43 Folders has been doing a series on making time to make things, and followed up today with a post about Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems.  Productivity blog + poetry?  I think I may have just had a geek nirvana moment.

Kenneth Burke called literature equipment for living, and O’Hara never put his away. He was always making. Sometimes poems, sometimes friends.

He has a slim book of work called Lunch Poems, and you might think of that as his primary mode of composition. While out walking from the museum to get lunch, he’d do a poem. Maybe he’d type it up and stick it in a drawer later.

I think that may be an oversimplification of O’Hara’s process, but who can say for sure?  What is certain is that O’Hara had a true gift for capturing the beauty of the colloquial and trivial, and it’s no coincidence that he was a poet who remained immersed in the world of work, firmly rooted in the everyday experience and not some artistic or romantic ideal, remaining engaged not to promote his work but to create it.