Frank o hara the day lady died. On "The Day Lady Died" 2022-10-09
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Critical Commentary on the Poem: âThe Day Lady Diedâ (Frank Oâ Hara) Free Essay Example
But which would prove more crucial to the future gains of multiculturalism? So too, in looking at texts that occur "elsewhere," whether in time or place, we ought to be encouraged to look for the protopolitical in those things that can be said, rather than in what cannot be said--what is suppressed, in short, by the work of ideology. The sharpness of the contrast between the vitality of the living man, attending to the errands and tasks of life, and the dead singer is like a last percussive note held in an expectant stillness. Ushered into fashioning an entire mental neighborhood the reader can hardly overlook the reflected image upon the page itself. Ross's suggestion that we need only substitute "hairdresser" for "shoeshine" for the day to reveal itself as a "lady's day," curiously misses O'Hara's nuance. One moment is succeeded by another as the poet moves back and forth from street to street, from store to store. It is charged language of this sort a good bit of which I missed the first time I discussed the poem that makes O'Hara's work so fascinating.
The second is the date of publication online or last modification online. This process of simultaneous composition is less stream-of-consciousness than consciousness-of-stream, the stream of urban streets reported in rapid succession. Distance is reduced by the pulp press, which is dominated by the lower-middle class the New York Post, not the Times ; poetry, modernism, these international zones of experience have no special force here. O'Hara's virtually minute-by-minute play-by-play narration suggests that he's telling everything in the exact order in which it happened. Who can read it without thinking of the deaths today, from AIDS, of thousands of young homosexual men, like O'Hara, in a culture that is only beginning to recognize how public agendas work by reorganizing and redefining private responsibilities.
We have the impression that no detail is omitted, because no detail is too small; the momentous fact of Lady's death freezes this day in time, preserving even its most inconsequential event. She finally arrived pretty zonked out. I think because he wants to make us see--and this is his great tribute to Lady Day--that she embodies both the foreign-exotic and the native American. Suddenly, in the midst of these mundane activities, the speaker experiences a moment of deep personal significance. Death is one of many random things that could punctuate and focus the seemingly unconnected activities of an otherwise typical day, making everything from a shoeshine to a bottle of Strega purchased in a liquor store glow with its own brilliant significance. Why does O'Hara introduce Verlaine and Genet, Gauloises and the Golden Griffin into a poem about Billie Holiday? It was written elsewhere, in that prelapsarian period of innocence--before the break-up of consensus liberalism, before the conspiracy climate of all post-Kennedy ideology, before the sixties "changed everything"--a period that has been celebrated, for over a decade now, in that glut of yuppie nostalgia culture that stretches from American Graffiti to Dirty Dancing.
All principles for arraying emphasis and registering discriminations have been flattened. When I was around 19 years old, working in the college library, I was talking to a friend of mine and this older woman interrupted and said "You're too young to know about Billie Holiday. The rush of life then embodies also a process of continual death leading to the climactic stoppages of life and breath in the last four lines. His final four lines bear out this notion by his spontaneous recollection, so vivid, of when he heard her sing. Such live moments cannot be reproduced on vinyl for mass consumption--you had to be there. Even while it accepts a stereotype of gay masculinity, itself based upon a sexist stereotype of female character traits and mannerisms, O'Hara's poem begins to imagine a different relation to everyday life for men in general. This scene in the 5 Spot doesn't seem to properly belong in O'Hara's work, where it is employed nonetheless to invoke a spirit of authenticity.
He served in the Navy and later studied at Harvard and the University of Michigan, then moved to New York. On the other hand, the word everyone in the last line refers to the audience that particular night, the people who admire Billie Holiday's genius regardless of whether they've heard her in a "live" performance , and finally all the urban throng, who by their momentarily caught breaths signal their admiration for the marvellous and for their own mortality. And yet, this is a poem, recording one of his celebrated lunchtime walks, which and those who know and love O'Hara's "I do this, I do that" poems will surely agree , has radically transformed modern poetry's expectations of how it is licensed to represent everyday life. As O'Hara presents the moment, he seems to have a double sense of his audience: for those who recognize Mal Waldron as Billie Holiday's accompanist there is a shock of recognition, and the moment's uniqueness is heightened, its transitoriness made more vulnerable, more precious. In one sense the poem is clearly demotic; its diction and ordinariness invite the most inclusive set of readers, as if the audience were to be congruent with that of the New York Post. To say that the poet's itinerary is conceived as the daily shopping round of a genteel lady thus glosses over precisely those images and phrases that make "The Day Lady Died" the bitter-sweet, poignant elegy it is. For O'Hara's man of taste, everyday-life things matter, not because they are a way of advertising wealth or power, nor because everything matters equally, but because their value is linked to how people use them to make sense of their world.
