So it is 10.03 (this is when I still had my watch on)

and Charles and I are on our way through the rain

to Bill's Frank O'Hara lecture and Charles says

but anyone could write a Frank O'Hara poem, why

bother?  Charles says Mark Pirie writes Frank

O'Hara poems. (Mark Pirie does not write

Frank O'Hara poems.) And he sits through

the lecture in his black leather jacket, his

trainers up on the metal ring bit of his chair,

his arms folded against his linen shirt, and

when I accidentally yell “goody” when Bill

says he'll play Frank O'Hara's recording

of “Song” he says “try and be a bit

more academic, Anna,” and Frank O'Hara

in a sweet and Ginsberg-like voice is repeating

his refrain, “you don't refuse to breathe

do you,” and I am thinking, if anyone

can write a Frank O'Hara poem, isn't that

a good thing?  Doesn't that make us all

potentially good people?  As if Ginsberg

had got it right and “we're all golden

sunflowers inside,” although later, in our

tutorial class, after listening to Ginsberg

giving a most elegiac and O'Hara-like rendition

of “America” on the computer with Windows

Media Player, we start looking at Plath,

and it is true she keeps her inner sunflower

pretty much hidden although I try

and make a case for reading the poems

as a literary exercise and the suicide

as a sort of accident and Frank O'Hara

poetry as what she could have been

writing if she weren't so determined

to think up something new and different

to do to interest the critics.  I still think

she could have. Charles says anyone could!

So let's!  Who knows what it might save

us from? After all, anyone can talk,

and you don't refuse to talk, do you.