postcoitus’s pillow talk

Frank O’Hara’s most noted poem, “The Day Lady Died,” about the death of Billie Holiday, exudes the belief that New York is a vacuum, a bubble, disconnected from the rest of the world and isolated, but within it a place of common experience. Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, also did so with photographs. In his photo “Crowd at Coney Island” the viewer, though looking down from a raised perspective onto the people packed shoulder to shoulder on the shore, feels like a part of the crowd, part of the New York vacuum. The viewer of Weegee’s photograph is made to feel special by the fact that all the captured faces are looking at him. Similarly, the reader of O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” feels like he is on the inside because of the conversational way the speaker of the poem addresses the reader. Both the image and the poem create an air of familiarity between speaker and viewer/reader. As E.B. White writes in his essay, “Here is New York,” “The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races, and breeds, into a small island and adds music…” (21). Frank O’Hara’s New York, the only world he knows, consists of places he’s been. His repetition of place names, names one would only know if they were “in the know,” makes the reader feel one of two ways: excluded and outside of his New York or sucked into the vacuum. Ideally, the reader becomes part of that poem, part of the compressed island. O’Hara mentions the “GOLDEN GRIFFIN” (O’Hara 25), the “PARK LANE / LIQUOR STORE,” and the “5 SPOT” (O’Hara 26). These are all places he has become accustomed to seeing on his walks during his lunch break, and the reader becomes familiarized with them, too, as he continues to namedrop. Setting the scene with names of familiar places is not the only way to draw a reader in and to make him feel as if he is experiencing the same thing as the speaker. The frame is entirely filled with bodies and they all are looking at the camera, at the viewer. They are the literal image of White’s concept of New York as life compressed into a small island.

O’Hara contrasts his personally familiar locations with a historical reference to Bastille Day in the first stanza: “three days after Bastille Day” (O’Hara 25), making the historical references seem more personal (Lowney 259). Though his references seem arbitrary and the poem reads like a list of what was seen on his lunch break—until the final stanza—each reference has a purpose. His use of Bastille Day instead of just saying July 14th puts Holiday’s death, “In the context of . . . official oppression of artists” as a means for him to comment on “the state of the ‘avant-garde’ artist” (Lowney 259). O’Hara’s reference to the, “Poets / in Ghana,” is also loaded. Ghana had only gained its independence two years prior to this poem being written in 1959 (Lowney 258), linking Bastille Day when France gained its freedom from monarchy to Ghana’s newfound independence. Ghana is also a carefully chosen reference because Billie Holiday was, obviously, of African-American descent and Ghana was a hotbed during the slave trade (Lowney 258).

O’Hara also inserts international brand names into the poem, “Strega,” “Gauloises,” and “Picayunes” (O’Hara 26) to certify New York as the center of culture and a place with endless selection (Lowney 259). As E.B. White says in his essay, “Every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle” (15). There are endless choices to be made in White and O’Hara’s New Yorks, and those choices define a person: “All of the actions represented in ‘The Day Lady Died’ are acts of selection” (Lowney 260). White also writes, “Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and morale” (White 16). The speaker chooses to have a hamburger and a malted; he chooses “a little Verlaine / for Patsy” though faced with other authors to choose from; he chooses Strega for Mike; and he chooses “a carton of Gauloises and a carton / of Picayunes.” The speaker is faced with endless consumer selections that define him in society.

In Weegee’s photograph, the subjects, or at least the subjects that are close enough to be aware that Weegee is photographing them, are faced with a choice: whether they are going to try to stand out for the camera or just carry on with their own business. Those who would choose to act out want to separate themselves from the masses, they are, “…Trying to distinguish themselves by any means possible from the mass of people surrounding them” (Orvell 36). These people feel lost in the crowd. They feel lost in the masses of the city, packed full of bodies, like the beach, but no one noticing one another. White calls it, “The gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy” (White 9). The isolation from the rest of the world along with the isolation within the city can be disheartening. O’Hara, too, does not notice why Miss Stillwagon doesn’t, “Look up [his] balance for once in her life” (25), only that she has forgotten to do it. The oddity of the situation to the speaker shows the importance of the scene to the reader (Lowney 260).

O’Hara also uses the made-up word “quandariness” to describe the way he felt at having to choose from so many authors for Patsy. To internalize the quandary of having to choose a gift for Patsy is significant. It emphasizes the importance of the choices one makes. O’Hara juxtaposes “quandariness,” or what would seem like a state of agitated unrest and confusion against the beginning of the line, “Going to sleep…” To go to sleep when in a state of agitated unrest is contradictory, but O’Hara implies boredom, a feeling of being jaded, with choice (Lowney 260). O’Hara and White both write about the importance of choice within the microcosm that is New York City. Weegee on the other hand shows people actually making choices and how those choices define them on a visual level rather than socially.

The first stanza with its references to time, “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” (O’Hara 25) tie into the memorializing of the day by Holiday’s death. The use of time creates a sense of importance for the day before the reader knows what has happened. On a normal day, one would most likely not remember what time they stepped off the train, but on a day when everything changes, one’s actions take on a new significance. Time also gains significance in this poem because it is contrasted with death (Lowney 258). Especially since Billie Holiday died relatively young, there is a feeling that life is hurried created by the documentation of time. It is constantly ticking away until it’s all gone.

The final stanza of O’Hara’s poem brings the title in with the rest of the poem. It’s clear that he has been recounting his actions on the day Billie Holiday died, and that after discovering that she is dead, his actions no longer are the same. They have gained more importance and are now the things he did the day Billie Holiday died. Just as those people on the beach were having a normal day until Weegee showed up with his camera and immortalized them for life. Now it’s not just the day they went to the beach, it’s the day they went to the beach and now they’re in a famous photograph. This stanza becomes much more heartfelt than the others because of the revelation of the true subject matter. While the others are conversational in tone, they are clinical and very much a list. The final stanza shows real emotion from the speaker. His breath is taken away by news of her death as well as by the memory of seeing her perform and hearing her voice. There is an intense reality to the lines, “I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of / leaning on the john door” (O’Hara 26). The reader feels his own sweat gathering on his brow. O’Hara’s words are unguarded and emotive, like Weegee’s photographs, like Holiday’s voice, like New York itself.

White says of New York, “There is not enough air and not enough light, and there is usually either too much heat or too little. But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with . . . the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled” (26). There is endless suffering in New York, and constant loneliness. Even with the commonality of the New York experience, some days, its residents feel completely isolated in their actions. Some days, those days that one remembers forever, there is nothing to do but sweat it out alone against a bathroom door.

Works Cited

Fellig, Arthur. Crowd At Coney Island. 1940. New York. Amber Online. 15 Feb. 2008 .

Lowney, John. “The “Post-Anti-Esthetic” Poetics of Frank O’Hara.” Contemporary Literature (1991): 258-260. JSTOR. 15 Feb. 2008.

O’Hara, Frank. “The Day Lady Died.” Lunch Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964.

Orvell, Miles. “Weegee’s Voyeurism and the Mastery of Urban Disorder.” American Art (1992): 36-37. JSTOR. 15 Feb. 2008.

White, E.B. Here is New York. Warner Books, 1988. 9-27.