You Go to My Head, Remembering Billie Holiday

Last week the world celebrated the birthday of Lady Day, as she sometimes is called. Born in Philadelphia on April 7th, 1915, Billie Holiday became an icon of jazz and blues music. She was only 44 years old when she died of complications due to liver disease, but what a legacy she left behind. Just one song from her today, but it’s one that I love to get lost in.

Image: Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

I don’t know much about Jazz, but I know about poetry, and I think Frank O’Hara does such a marvelous job of capturing what Lady’s singing does to a person. In his poem “The Day Lady Died,” he breathlessly writes about his day and preparations for a dinner that night. He creates this breathlessness, in part, with his often characteristic lack of punctuation that makes me feel like I’m listening to someone talk who is can’t stop to take a take a breath.

And then at the end when he picks up the paper with the news of her death, it hits like a punch in the gut. Here’s “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara, followed by her song, “You Go to My Head.”

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, “The Day Lady Died” from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara.
From The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1995)

Lego House

Halloween at a poetry reading back in 2019. That was the theme and inspiration for Micah’s portrayal of Edgar Allen Poe, complete with Raven at Dugan’s Pub in Luzerne, PA. I was dressed as a young Walt Whitman at that party and I think our guest poet, Brian Fanelli was something zombie or vampirish, and reading some of his fantastic horror poems. I am missing that pub these days where we used to have a regular poetry reading series. Maybe it’s time to find a new venue in our new home town.

I think this song sort of slipped under the radar for me back in 2011, but I find myself listening to it from time to time lately. When I first saw the video here I thought that Rupert Grint, of Harry Potter fame was playing the part of the Ed Sheeran, but it turns out it’s a wee bit more complex than that. Fun video, if a little bit dark. I’ll add a behind the scenes video too!

The song itself, though, reminds me of a cool little poem that Micah got published in Word Fountain lit mag way back in 2016. It’s still a favorite at readings that he does, and if you click right here you can read it and listen to him present it.