I open my Week 7 musings with a ModPo forum post from 2012.
I suspect Day Lady is more than just a pun on Lady Day. In that era, at least in the South, white families hired black ladies to come in to do house work. They generally paid them by the day, off the “books,” with no tax and no social security. These employees were referred to as day workers, day ladies. Most white families didn’t have a closer contact with black people than the one with their day ladies. When young hip white kids discovered Billie Holiday (and other entertainers), they suddenly found themselves in a different relationship with black people. But the relationship with the day lady was the one they felt most comfortable with. Maybe?
2012 ModPo forum post
O’Hara’s elegy to Billie Holiday, The Day Lady Died, is breath-taking in a nice, gay white-boy way. I mean, he did this, and he did that, and everything is wonderful until the Earth stops spinning in homage to the great Lady Day. And the metaphor is beautifully done, beautifully extending straight into our own hearts and living rooms. But Owen Dodson, in his sonnet-elegy, Finally, Lady, You Are Gone From Us, screams “Foul!” to the referees and cuts to the quick of all that makes up our ho-hum existence. Check out the Dodson reading, starting at 37:50 on this Library of Congress recording.
An aside. We continue to sing the praises of Billie Holiday, purchase her music, and visit her on YouTube and Spotify. The FBI official who literally hounded her to death, Harry Anslinger, who put her under arrest on her literal death bed, has no memory in the streets, per the prophet Job, effectively canceled, erased by history. Sometimes the only justice is poetic justice. Sometimes posthumous justice.
Emotions would resurface for me again, when, sitting through the keynote address at an archivists conference, I first learned from an incoming tweet of Aretha Franklin’s passing. I memorialized the moment here: Still Under Construction – For Aretha.
In Week 7 I also discovered what came to be one of my all time favorite poems, in life perhaps. Frank O’Hara’s To The Harbormaster. I ask you, can you ever demand more from a poem than this gem gives, this piece of divine inspiration?
To the Harbormaster
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42661/to-the-harbormaster
It’s way too soon for the end.
I came upon a grove of trees on my early morning river walk that brought Week 7’s John Ashbery’s Some Trees to mind. In the photo it looks like they may be in communication with each other.
A few years back German forester and author, Peter Wohlleben, figured out that trees do in fact feel and communicate, and care for their young and their neighbors. Just in slow motion, so slow, perhaps, that we haven’t a clue what is going on. He published a best selling book, The Hidden Life of Trees. His thoughts are summed up in this Smithsonian Magazine article.
And, finally, in one of the early ModPo years, may have been 2012 or 2013, a group of DC ModPoers met at the Smithsonian American Art Museum to see the painting “Sardines” because it was mentioned in one of the O’Hara poems whose title escapes me. Oh yeah, it as “Why I am not a painter.” It was a cool enough poem, though my preference at the time was for Having a Coke with You, which I thought was a very cool poem once you got past all the gay innuendo. I still like Having a Coke with You.
Anyway, we all took photographs next to the Goldberg painting. Later at home, I posted something to one of the forums about the original Goya painting and tried to make a case that sometimes, O’Hara was less a modernist and more a neoclassicist. It’s still a silly little thing I hold on to from time to time throughout ModPo, the idea that certain streams of modernism are actually classical and neo-classical. Just one man’s opinion.
I wonder can I post the Goya painting next to the Goldberg one? Will wordpress let me do it? (For educational purposes only). There are some correlations . . .
Let’s close week seven with a discussion of this theoretical thing, the modern vs. the classical, Two quotes:
Aaron Douglas (Harlem Renaissance artist)
” . . . Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art painting black…let’s bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough, neglected. Then let’s sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let’s do the impossible. Let’s create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic.”
Kenyon Cox (American painter and muralist)
“The Classic Spirit is the disinterested search for perfection; it is the love of clearness and reasonableness and self-control; it is, above all, the love of permanence and of continuity. It asks of a work of art, not that it shall be novel or effective, but that it shall be fine and noble. It seeks not merely to express individuality or emotion but to express disciplined emotion and individuality restrained by law. It strives for the essential rather than the accidental, the eternal rather than the momentary. And it loves to steep itself in tradition. It would have each new work connect itself in the mind of him who sees it with all the noble and lovely works of the past, bringing them to his memory and making their beauty and charm part of the beauty and charm of the work before him. It does not deny originality and individuality – they are as welcome as inevitable. It does not consider tradition as immutable or set rigid bounds to invention. But it desires that each new presentation of truth and beauty shall show us the old truth and the old beauty, seen only from a different angle and colored by a different medium. It wishes to add link by link to the chain of tradition, but it does not wish to break the chain.“
ModPo 