Frank O’Hara’s
poem for Billie Holiday, “The Day Lady Died,” James Blake’s electronic-jazz-pop
song, “Retrograde,” and Avicii’s straight-up dance track, “Wake Me Up,” are three
works I admire for their well-embedded, although not obvious, elegiac expression.
It is a sensation of loss and longing that is carried in all these works
through not just their lyrics, but also the form that gives the words both
their substance and adds to their underlying meaning. They are more than just
the obvious hooks which make us read or listen to them in the first place. The
chatty-tone of O’Hara, the cerebral intensity of “Retrograde,” and the
rise-and-fall dynamics of “Wake Me Up,” all reach beyond the immediate surface
of the work—what we initially apprehend in them—to establish a direct
connection with their audience who sense beneath the ostensible direction of
the poem or song a larger presence.
Although these
works are completely unrelated to one another, the skill of their execution—in
their accessibility and artistic resonance—along with the emotional intensity
they emit—which in its complicated transmission is equal to, and reflective of,
the complicatedness of any emotion—effectively brings these works together.
They are possessed of a shared sense of the world as this thing that goes on,
even if this momentum is occasionally suspect to being momentarily halted by
its unexpected losses, terrors and fading dreams of youth: all emotional
moments that, despite the pain and confusion of their presence, also give the
daily rush its significance.
(First, the poem)
The Day Lady Died
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
(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171368)
O’Hara’s poem
is striking for the fact that it doesn’t present itself in the ‘normal’ guise
of a poem: it doesn’t rhyme; it has no clearly discernable meter or rhythm,
beyond the urbane pitter-patter of a man describing his day; and what it seems
to be talking about is clearly laid out, from what date and time it is, to the
speaker’s shopping list. However, the very absence of usual poetic signs lends
the poem its poeticity: a kind of perfectly executed ironic subversion that captures
the daily-ness of its events to render its climactic moment, that is the match
of any Romantic transcendent realization, all the more poignant.
It does not
have any full stops and in reading, one is forced to scan quickly through this
series of its day-to-day events strung together seemingly only by conjunctions.
When the last stanza is reached, the peculiarity of the phrasing of the last
line—‘and everyone and I’—forces a closer observation. Just like the speaker,
the reader has similarly ‘stopped’ and the full impact of being breathless in a
memory of a great singer is given a forceful clarity in the reader’s
imagination. They sense the importance of this moment among the detritus of the
day-to-day of living.
For the
speaker to be caught suddenly in this memory in amidst his daily chores says
much for the elegiac expression which is O’Hara’s intention. We may not exist
in the incomprehensible sphere of someone like Billie Holiday’s fame—how can
they relate to the task of simply going grocery shopping?—but the strength of
her talent, primarily the memory of it in this poem, is capable of taking us
out of the mundane of going to the bank, or buying a magazine, maybe
cigarettes. In this everyday, the ethereal presence of Holiday sneaks in. The
tasks, so blasé before, are suddenly imbued with a sense of escape; the poem’s
rush a means of evasion. Grief, accompanied by a quiet wonder, finds their way
in, even as the time and movement of just getting around both threaten and
heighten the intensity of these feeling. The speaker may nearly fall asleep
‘with quandariness’—an ideal state of confusion in this poem—but the smallest
cue like sweating as a result of performing these tasks brings back the memory
of sweating in a nightclub, slightly drunk, surrounded by other people, and
there she is singing with Mal Waldron. O’Hara’s balanced poem, then, shows that
even in the drive of the ordinary, which can seem so obvious and
straightforward, there remains an occasionally invasive sense of loss. It
needn’t consume the mind however, as one can still draw on the wondrous moments
of the great singer—grieve her talent that can drag us away from the sterility
of just being. In moments of grief and the mundane of life, there is still the
vitality of memory to make sense of everything again.
“Retrograde”
is the first song in recent memory that not only describes the terror of
falling in love, but actually evokes that feeling in musical form.” – Edward
Sharp-Paul (http://www.fasterlouder.com.au/features/37881/The-Top-50-Songs-of-2013?page=5)
I
quote my friend here because he nails, brilliantly, exactly what makes James
Blake’s song so great. It is a different sort of elegy, as rather than
retrospectively looking back on or celebrating a life, it describes, as Eddy
notes, falling in love. Of
course, this would usually mean it is nothing like an elegy. However, its
‘terror’—evident in the drive of the synth, almost like an implacable
electronic motor, and the hauntingly climbing wail that sounds in the
background near its conclusion—is an attempt to match the intensity of feeling
that defines both death and falling in love: a sudden disappearance of the
world as it was known and as it never will be again; it is the evacuation of
rationality for pure emotion, memory and promise.
