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