Micro Essay: The Pittsburgh Pirates Shout

the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive

— Frank O’Hara, “Steps”

One of the challenges of life is finding new ways to remind ourselves that it (i.e. life) is amazing. Louis CK laments our ability to do this consistently in a popular appearance on Conan O’Brien. But Louis CK has, by no means, cornered the market on attempting to reveal for the benefit of an audience that we’re all, always, winning.

In a sense, the work of poet Frank O’Hara — who, if you’re not familiar with him, was kind of a big deal in the the tiny, tiny world of poems — represents a constant attempt to provoke the reader into re-seeing the world.

In fact, if O’Hara’s work has a flaw, it’s that it suffers from an excess of enthusiasm. In baseball, we learn, only so many opportunities present themselves for the walkoff home run (or walkoff other-type-of-thing) and its attendant joys. Just as the constraints of a baseball game only conspire to create so many revelatory moments, so do the constraints of life. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous; writing poems that pretend otherwise makes those poems feel strained.

But O’Hara’s work is successful enough of the time to be important. And the reader, using discretion, can shape his approach to O’Hara’s work to maximize its benefits. The comparisons to how we might approach life are too obvious to be explicated. The difficulty, of course, is in the actual doing. When we speak of life being difficult, I assume this is what we’re talking about.