Frank O’Hara, from Michigan
to New York
Frank O’Hara, from Michigan
to New York
5 — Wednesday, August 3, 2022 // The Statement
Nestled in between Catherine
Street and Detroit Street, a sliver
of a building sits — the eclectic and
magnificent Detroit Street Filling
Station. Surrounded by a moat of
picnic tables and potted plants, a
tributary of jazz, blues and boogie
pours a cocktail of heart, soul and
song into the summer streets of
Ann Arbor. Inside, the music grows
louder as you enter the wall-less patio
adorned with upside-down umbrellas
and vibrant plants floating from the
ceiling. Captivated by the decor, it will
probably take a bit before the familiar
smell of comfort food wafts into your
nose, encouraging you to sit down and
stay a while.
This
dynamic
and
eclectic
restaurant keeps up its lively posture
by enthralling its customers with
an experiential and delightful meal
surrounded by a magical atmosphere.
The charisma is masterfully run by
a team of passionate people with a
level of customer service any manager
would be envious of. At the front
of it all, founder and owner Phillis
Engelbert stands attentively, engaging
with each customer and employee.
As the night picks up and the
colorful lanterns light up the night,
the pace increases and the music
gets louder, dancing across the
block. Despite tumultuous times in
the community and in the country,
Detroit Street Filling Station remains
a shining beacon of positivity and
humanity, providing a small retreat for
anyone who needs it. The entire space
is meant to remind the customers and
employees of the spirited potential of
life and happiness, Engelbert affirmed
as we sat down on a balmy summer
afternoon inside her restaurant.
“Everything feels vibrant and sort
of bursting with life and culture,”
Engelbert said. “And so the colors,
the sounds, the music, the plants,
the outdoors, all contribute to having
a feeling of being alive and being
joyful.”
Named after the 1925 Staebler
Family Oil Company, Detroit Street
Filling Station expanded into the
historic building in 2017. However,
Ann Arbor’s first entirely plant-
based restaurant didn’t start in the
triangular building, or even in a
restaurant at all.
“My next-door neighbor and I
are both vegan and love to throw
dinner parties, and so we had a joint
backyard, and we have our friends
over and cook,” Engelbert said. “And
one thing led to another, and we
started doing some pop-up meals at
the invitation of a friend who had an
event space.”
After many backyard meals and
“pop-up dining events at local retail
establishments,” Engelbert and her
neighbor, Joel Panozzo, responded
to an ad in the Ann Arbor Observer
asking for applicants for food cart
vendors at Ann Arbor’s “Mark’s
Carts.” Their food cart, “The Lunch
Room,” ran for the 2011 and 2012
summer seasons, and as their second
year concluded, they decided it was
time to break ground with their first
physical location.
By Shannon Stocking, Statement Contributor
By Taylor Schott,
Statement Deputy Editor
I once had a professor who began
a class by asking if we could name
five poets — the caveat being that
they had to be living — and none of
us could do it. I could only cough up
Louise Glück and Mary Oliver, both
Pulitzer Prize winners; I looked
them up afterward to check and
found that I was wrong about Mary
Oliver, she had died a year prior. And
I hadn’t even thought to name Rupi
Kaur, a lapse that speaks more to my
incredibly mixed feelings about her
contributions to poetry than to my
recall abilities.
And yet I called myself an admirer
of the arts? I was flooded with guilt
and made a mental note to read
more living poets, although I always
felt that there was so much more
romance involved in reading the
dead ones: Emily Dickinson, Arthur
Rimbaud,
Walt
Whitman,
Sara
Teasdale, W.B. Yeats, Pierre Reverdy,
William Carlos Williams, Frank
O’Hara — the less recently dead to
the more recently dead, respectively.
In the months that followed, I
burrowed into the internal promise,
combing through library catalogs
and hunting for “The Collected
Works of” in the bookstores scattered
throughout Ann Arbor. Probing
one afternoon through a nearly-
toppling pile of paperbacks in the
Dawn Treader Bookshop, I carefully
withdrew an intriguingly designed,
fraying copy of “Lunch Poems”
by Frank O’Hara — the playfully
contrasted blue and orange cover had
caught my attention, and I had heard
of O’Hara, but had yet to read him
in any dedicated, sustained fashion.
O’Hara was dead, I knew, and buying
the book would contradict my mission
to read living poets — but the first few
poems of his that I leafed through
while crouching on the floor were
witty, and I had never promised to
only buy the living poets — so I folded
and made my way to the register,
“Lunch Poems” tucked protectively
under my arm.
