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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 Né¨gres
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, 1959

I heard of Ras Baraka a year or two ago and connected the dots to LeRoi Jones as neo did.

I am reminded of Ta-Nahesi Coates, the author of the bitter book-length diatribe against White America, “Between the World and Me,” which was written in the form of a letter to his son.

And Coates’s father had been a Black Panther, who taught Ta-Nahesi much the same.

I don’t know how blacks go beyond the victim narrative when so many are so eager to pass their victimology on to their children like a precious family heirloom.

It is to weep.

O’Hara was an interesting fellow. In addition to being a poet, he was an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art in the sixties and something of a beloved celebrity in the New York art and poetry scenes.

He died relatively young, 40, hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island.

@huxley – thanks for the link

“What can we expect from Personism? … Everything, but we won’t get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. “

This part resonated this recent election.

Also, interesting timing of that Genius post – almost precisely one month before trump’s announcement.

–Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto”
https://genius.com/Frank-ohara-personism-a-manifesto-annotated

This excerpt from Frank O’Hara’s tongue-in-cheek manifesto was my introduction to LeRoi Jones back in my young poet days. I looked up LeRoi Jones in some anthologies and was disappointed to discover Jones was not nearly as wonderful a poet as O’Hara.

Suffice it to say, the Beat and New York School poets treated LeRoi Jones well.

The manifesto is a hoot and worth reading in its entirety. It’s only nine paragraphs long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yygMhtNQJ9M

Hyperbolic victimology is all in vogue.

Sure the left uses it often (more?).

But does anyone remember the “Flight 93 Election” analogy from last summer?

Here is a reminder…

“How have the last two decades worked out for you, personally? If you’re a member or fellow-traveler of the Davos class, chances are: pretty well.
…
If you haven’t noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988.
…
Because the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against us.
…
The junta of course craves cheaper and more docile labor. It also seeks to legitimize, and deflect unwanted attention from, its wealth and power by pretending that its open borders stance is a form of noblesse oblige
…
Nearly all the gains of the last 20 years have accrued to the junta anyway.
…
The level of unity America enjoyed before the bipartisan junta took over can never be restored.
…
It would, at this point, be better for the nation to divide up more equitably a slightly smaller pie than to add one extra slice–only to ensure that it and eight of the other nine go first to the government and its rentiers, and the rest to the same four industries and 200 families.
…
The election of 2016 is a test–in my view, the final test–of whether there is any virté¹ left in what used to be the core of the American nation.”
http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/

So, yes, we can point to the left – it is a tactic that works – it riles up the base.
.

Yet, the tide seems to have turned and we must recognize it is not only the left playing this game.

Many on the “right” have clearly adopted the very same playbook. They look to rile up their base to be angry and feel a victim, or for a victim.

Problem is, it creates a challenge for us to navigate the truth…

“And above all: where to find anything even approximating the truth? It’s like panning for gold in a river that has little or no precious metal left, even of the gold dust variety.” – Neo
http://neoneocon.com/2017/03/27/here-comes-your-19th-nervous-breakdown/

…when so much becomes a hyperbolized story and we “otherize” someone to blame.

That’s true of the idealistic ‘Trotskyites’ who are always shocked when the Stalinists show up…