Austin Allen - Close Reading: Frank O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died" [tekst, tłumaczenie i interpretacja piosenki]

Half a century after his tragic early death in a freak dune buggy accident on Fire Island, Frank O’Hara remains one of the few poets who can get away with the kinds of things Frank O’Hara does. Legions of subsequent imitators have turned his signature techniques—disarming chattiness, absurdly specific autobiographical detail, whimsical inclusion of trivialities in even the most somber poems—into bad habits. O’Hara sometimes misused them himself, but his greatest work is a refreshing reminder of their original intent and enduring power.

Take the famous short lyric “The Day Lady Died,” his elegy for jazz legend Billie Holiday. Though deliberately stuffed with dates and topical references, it manages to remain as fresh as the day it was published:

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...

...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 breathingThe most conspicuous formal element of the poem is its run-on effect. It doesn’t contain a single full stop, although implied transitional pauses occur at the ends of lines 6 and 10. Everything else is a continuous, albeit meandering, buildup toward the final line, with each new reported experience conjoined by “and.” ("Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and'"—Elizabeth Bishop's famous line could work as a description of what O'Hara himself called his "I do this I do that" poems.)

The editors of the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry call the syntax of this poem “paratactic”; that is, it juxtaposes phrases without using subordinating conjunctions to make cause/effect, hierarchy, and sequence explicit. Yet the use of parataxis here differs from that in, say, the fragmented episodes of The Waste Land or the frenzied juxtapositions of “Howl,” since “The Day Lady Dies” is so precisely sequential. 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. 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. (At least for Holiday fans like O'Hara—but the power of his poem is that it's enacted that preservation for all of us.)

Of course, O’Hara is always willing to test the limits of his style and his readers’ patience. Because an entire day can't be exhaustively recorded in a short poem, we know he is omitting some things while including others; yet even on close inspection, many of his chosen details refuse to “tell” with any perceptible literary significance. The O’Hara-speaker stops, for example, to get “a hamburger and a malted,” apparently just because that’s what he likes to eat for lunch. (He orders the same thing in other poems as well.) Nor is every detail pointedly un-literary. Some are very much the opposite, as when the speaker contemplates several possible book purchases, all of which expand the poem’s allusive possibilities. Others seem comically trivial, almost self-parodic: why in the world do we need to know the name of O’Hara’s bank teller?

We could strain to read some allegorical significance into it (Linda Stillwagon—like the stillness of death?). But really I think details like this are part of the human warmth of O’Hara’s project, his effort to make poems that match Whitman’s democratic inclusiveness while heightening his spirit of insouciance. If “Song of Myself” can mention the odd cart-horse driver or place name solely because Whitman happened to notice it, why can’t O’Hara’s elegy for a great American performer give Linda the bank teller a little stage time, too?

In order to pull off such decorative flourishes, a poem needs an absolutely sound foundation: a "heart." The heart of “The Day Lady Died” is the final, devastating lines, which put aside the mundane daily distractions (from sadness, from loss) and hone in on the elegy's true subject. O’Hara’s reminiscence of Lady Day is a kind of reverse joke—comic setup, solemn payoff—that begins with “leaning on the john door” and ends (but does not come to a full stop) with “everyone and I stopped breathing.” This is an elegy that portrays its subject as so vibrantly alive, she renders the rest of us dead by comparison. She can even stun the great Frank O’Hara into silence.