Reminders: Vocabulary 1 is due this Friday at the beginning of class. If you are absent, Please scan in your work or send along the responses. Problems? see me very soon.
For Wednesday: please bring the handout we were working on in class last Friday.
Make sure you have familiarized yourself with the following poem before class tomorrow. This is on Friday's handout.
The Day Lady Died FRANK O'HARA
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes July 14, French national holiday, commemorates beginning French revolution
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton town on Eastern Long Island
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 milkshake
an ugly new world writing to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days west African country
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) name of narrator’s bank teller
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the golden griffin I get a little Verlaine New York bar French poet
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do French artist
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or ancient Greek poet
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres Irish poet two plays by Genet
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine controversial French poet / playwright French symbolist poet after practically going to sleep with quandariness a state of perplexity or uncertainty
and for Mike I just stroll into the park lane
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and an Italian herbal liquor
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and theatre in NYC
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton French cigarettes
of Picayunes, and a new york post with her face on it French cigarettes New York newspaper
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 spot restaurant
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing American jazz composer
No comments:
Post a Comment