But when it comes to his poetry, jazz almost never figures in the taste milieu within which he represented himself, or in the realm of cultural events about which he wrote in copious detail. In the prepolitical climate of O'Hara's day, this survivalism found expression in the highly ironized flamboyance of the camp ethic--"laughing to keep from crying"--which structured a whole subculture around the act of imagining a different relation to the existing world of too strictly authorized and legitimized sexual positions. His details need not be chosen because they enhance a specific lyric point or attitude; the objects chosen can embody the multiple facets of experience, only some of which might be essential to the lyric feeling. Pop, in its purist, theoretical form, was intended as an utter negation of the use of taste as a category of cultural power. Such lines as "and I don't know the people who will feed me" or "Miss Stillwagon.
O'Hara has plans for dinner but does not know the people who will feed him; he is divorced in space and attitude from the Ghana poets, in time and habit from the writers mentioned in the third stanza one usually does not "go to sleep with quandariness"--one sleeps from boredom and the lack of choice--but O'Hara wants to suggest connections between multiplicity, lack of connections guiding choice, and forms of death ; he encounters probably for the hundredth time a bank teller be has no communication with, yet who also disproves his expectations; and even the apparently most arbitrary item, the reference to Bastille Day, has a curious appositeness in a poem so thoroughly about death, separation, and the fragility of established order. Here again, as in "Personal Poem" and "Memorial Day 1950," the names mentioned in the poem are not merely gratuitous; from our distance we can see just how much they tell us about the world in 1959. They know what they like, and it's not Gauloises and it's not Genet, even although they may share the 4:19 to Easthampton, the same commuter train as O'Hara's poet, who, incidentally, shares the same working hours as they do. The mention of those the poet hardly knows at all "the people who will feed me,""Miss Stillwagon" along with the mention of international trade names "Strega,""Gauloises,""Picayunes" conflates the impersonal and the international with the personal and the local. Furthermore, the seemingly innocuous books the poet browses in the shops include plays by Genet Les Negres involves a sophisticated non-essentialist exploration of the relationship between racial identity and skin colour ; a play by Brendan Behan; and a New World Writing volume from Ghana.
But the nodes along the route of the poem open up racial difference by retaining the complexities of place and culture. But then it seems as if he is virtually running out of steam. Nor is every detail pointedly un-literary. And O'Hara's poem is itself an act like Billie Holiday's; the full elegiac effect depends on the reader's union with his memory. The name "Stillwagon," moreover, with its oxymoronic conjunction of whiskey still and being on the wagon, anticipates the crisis of Billie Holiday's last days. No doubt this notion of taste also contains the rudiments of the principle that came to be recognized by feminism as "the personal is the political.
Such tension makes readers simultaneously attentive to significance in the seemingly insignificant and wary about attributing significance at all, as closer examination of several representative "I do this I do that poems" will show. But whose voice in 1959 or, for that matter, at any other time would this be? Perhaps exoticism is the point: Cigarettes from France and New Orleans, liqueur from Italy, poets and painters from all overâthe names in "The Day Lady Died" represent a whole way of life that would have seemed exotically bohemian to O'Hara's first readers. The suggestion that role-playing, and the destabilizing of fixed sexual positions, could actually add to the exercise of sexual power was a very attractive suggestion for the gay male, who knew that his sexuality , in everyday life, was likely to get him into trouble. And what of "I," which, in such a chatty, vernacular poem, seems to want to be an indirect object despite the rules of grammar? It is in this context that O'Hara's code of everyday responsibility begins to take on a new kind of sense, three decades later. As a gay poet, and one of the most spontaneous of all camp writers, it is no surprise to find that it is a woman singer who shares the billing along with the goddesses of the screen whom he celebrates in other poems. . But the felt weight and presence of the objects O'Hara details in the poem flatten and almost oppress anyone who looks to them for significance; the objects are clearly in the poem as an antipoetic weight.
Frank OâHara, Amiri Baraka: âThe Day Lady Diedâ
Richmond Lattimore, Brendan Behan, Le Balcon, Les NĂŠgres, Genet, Strega, Gauloises, Picayunes. . The conjunctions become increasingly insistent eleven of the poem's nineteen and's occur in the last ten lines , and the pace slows down until finally the sequence of meaningless moments is replaced by the one moment of memory when Lady Day enchanted her audience by the power of her art. The sometimes mawkish sentimentalism of camp is often seen as an institutionalized expression of self-hatred, and thus a dangerous form of acceptance, by an oppressed group, of the oppressor's definition of the oppressed. This is not Baudelaire's poet-dandy-flaneur lured to the marketplace to look but not to buy. Then, what was most self-conscious about consuming had been made to seem like the most natural thing in the world.
