page on the web. It seems like an obvious statement, but the brevity of the poem really highlighted the differences to me - such a contained experience, a few short lines. It felt better read through Google books than it did with the intermediary of whichever stray nerd like me decided to repost an O’Hara poem.

In case you were wondering, I’ll post the poem below, but better yet - go buy the book. It’s a good one.

POEM

Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that’s what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirty
that’s what you think of in the city
you don’t refuse to breathe do you

someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very
he’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes

that’s what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that’s not a thought that’s soot

and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don’t refuse to breathe do you