To excuse one
more poetry reference, the sound that rushes the listener, and seemingly the
singer, before “Retrograde” hits its epiphanic moment—‘suddenly, I’m
hit’—brings to mind these lines from the German Modernist poet, Rilke, and his
masterpiece, The Duino Elegies: ‘Who,
if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ | hierarchies? and even if one
of them pressed me | suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed | in that
overwhelming existence.” The poem, in part an elegy for the loss of imagination
in the material world and the abject fear of this imagination nonetheless,
invokes the same sense of wonder, fear and eventual acceptance that Blake’s
song inspires. It is a moment of heightened isolation—‘and your friends are
gone | and your friends won’t come’—given perspective by the presence of an
other—‘we’re alone now.’ The contemplative humming it opens on, at first alone,
then echoing against the clapping and the first line of the song that soars
into being, builds and builds into the chorus that takes an electronic turn and
gives the song a spectral sense of unity. Around the singer, the world has
fallen away—much as it does when there is a sudden, unexpected loss—and this is
terrifying, but he is faced by another person, similarly experiencing this
almost brutal emotion, and who in being the cause of this transformation, of
this sudden terror, is the subject of the elegy: a celebration of her presence
against the backdrop of complete and utter change leading into uncertainty. The
humming fades out, isolated again, and there is no other verse: the world goes
on, the intensity of the music and emotion fade into familiarity, awaiting its
return as memory in the day-to-day. Left behind is a sense of love’s gain via
recognition of its intense, strange associative loss and complication.
Avicii’s song,
‘Wake Me Up,” is pure plastic: all hook, melody and dance-club dynamic. Yet,
even against the backdrop I have here of postmodern poetry and avant-garde jazz-pop, I find it still
has its place; that beneath its glitz and place in the cultural space of a
club, it is sounding a speculative final call to the abandonment of youth.
I love this
song. Alone out of all these works, it gets an unrestrained physical and
visceral reaction from me. I like to bop to music, mouth the words
occasionally, and sporadically play an air guitar/head bang when a big moment
arrives, but this is one of the few songs that I actually find myself dancing
to. And it is obvious that people love to dance to this song, or at least
literally ‘wake up’ to it. Its surface is all promise and glitter: a challenge
to face up to the day; to go get amongst it.
But what are we really dancing for when its watery, synth hook kicks in?
Why does it feel so right with this song in particular? Its pretty much laid
out in the lyrics. It is a final grasp for the joy, the ‘dream,’ of being
young: a place where you don’t hold the whole world—you only ‘have two
hands’—but, dammit, if you’re not going to make an effort to see it and not be
afraid in this, yes, clichéd adventure. It is a youth that stands for complete
freedom: an illusion. And if it is, indeed, a dream, we’d rather be caught up
in its beautiful sense of being lost and not knowing when the end is coming,
even as the song, in its strangely low key way, signals an end or perpetually
awaiting climax. Just ‘wake me up’ when I’m ready: when ‘love’ is, finally,
‘the prize.’
“Wake Me Up”
contains within it the elegiac excitement of growing up, which necessarily means
leaving behind the dream: those last vestiges of irresponsibility. As such, it is
a celebration tempered by the inevitability of time. The music itself, always
slightly fading in and out of being entirely present—listen to the acoustic
guitar disappear into the background at the beginning—is circular, returning
over and again to the key hook which itself is tinged with a sense of finality,
with a weird last waltz sort of rhythm. In one of its final moment, this very hook
materializes without bass, then finally rises and rises as if grasping at the
song’s promise of the dream one last time.
It is an elegy to youth that is possessed of a wry acceptance of its
eventual passing. That is, if it hasn’t already faded away. Of course the
singer doesn’t know he is ‘lost’: he is still in the dream, even as it is
sliding further into the past with one last forceful and defiant dance.
All three
works are heavily populated—by the proper names in O’Hara, the ‘you’ or girl in
“Retrograde,” and the collective celebration and universal feeling of youth in
“Wake Me Up” (even the density of its production)—but ultimately all the works
identify themselves by their isolation. It is a sense of longing in the face of
the various losses the poem and songs are essentially about. One may ride the
jolts of living and wonder at its difficulties, but in the sensual intensity of
their performances that embrace loss as a matter of life’s complexities, these
pieces show that a moment is only a moment: a dream to come breathlessly out of
when you’re suddenly hit and realize you’ve been lost in its emotion.
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