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
© 1964 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books
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This work has been described as a classic instance of a poem chronicling its own coming into existence, as we can trace all of the writer’s movements. Inconsequentiality, triviality, immediacy, all combine to give a sense of realism: this is what it really must have been like for Frank O’Hara in the middle of Friday July 17, 1959, when he saw the news on the front of the New York Post that the jazz singer Billie Holiday had died.
His aimless wanderings and hesitancies gather pace through the poem, piling up on a succession of “ands” until, in the final lines, the writing steps back from the constant present tense as he recalls listening to Holiday singing in the
5 Spot club, with her accompanist Mal Waldron. Everyone was so rapt they stopped breathing, which of course is in direct opposition to the breathlessness of the unpunctuated, rushing of the poem, and brings it to a stop.
David Mills