Frank O\'Hara - The Day Lady Died PDF

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Notes on Frank O'Hara's 'The Day Lady Died'...

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FRANK O HARA – THE DAY LADY DIED Curious elegy to Billie Holiday. Speaker is going about his everyday business in summertime Manhattan. As the poem goes on layer upon layer of urban life build a picture. The speaker is excited, tense, wary of time passing as he browses, shops and prepares to catch a train. Reflecting on the ordinariness of the end of a working week. All of the times show how our lives are led by deadlines and specific times. He’s going to eat with near strangers, but he’ll be fed (survival). Noting Bastille Day shows a speaker who is in this highly localized bubble of NYC but still aware of the wider perspective. As does the Behan/Genet/Verlaine decision and the buying of a Ghanian poetry book. It’s the ex slave capital, but no longer. These books give him ideas. The speaker wishes to inform us that times change, minutes change, big and small things change in life. (also eclecticism) Short simple sentences and clauses ‘I go get/I will get off/I walk up/I go on’ narrate the speakers series of actions and possibilities. The first person running commentary reinforces the idea that this is an individual fully engaged in the here and now. The constant use of ‘I’ shows the battle of an ego forced to compete on the NYC streets. The punctuation reflects frantic Manhattan living. Totally wrapped up in the present - his everyday life is almost monotonous, but a consumer’s dream. This everyday contrasts at the end with the profound with the memory of hearing and seeing Billie Holiday sing. The speaker is totally plugged into the New York City arts and cultural scene. He also follows the latest global trends, such as experimental French theater and the up-and-coming African literary movements. It's ironic that he would name all of these examples of "high culture" in a poem about a so-called "popular" art form – jazz. The poem seems to make the case that Holiday's work belongs right up there with the big players of world culture An artists's death and genius might appear to be smothered in the urban goings on but an argument could be made for the opposite to be the case. Our existence is brought into question - how to transcend the mundane? Composition and process; fresh and in the moment, spontaneous. Time warp of the last stanza; the face of BH in the newspaper takes him back to 5 SPOT. *Overall, an unusual approach to a celebrity death, one that at first reading seems to have too much incidental stuff in it. Too much ego-based material could be deemed to get in the way of the important event, the passing away of a legend. But conversely, why not immerse the speaker in the street life of the metropolis, the hub of existence, where time and things play vital roles? Isn't real life made up of moments full of and then I did this, then I did that despite someone of importance passing away? This is a poem about mass culture, the vitality of being on the street, personal engagement with the surface of life, juxtaposed against profound change which comes in the form of a legendary jazz singer, Billie Holiday, and her untimely death. Change in physical being, relaxed to ‘I am sweating quite a lot by now’. His ordinary day becomes extraordinary and memorable. BH turns a public moment private when she ‘whispers a song along the piano to mal’

O’Hara’s mock manifesto ‘Personism: a Manifesto’ – he didn’t believe that poetry should bully people into learning something of having a fixed meaning. ‘I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures’ (against meta narratives). Poetry was about your gut feeing, off the cusp, not overly thought out or reasonable. Personism is kind of a joke at the hollowness O’Hara felt about art of the time. Personism he said is so removed from abstraction that it is verging on true abstraction for the first time in history. His personism is as if writing the poem to a singular other person. By doing this it achieves a greater distance from any fixed meaning and logic....