Frank O'Hara on Billie Holiday

If you're unfamiliar with Frank O'Hara, you're in for a treat. O'Hara was part of the New York School of poetry that emerged in the 1950s. What made this school singular is how its poets used words. Rather than stick rigidly to traditional form and meter, they expressed themselves freely and often journalistically. They also prized how words sounded smashed together and adored the feeling of abstraction. What's more, the school's poets came together informally with painters, dancers, jazz musicians and photographers of the day to share ideas and new creative concepts. One big emotional stew. Talk about birth of the cool. [Photo of Frank O'Hara in 1958 by Harry Redl]

The late 1950s was a special time in New York. Cutting-edge artists seemed to understand implicitly that painters, musicians, singers, writers, poets, photographers and dancers were important thinkers and that all were cut from the same creative cloth. Naturally, there was a great deal of cross-arts socializing and sharing of ideas about culture and aesthetic perspective. 

O'Hara reportedly was a charming chap (back when you could feed yourself by selling poetry to magazines!) and was pals with Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers and many other painters. He also was an avid jazz fan. O'Hara, sadly, died after a freak accident at age 40 on New York's Fire Island in the summer of 1966, when a beach vehicle hit him. For more on the New York School of poets, go here. [Pictured: Frank O'Hara with fellow New York poet John Ashbery]

Here's one of my favorite O'Hara poems, dedicated to singer Billie Holiday. Don't fuss over the poem's meaning or why lines break where they do or why there isn't punctuation. That's not important. Just absorb the mood that O'Hara creates, the sound of the words in your head and the feeling he puts across:

The Day Lady Died

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

—Frank O'Hara

JazzWax clip: Here's poet Frank O'Hara in 1966 shortly before his death reading his Having a Coke With You. Listen to it a few times to absorb the imagery...