On 07/11/2013, at 7:17 PM, Bill Wootton wrote:
> Forgive my ignorance, Doug. Which O'Hara poem?
>
> Cheers,
> Bill
The Day Lady Died
BY FRANK O'HARA
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, “The Day Lady Died” from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books.
>>>>> The Day Lou Reed Died
>>>>>
>>>>> Not a Perfect Day for liver-ravaged Lou
>>>>> or perhaps it was, surrounded bedside
>>>>> by friends and family, as reported.
>>>>>
>>>>> Lou's 'Transformer' was on constantly
>>>>> at a party I went to in Balwyn one night,
>>>>> in 1973 it must have been. And I mean
>>>>>
>>>>> someone just put the stylus back on
>>>>> as soon as 'Goodnight Ladies' finished.
>>>>> Didn't sound repetitive; we just got more
>>>>>
>>>>> and more absorbed in that brittle world.
>>>>> Finishing playing pool in a sunken rumpus
>>>>> room later, no one could find the light switch
>>>>>
>>>>> so John Kenneth simply punched the globe,
>>>>> shattering it and leaving little shards on cloth.
>>>>> Back upstairs they were still listening to Lou.
>>>>>
>>>>> 'Sa - da - lite of love ...'
>>>>>
>>>>> Leaving the party, scenes of disarray -
>>>>> overflowing ashtrays and spilled drinks
>>>>> and in the corner on a beanbag, Jim H
>>>>>
>>>>> coiled up, headphones on,
>>>>> still wild siding with Lou.
>>>>> Vale Transformer.
>>>>
>>>
>>
>> Douglas Barbour
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>>
>> Latest books:
>> Continuations & Continuations 2 (with Sheila E Murphy)
>> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=962
>> Recording Dates
>> (Rubicon Press)
>>
>> Art is always the replacing of indifference by attention.
>>
>> Guy Davenport
>>
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