‘Meditations in an Emergency’

Episode 1, For Those Who Think Young

As Don sits in a bar eating lunch, he glances over and sees someone reading Frank O’Hara’s book of poems. “Is it good?” Don asks. “I don't think you'd like it,” replies the man, seeing Don as nothing but the prototypical man in the gray flannel suit. At episode’s end, we see Don reading from the poem “Mayakovsky” and hear, in voiceover, a particularly resonant phrase: “Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”

Weiner: “That was a magical occurrence. I had studied poetry in college, and I read a lot of poetry, but I did not know Frank O’Hara. My wife took me to an exhibit between the first two seasons at the Museum of the City of New York and they had individually printed pieces of paper where you could read some Frank O’Hara poems. So I had one of these folded up in my pocket and it led me to think that Don, who was experiencing boredom after recommitting himself to his family, runs into this guy who just says he’s a suit, he’s a button-down guy.

In my mind, Don bought the book ‘Lunch Poems.’ But that had not come out yet, so we had to use Meditations in an Emergency. I read a little bit of it and said, we’ll use this. It has a great cover, it's very period, it was definitely a popular book.

We put it into the episode and then at the end, Kater Gordon, who was the writer's assistant at the time, said, ‘Don’t you think he should read some of it? Don’t you think we should hear it?’ And I had not read the whole book. So I sat down and read that last poem, ‘Mayakovsky,’ and I said 'What? This is the story of the season!' It was exactly related to how Don felt in that episode. I wish I could act like it was planned that way, but it wasn’t.”

