“The Day Lady Died” By: Frank O’Hara

I want to talk a little about the poem, “The Day Lady Died,” by Frank O’Hara. I just think this poem is so magnificent in its ability to bring us into an ordinary, seemingly unimportant and busy day in New York City, and then into a profound memory of the narrator’s mind.

“It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

/

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets

in Ghana are doing these days

                                           I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

/

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

/

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”

/

O’Hara was part of the New York School poetry movement, which was one of the last great Avant-garde movements in American poetry. And as I read this piece for the first time in Postmodern American Poetry, a Norton Anthology (which has an awesome cover by the way!) I was struck by how insignificant I felt the first four stanzas were (Initially of course). It’s not that I felt the tone seemed arrogant necessarily, but I just couldn’t relate to all of the names, and titles of plays and magazines. It seemed to represent an intellectual lifestyle, but in no way represented me as an average American reader. I couldn’t make an emotional connection.

Until we get to the last stanza of course, this wonderful and profound set of four lines,

The narrator walks past a magazine stand and sees Billie Holiday’s face- Lady Day has died.

“and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”

/

We are taken to this other time, a seemingly simple time, but juxtaposed with that raw emotional realization of death. I can see O’Hara there in a New York Jazz club, leaning against the bathroom- I feel the warmth of the scene, and of the drinks and of the people. But most importantly, Billie Holiday is there, alive, in this memory “while she whispered a song along the keyboard.”

“Everyone and I stopped breathing.”

That breathlessness; now who can’t relate, in some way, to the beauty and the warmth of this scene. It makes what occurred in the beginning four stanzas seem so unimportant (which also makes them perfectly written) because of this news- this news that makes the narrator remember-

a moment that is truly important.

I just think this poem is awesome, and I love Billie Holiday too!

(Sorry I had to add the “/” between stanzas, I couldn’t figure out how to get the spacing right.