"Mad Men" not only sells the Relax-icizer and Mohawk Airlines; it's also pushing books of poetry, too

So have you gone to Amazon.com and ordered your copy of Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency" yet? If not, good luck, they were out before last night's episode of "Mad Men" even aired.

What does one have to do with the other? Last night's episode of "Mad Men," written by series creator Matthew Weiner, ended with a deeply ruminative moment in which Don Draper (Jon Hamm) walks the book to a mailbox to send to someone - Rachel? - having scribbled on the title page that it reminded him of her, as Hamm's voice-over recites "Mayakovsky," the final poem in "Meditations in an Emergency:"

"Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

"The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

"It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again."

If there exists a TV show that could move volumes of poetry off bookstore shelves, it's "Mad Men." "I would love to see that book on 'According to Jim,' actually," Hamm told me in his patented droll fashion.

If you can't wait for the original, a new collection of the poems of O'Hara (who died in 1966), "Selected Poems," was released this year. Hamm recalls seeing the book featured on the front page of the New York Times Book Review last month.

"I texted Matt - 'Really?' We shot this months ago, and there's no way (Weiner could've known an O'Hara renaissance was in the making). It's all in his head. It's truly a bizarre set of circumstances."

Hamm explained why this sequence was so haunting: "Poetry says a lot in a very little space, very enigmatically, and that's a good description of Don. He's very enigmatic; he doesn't say a lot, but he gets a lot across. That's why that particular poet resonates with Don - he speaks to something personal in him that he wants to share. He doesn't have the capacity, perhaps, to articulate it, but he wants to share it, and as the season goes on, you'll see more of that need to be understood. And that's what Don is seeking, is meaning, and an understanding of life."

For his part, Weiner says the new anthology is a complete coincidence and that he secured permission to use the poem from O'Hara's sister, who told him, "She loved the show and she thought (Frank) would, too."

Weiner'd be happy to boost O'Hara's sales. "I hope so; it's so contemporary. He's a great writer - I studied poetry in college but just discovered him about four years ago. That poem is, that whole image of it, is so related to the show.

"Something is different about Don, from the first frame of that episode, and all he's expressing by the end is that he knows something is different. He wants to feel the catastrophe of his personality. And there's nobody out there who has any sort of consciousness at all who doesn't feel like, I don't feel like myself. And that's a big part of the show, and that's a hard thing to dramatize."

I mentioned to Weiner that in doing some online research (and if it's online, it's gotta be true), I found somewhere that the book's title was an early 20th-century phrase that referred to ejaculation.

"I didn't know that," Weiner said, "but the book is about, in places, impotence. And it's definitely about feeling apart from yourself. So the fact that it goes back to masturbation, well, that's just poets for you."

(What other TV blog would deconstruct a premier poet of the 20th century and still go to the trouble of working in a reference to masturbation? That's just how classy we are around these parts.)