The Legacy of the End of an Era

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

Don Draper reads Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency.”

A voiceover of Don Draper reciting the lines leading this post while thumbing through a copy of Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency bring one of my favorite episodes of Mad Men to a close. He’s reading them from O’Hara’spoem “Mayakovsky,” which first appeared in print in 1957. The choice of this poem by this...