Yesterday’s note should have come with an explanation. I was reading an essay on Frank O’Hara at 100 because I have trouble with this poet. I think of him as a poet I should like and am puzzled that a lot of his poetry leaves me somewhere short of liking.
But then there’s his poem “The Day Lady Died,” which gets to the point of how sudden, unexpected grief can hit you — grief about a famous person, a singer in this case, that you know through concerts or recordings. How you can feel grief for the loss of the artistry that was in a person, without, perhaps, really knowing the person. How that grief strikes in the middle of the everyday.
If someone did that better than Frank O’Hara, I don’t know about it. And so I read essays about a poet whose poems I struggle with, hoping to get a better grip.
• Source: Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42657/the-day-lady-died
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