I breezed through “Lunch Poems”
in one sitting and, neglecting my
Literati-bought copies of Tracy K.
Smith and Ada Limón’s poetry in
its wake, instantly bought more
of O’Hara’s: “Meditations in an
Emergency,”
“The
Collected
Poems of Frank O’Hara” and “The
Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara,”
alongside Brad Gooch’s acclaimed
(but also “gossipy,” according to
other biographers) biography, “City
Poet: The Life and Times of Frank
O’Hara.”
Flitting back and forth from poem
to biography to memoir to audio
recording, I gathered that O’Hara,
with a personality nearly as large as
his body of work, had captivated the
artistic community of 1950s New
York and served, many biographers
and friends say, as its veritable center.
I found, too, that he had graduated
from the University of Michigan with
a Master’s in English after attending
Harvard on the G.I. Bill, winning a
Hopwood Award in the process.
For those unfamiliar with the
University of Michigan’s literary
prowess, O’Hara’s decision to attend
a university in the Midwest might
seem an odd choice.
How Phillis
Engelbert’s community
impact extends beyond
kitchen doors
How Phillis
Engelbert’s community
impact extends beyond
kitchen doors
JULIANNE YOON/Daily
Read more at michigandaily.com
Read more at michigandaily.com
nailhed.com: Honoring our state’s
abandoned “eyesores”
nailhed.com: Honoring our state’s
abandoned “eyesores”
By Saarthak Johri,
Statement Correspondent
This story starts how many of my
most reflective pieces do — with the
start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The situation trapped us inside, and
for many of us, deep into our own
heads. Here’s my deal, though: I’ve
been struggling with a digestive
autoimmune disorder for the past
four years, one that intensified the
need for me to be isolated. The class
of 2020’s virtual graduation story
doesn’t need to be repeated here —
you’ve either lived a version of it, are
close to someone who has or have
read about it countless times. What
I need you to understand is that for
me and many immunocompromised
people like me, this constant decay
we feel in our bodies and minds, the
one we try to cover up and return to
regularity from, was drummed up in
full force during the pandemic. We
all slowly found our own ways to deal
with it, though I took a less-than-
conventional approach.
At first, I was content with
forests. The woods surrounding my
neighborhood’s houses had always
been intriguing to me, but I never
had enough time to explore them
like I wanted in high school. It was
something I was used to doing in
my old neighborhood in elementary
school, stomping through shrubbery
that the real estate company in charge
of our subdivision hadn’t accrued
enough money to develop.
I spent the months of spring
wandering these woods, hoping
that they wouldn’t be cleared for a
while, checking in each day as bare
trees sprouted buds and restored
themselves. Maybe I envied them. It’s
an odd contradiction to be a human
in nature, returning to the spaces
that our species separated itself from.
Walking through, I could tell I wasn’t
the first to return as I stepped through
the litter of explorers past. However,
there was only so much green that
I could explore before I had to move
on. I couldn’t count it as exploring if
I’d already mentally mapped every
part. As summer approached, I tossed
my bike in my car and drove off to see
what else I could find.
I remember the first bike ride I
embarked on during the summer of
2020; it flipped a switch in me. As it
became warmer, people began to be
more lax with COVID-19 restrictions
so as to “save their summers.” I biked
through a neighborhood near my own
because that was what I was used to —
before school swallowed my schedule,
my childhood bike rides were all
confined to the old neighborhood,
ending at the main road and the
undeveloped plots. As I took in the
suburban scenery, I was hit by a sense
of multiplying and senseless sonder
— the conscious awareness that every
life is as complex as one’s own. Every
house had a family of some kind,
all living out individual existences
dictated by their own choices and
personal chaos, and each of these
layered over each other in a tapestry
so dense with narrative weight that it
began to slow my pedaling.
But I pushed myself and my
pedals, searching for scenery that
wouldn’t inflict this sonder on me,
and didn’t stop until I reached a
local salon, presumably closed for
months due to the pandemic. It was
a lovely, slightly yellow building with
withered plants hanging from its
balconies and dense weeds growing
through the unmaintained cracks
of its concrete drive. It was a place
where the narrative had ended, if
only for a moment, before it would
hopefully reopen its doors. It was
a place I could breathe — like in the
woods, left alone by the vast majority
of humanity.
Read more at michigandaily.com