Frank O'Hara on Billie Holiday

If you're unfamiliar with Frank O'Hara, you're in for a treat. O'Hara was part of the New York School of poetry that emerged in the 1950s. What made this school singular is how its poets used words. Rather than stick rigidly to traditional form and meter, they expressed themselves freely and often journalistically. They also prized how words sounded smashed together and adored the feeling of abstraction. What's more, the school's poets came together informally with painters, dancers, jazz musicians and photographers of the day to share ideas and new creative concepts. One big emotional stew. Talk about birth of the cool. [Photo of Frank O'Hara in 1958 by Harry Redl]

The late 1950s was a special time in New York. Cutting-edge artists seemed to understand implicitly that painters, musicians, singers, writers, poets, photographers and dancers were important thinkers and that all were cut from the same creative cloth. Naturally, there was a great deal of cross-arts socializing and sharing of ideas about culture and aesthetic perspective. 

O'Hara reportedly was a charming chap (back when you could feed yourself by selling poetry to magazines!) and was pals with Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers and many other painters. He also was an avid jazz fan. O'Hara, sadly, died after a freak accident at age 40 on New York's Fire Island in the summer of 1966, when a beach vehicle hit him. For more on the New York School of poets, go here. [Pictured: Frank O'Hara with fellow New York poet John Ashbery]

Here's one of my favorite O'Hara poems, dedicated to singer Billie Holiday. Don't fuss over the poem's meaning or why lines break where they do or why there isn't punctuation. That's not important. Just absorb the mood that O'Hara creates, the sound of the words in your head and the feeling he puts across:

The Day Lady Died

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

—Frank O'Hara

JazzWax clip: Here's poet Frank O'Hara in 1966 shortly before his death reading his Having a Coke With You. Listen to it a few times to absorb the imagery...

 

Comments

[Larry Kart]

Back in 1969 or 1970, when I was assistant editor of Down Beat under Dan Morgenstern, I got us to reprint "The Day Lady Died" in a special Lester Young-Billie Holiday memorial issue, which also included Dan's great piece "Lester Leaps In" (originally published in 1958 and reprinted in his book "Living With Jazz").

[Joel Lewis]

Thanks for posting this poem -- a couple of points I wanted to note:

1 - O'Hara made his living at the Museum of Modern Art rising from a desk assisstant to Assisstant Curator (He was to become Curator at the time of his death). He put together many important shows at MOMA &, for a period, travelled Europe as part of travelling MOMA exhibitions. His art writings are collected in a book called "The Art Chronicles"

2 - O'Hara was more of a classical music fan and was friends with Leonard Bernstein & Morton Feldman. His young poet friends were jazz fans, especially his close friend Le Roi Jones (later to become Amiri Baraka). O'Hara studied music at New England Conservatory before he went to college (where he began as a music major) and even compsoed incidental music for his friend John Ashbery's plays.

3 -- for years, jazz fans thought O'hara was taking "poetic liberties" in this poem. Holiday could not sing in NYC clubs -- she had lost her cabaret card. The puzzle was solved in a memoir by novelist-editor Joyce Johnson (who was Kerouac's gf at time of On The Road) who was present with O'hara and friends at the event described in the poem. It was a mal waldron gig and Holiday sat in for a number with his trio.

joel Lewis

[Ed Leimbacher]

All the right Jazz, and poetry too, should do just exactly what O'Hara's words and Billie's singing do here--leave you suspended in Time, scarcely breathing, lost in the moment and the artistry. (And thanks to Lewis for elucidating that serendipitous gig; how blessed we are that O'Hara and Johnson were there and in the moment.)

[Ian Carey]

This is great, I love O'Hara. On an unrelated note: I once got drunk on Strega. Take my advice and NEVER do that.

[David]

The late fifties was certainly a special time in New York (especially for jazz), but I'm extremely skeptical of the statement that "you could feed yourself by selling poetry to magazines." As Joel Lewis points out, O'Hara had more substantial sources of income, and I would be curious to learn about any poets who actually supported themselves solely in this manner.

[Federico Moramarco]

A long while ago I wrote this poem as a tribute to O'Hara:

The Day Lady Died, Lady Died

I’m driving along Interstate 8, it’s 12:20, a Monday
and I pop the new cassette I bought for $1.64
into my hot new state of the art in-dash stereo

so I can hear what kind of Billy Holiday songs
could possibly be on this tape for only $1.64,
and out to the speakers comes the shrill

unmistakable sound of her voice, soaked in booze and
wavering out of control, just this side of oblivion:
I make a date for golf and you can bet your ass it rains,

and she pronounces “ass” “ash” slurring the phrase into
the laughter that follows it and I’m aware that this is
no regular tape, but some bootlegged rehearsal session

late in Lady’s life, some time in the ‘50s and she’s reminiscing
with the piano player about her early days in the music biz
singing with Charlie Johnson’s all-negro band

and I can’t quite believe what I’m hearing for $1.64
when she starts again, no fooling around this time,
I make a date for golf and you can bet your life it rains,

and I’ve lost track of where I’m going by now
as she settles into the melody with her old friend pain
while I turn onto Interstate 5 heading up the California coast
a long way from the Five Spot where everyone and Frank O’Hara stopped breathing.

[Ed Leimbacher]

As pianist Jimmy Rowles likely said on that day of rehearsals with Billie and booze... "Pshaw." (He pronounced "it" slightly different from the rest of us.) And when he yelled, "Four!", it was on a count of the club.