Frank O'Hara Writes a Blurb for Danny Rivera

Danny Rivera writes poems of great mystery and longing, or so he would like you to believe. Rivera could use some time in the real world, out there with the working folk that propel this city, with the types that know a thing or two about strategizing at dominoes, about la vida profunda. He might also want to spend a few successive days at the movies, where he can take a look at characters neither dressed in wire-rimmed glasses and tweed jackets, nor with silk scarves around their necks like swans on a final visit to shore. He should sit in the back row of the Lyceum Theater on 42nd and 7th, that line of seating that never seems to get a visit from an usher, and gauge people's reactions - the slow gasps, moving as though confetti unleashed on that first victory parade along Broadway, especially - to the cowboy, the samurai, and the sad-sad bettor at the racetrack. All he has to do is observe, carefully at that, and learn to live accordingly.

In the meantime, I'll sit here, behind this green Olivetti and with poems by Pierre Reverdy in my pocket, awaiting the time that Rivera wakes up to what he already knows, to what he already feels.