"The Catastrophe of My Personality"

In my bleak mood of the past week, I have been thinking of this stanza of this poem, "Mayakovsky" by Frank O'Hara. This is where I first heard it, as recited by the character Don Draper on Mad Men:


That first line, "now I quietly wait for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting and modern," and later, the landscape that is "less funny not just darker, not just gray"-- the combinations of those words seemed so startling and authentic, and yet also familiar. The rest of the poem is equally painful, equally accurate.

The day after that episode aired, I surfed through Google to track down their source, discovering that Meditations in an Emergency was, in fact, an actual volume of poetry containing the rest of this poem and that a poet named Frank O'Hara actually existed (Mad Men does strive for some accuracy).

The most interesting thing that turned up about Frank O'Hara, aside from his fascination with seemingly everything artistic and creative, was that he tried to write a poem a day. He would go out on his lunch hour from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and write a poem. "How amazing," I thought. Not so much that he wrote a poem a day, but that he went out looking for that poem, and the looking seemed to be the point.