“The Day Lady Died” is written in free verse. It describes Frank O’Hara’s activities on the day he found out that Billie (Lady Day) Holiday had died. Although the poem appears to be a straightforward narrative, the title emphasizes the day itself rather than Holiday’s death or O’Hara’s activities, and thus it hints at something larger, something that perhaps combines both Holiday and O’Hara. It suggests that the poem should also be read as something other than the narrative it may first appear to be.

The poem is written in the first person. Poets often use the first person either to address a particular person or the world, while the reader is a witness rather than the addressee. O’Hara, however, uses the first person differently. One of the striking features of this poem is its conversational tone; combined with the first-person point of view, it creates the impression that the poet is talking directly to his readers, including them in the seemingly innocuous moments of his life.

This effect brings an intimacy to the poem. O’Hara furthers this intimacy by including the names of friends and places that are meaningless to almost anyone who does not know him or his social circle without ever explaining who or what they are or what their significance is to him or his life. He appears to be telling readers about his life as though they already understand all the references; the poem becomes a conversation, O’Hara talking directly to each reader every time it is read. The details, however, still remain meaningless; O’Hara, it may be assumed, knows this and is using it to point again beyond the narrative, toward something else.

The poem lists O’Hara’s activities on July 17, 1959 (“three days after Bastille day”). He locates his readers in a very particular time and place, then tells them what he will be doing that evening. Following him as he runs errands and makes purchases in preparation for dinner that night, the reader joins him as the poet sees the front-page headline of the newspaper announcing that Billie Holiday has died. He suddenly remembers a particular night that he heard her sing in a nightclub; he conveys the power of her singing by ending the poem with wordplay involving death: “everyone and I stopped breathing.” The image of the audience being so enraptured by her singing that they forget to breathe parallels Holiday’s death, when she actually stopped breathing. Her ability as a singer to make people figuratively leave their bodies is analogous to her spirit leaving her body. Thus the poem, at its end, represents a transcendence of the daily activities that it has narrated.

Though the poem’s narrative structure looks simple, O’Hara employs devices that ultimately break down ordinary concepts of time and perception. For many years he was an art critic, and many of his friends were abstract painters. One of the developing thrusts of visual art at that time was that the painting itself became a record of the process of painting; so, too, O’Hara makes the poem a record of the process of the contents of the poem.

O’Hara accomplishes this through the impressionist quality of the writing, telling of events as he goes about his day. He does not link them together through metaphor, imagery, or any other standard poetic device, but merely sets them down as they occur. Yet this seemingly innocuous jotting down has a peculiar effect; the poem becomes not only a record of the day but also a mirror of the...