Frank O'Hara (1926–1966)

On March 27, 1926, Frank (Francis Russell) O’Hara was born in Maryland. He grew up in
Massachusetts, and later studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to
1944. O’Hara then served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS
Nicholas during World War II.

Following the war, O’Hara studied at Harvard College, where he majored in music and worked on
compositions and was deeply influenced by contemporary music, his first love, as well as visual art.
He also wrote poetry at that time and read the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris
Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

While at Harvard, O’Hara met John Ashbery and soon began publishing poems in the Harvard
Advocate. Despite his love for music, O’Hara changed his major and left Harvard in 1950 with a
degree in English. He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and
received his MA in 1951. That autumn, O’Hara moved into an apartment in New York. He was soon
employed at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and continued to write seriously.

O’Hara’s early work was considered both provocative and provoking. In 1952, his first volume of
poetry, A City Winter, and Other Poems, attracted favorable attention; his essays on painting and
sculpture and his reviews for Art News were considered brilliant. O’Hara became one of the most
distinguished members of the New York School of poets, which also included Ashbery, James
Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch.

O’Hara’s association with painters Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns, also leaders of the
New York School, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry. He attempted to
produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas. In certain instances, he
collaborated with the painters to make “poem-paintings,” paintings with word texts.

O’Hara’s most original volumes of verse, Meditations in an Emergency (1956) and Lunch Poems
(1964), are impromptu lyrics, a jumble of witty talk, journalistic parodies, and surrealist imagery.

O’Hara continued working at the Museum of Modern Art throughout his life, curating exhibitions and
writing introductions and catalogs for exhibits and tours. On July 25, 1966, while vacationing on Fire
Island, Frank O’Hara was killed in a sand buggy accident. He was forty years old.

The Day Lady Died

F RA NK O 'H ARA

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

Billie Holiday -- The jazz singer Billie Holiday died of liver disease in a New York hospital early in
the day on July 17, 1959. The early editions newspapers carried the news and printed picture.
Holiday, nicknamed "Lady Day," was the singer of such hits as "Strange Fruit." She is one of the most
important figures in the history of jazz music. Her life, however, held many hardships. She was
involved in abusive relationships and grappled with a serious drug problem. Even as she lay dying in
the hospital, she was arrested for drug possession.

On July 17, Frank O'Hara was walking around New York, running some errands, when he happened
to see a newspaper with Holiday's face on it, from which he learned of her death. A huge admirer of
jazz and of Holiday in particular, O'Hara had been to several of her performances. He once saw her
perform in an old movie theater – an unusual venue made necessary by the fact that Holiday had
been arrested for possession of heroin and was not allowed to enter a normal club. The last time he
had seen her was at a New York club called "The Five Spot," backed by the piano player Mal Waldron
(source). You might compare the reaction of serious jazz fans to her death to the reaction of serious
grunge fans to the death of Kurt Cobain. It was a huge blow.
Hearing of her death, O'Hara quickly wrote up the poem "The Day Lady Died" – on his lunch-break
(source). Yes, you read that right. This classic American poem was probably written in one shot, in
less than an hour. Actually, the conditions under which the poem was written are pretty much par
for the course for O'Hara. He had one of the most unique styles in contemporary poetry. He wrote
piles and piles of poetry, and many of them remain unpublished. He wasn't one of those tortured
geniuses who sat for hours laboring over a line. He wrote in a very fast, breathless, rambling style,
incorporating bits of tabloid news and snatches of telephone conversations. He never intended
many of the things he wrote to be published. An extremely social guy, he preferred reading his
poems to friends over drinks or dinner.

He worked at the front desk of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for much of his life, selling
postcards and such, and he scribbled down many of his poems during lull periods in his job. This
approach seems to resemble throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something sticks. Sometimes,
as in this poem, the spaghetti did stick. The result is one of the most interesting, innovative, and
accessible American poems of the second half of the 20th century.

Frank O'Hara was a major figure in the so-called New York School of poetry, along with fellow New
Yorkers like John Ashbery. His two most famous collections are Meditations in an Emergency (1957),
and Lunch Poems (1964), in which "The Day Lady Died" was published.

What is The Day Lady Died About?

Have you ever been taken by surprise with the news that someone you care deeply about has died?
Maybe you've been fortunate and haven't experienced this yet, but it happens to almost everyone
eventually. That's the feeling that Frank O'Hara captures.

Yes, unexpected death. That's the experience O'Hara captures in "The Day Lady Died." Here's a
normal guy, just walking around New York City, picking up some gifts for friends and peering into
newsstands. He has a lot on his mind, and this death just imposes itself in the middle of everything.
Like, when you have a lot of stuff to do, you can't really process the news of someone's death. The
world goes on, even if you feel like you're about to suffocate.

If you've ever thought that poetry is just too darned philosophical and nothing like real life, then you
have to check out O'Hara's work. Without going into drama mode he conveys a deep, almost frantic
sense of grief over Holiday's death in a way that pretty much anyone can identify with. And he never
loses touch with the everyday world. Notice for example how he capitalizes the names of certain
brands, so they seem to leap off the page like concrete things.

In the real world, insignificant things are constantly interrupting our best efforts to think. We're
bombarded with advertisements and products. O'Hara's hip, haphazard style is true to modern life.
He didn't spend a lot of time reflecting on the meaning of life. In "Meditations in an Emergency" he
wrote, "I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or
some other sign that people do not totally regret life."

Many of his poems read like bullet-point lists of stuff he did during the day. They are frequently
hilarious. When reading O'Hara's work, you can't help but ask: this is supposed to be poetry? Where
are the flowers, the deep thoughts, the obscure literary references? Maybe "The Day Lady Died" will
lead you to reconsider what poetry is.