Narrative Poem Research

A narrative poem is a poem that tells a story. Some examples of narrative poems are ballads, epics, and lays. I chose the poem, 'The Day Lady Died', by Frank O'Hara. The poem starts off with setting the scene (in New York, on a Friday in 1959) and very simple day-to-day tasks, with the narrator going to the bank, getting presents for his friends, etc. But the poem takes a turn as he enters the liquor store, and he sees a New York Post newspaper with 'her face' on it. The 'her' is referring to Billie Holiday, a singer who died that year, and the name of the poem is a play on a nickname: 'Lady Day'. O'Hara's style of writing is considered very 'detailed' and 'trivial'. In most of his poems, he writes in a way that is like a human mind thinks. The human mind thinks in details, taking in specific names and random thoughts. In this poem, there is a lot of names, such as Easthampton, 7:15, New World Writing, Miss Stillwagon, Verlaine, Bonnard, Park Lane, etc. Also, in between these details, there are also little commentaries that our minds tend to make on certain things. This is why in the poem, it starts off by listing off the trivial tasks of his daily life, and then, as he makes the extraordinary discovery of the death of Billie Holiday, the tone of the poem changes completely, and it focuses on how he feels: " 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". This refers to the narrator's last memory of Billie Holiday, at possibly a jazz club with Holiday's accompanist, Mal Waldron. It is not a very long poem, and goes at quite a fast pace, as a human mind would. There is no rhyme scheme, and no particular number of syllables in each line. Also, there is no set number of lines in each stanza. Another thing worth noting is that there is hardly any punctuation; there does not seem to be any periods, and barely any commas, because as mentioned above, this poem is written like the human mind. The human mind does not stop, or pause, but instead, keeps going and thinking. There is no figure of speech and no imagery; in short, there is no descriptive language except at the very end, where it mentions: "she whispered the song along the keyboard", which is giving an image of of her singing as soft and delicate.