In an interview conducted by Mike Wallace that same year, Holiday was asked, “Why is it that so many jazz musicians die young?”
We try to live one hundred days in one day and we try and please so many people. Like myself I want to bend this note and bend that note, sing this way and sing that way and get all the feeling and eat all the good foods and travel all around the world in one day and you can’t do it.
Some of my favorite occasional writing about Billie Holiday has been done by poets. There is, of course, “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara. In the poem, O’Hara leads us through the details of an afternoon spent running around New York City. The poem begins to slow down as he asks the tobacconist at the Ziegfeld Theatre for a copy of the New York Post “with her face on it.” As the reality of Holiday’s death sets in, the poet begins to think back over his not so distant past:
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
In their novel Inferno, Eileen Myles describes Holiday’s late, tattered, fifties voice as “a scratch where a croon used to be.” John Wieners wrote a poem titled “Broken Hearted Memories” about meeting Holiday in a bar after her show with his lover in tow. It ends with a description similar to Eileen’s, “Billie’s grey-hair was Parisian style and her / singing Big Apple. She’s still rotting nectarines.” Sometimes a poem may not even be dedicated “to” Billie Holiday, and I can still hear her intimate carving into space as an influence. I can hear both her phrasing and mythology at play in this piece from a poem by Jayne Cortez titled “Rose Solitude (for Duke Ellington)”:
Ask me
Essence of Rose Solitude
chickadee from arkansas that’s me
i sleep on cotton bones
cotton tails
and mellow myself in empty ballrooms
i’m no fly by night
look at my resume
i walk through the eyes of staring lizards
i throw my neck back to floorshow on bumping goat skins
in front of my stage fright
i cover the hands of Duke who like Satchmo
like Nat (King) Cole will never die
because love they say
never dies
Amiri Baraka wrote a beautiful paragraph on Holiday’s music in 1962, three years after her death. This piece is titled “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets” and was eventually included in Baraka’s 1967 collection, Black Music:
Nothing was more perfect than what she was. Nor more willing to fail. (If we call failure something light can realize. Once you have seen it, or felt whatever thing she conjured growing in your flesh.)
At the point where what she did left singing, you were on your own, at the point where what she was was in her voice, you listen and make your own promises.
More than I have felt to say, she says always. More than she has ever felt is what we mean by fantasy. Emotion, is wherever you are. She stayed in the street.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A voice that grew from a singer’s instrument to a woman’s. And from that (those last records critics say are weak) to a black landscape of need, and perhaps, suffocated desire.
Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this lady.
I remember that when listening to Billie Holiday a few years later, in college, my roommates would sometimes comment on her later Verve recordings as “depressing.” Somehow, I had always stayed ahead of that interpretation. I was listening for the slight delay, the authority thrown down in a single gesture, how every silence locked into place, the encroaching rasp enhanced the sensation of her voice being chiseled out from the darkness over and over. And for all these years the realms within her voice have continued to unfold before me. Many of the 1950s records were rearranged versions of songs she had recorded with Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra in the ’30s, meaning, by this point, she had assembled her own songbook out from the oeuvres of Ellington, Gershwin, Arlen, Strayhorn, etc. This sense of rendition reminds me that as poets we do not simply read the poems of others, we cover them; that is to say, inhabit and reinterpret the lyric. The songs we think of as “belonging” to Holiday are those that she imparts with an entirely new melody.
My sense of the musical phrase in poetry is also haunted by writing slogans, which I have memorized over the years, those slogans I keep in mind for myself as well as future students. One of the most elegiac, lyrical, and redeeming is Ted Berrigan’s line, “Be born again daily, die nightly for a change of style.” It is probably best that we hear this line within the context of the entire poem:
WHITMAN IN BLACK
For my sins I live in the city of New York
Whitman’s city lived in in Melville’s senses, urban inferno
Where love can stay for only a minute
Then has to go, to get some work done
Here the detective and the small-time criminal are one
& tho the cases get solved the machine continues to run
Big Town will wear you down
But it’s only here you can turn around 360 degrees
And everything is clear from here at the center
To every point along the circle of horizon
Here you can see for miles & miles & miles
Be born again daily, die nightly for a change of style
Hear clearly here; see with affection; bleakly cultivate compassion
Whitman’s walk unchanged after its fashion
“Die nightly for a change of style.” I always forget about the “Be born again daily” part. That slight addition makes the line even more indestructible. At the time that he wrote this poem (summer 1977) Ted Berrigan was an acknowledged master of the serial collage and of condensing individual lines. In “Whitman in Black,” he retools these sensations slightly. We are handed a hard-boiled, Raymond Chandler–like narrative. In the notes section at the back of Berrigan’s Collected Poems the editors tell us that this sonnet was inspired by the crime novelist Ross MacDonald, using his handbook On Crime Writing as source material. In the poem, Berrigan exploits the fact of his own mythic status as a New York City poet, and this mythology is allowed to bleed through tonally and to pool up in places. The proverbial “old hat in secret closet.” The poem’s effects are exquisitely timed out. In Berrigan’s hands, “the last poem” can begin as a grid for any number of nights, whenever the light beckons through a new tear in the screen. As if we could ever change our actual walk…these constant tweaks to the writing process are in some ways useless. There are elements of our voices that will remain unchanged. All language is eventually abandoned or recombined, and this state of mind is romantic, “the machine continues to run.” Maybe all this time I have just been seeking companions in these various triggers and assignments.
I read through a lot of poets after my first summer at the Naropa Institute (1996). I simply wrote down page after page of names as they came up, book titles, presses. I was eighteen years old. I began to get very caught up in Robert Creeley’s work and to write endless piss-poor imitations of him. I was attracted to the Elsa Dorfman photo that graced the cover of his Collected Poems. It is a shy and slightly obscured portrait. I think his hand is in motion, his single eye gives his face an alluring and skeletal weight. It appears to be early morning. In the actual writing, I was taken with his minimal and cutting approach in terms of what made it down onto the page. I could understand each and every word used in the poetry. The words used were often quite short, words like things, one, fact, if, edges. All of these seemingly simple words are made so jaggedly present through an incisive patterning. It is not the words themselves but the space they take up as marked, as reset. They have to be read with this constantly sharpening edge, otherwise in the end they seem to carry no weight. The whole drama of his reading
style (so evident when hearing him live) seemed to hinge on the action imposed by his line breaks, as if their collapsing framework made it possible for Creeley to complete the poem. The intensity was felt in his cutting of the brush, his hacking out of large, permanent, asymmetrical pieces. I experienced his poetry as an invitation to write. This is a poem from my personal favorite of his books, Words, published in 1967:
VARIATIONS
There is love only
as love is. These
senses recreate
their definition—a hand
holds within itself
all reason. The eyes
have seen such
beauty they close.
But continue. So the voice
again, these senses recreate
their singular condition
felt, and felt again.
I hear. I hear
the mind close, the voice
go on beyond it,
the hands open.
Hard, they hold so
closely themselves, only,
empty grasping of
such sensation.
Hear, there where
the echoes are
louder, clearer,
senses of sound
opening and closing,
no longer love’s
only, mind’s intention,
eyes’ sight, hands holding—
broken to echoes, these
senses recreate
their definition. I hear
the mind close.
The poem seems to be charting a fit of haunted, rhyming music. Creeley is chasing a description of what goes on when the language presents itself as malleable or driven purely by music. It is a sort of literal charting, except that the phrasing and the feeling are always at the mercy of the actual performance, the tone of the room as well as the audience. Creeley once related that at an early reading, he came off stage after what he considered to be a good performance only to find the person seated next to him patting him on the back, trying to comfort him, assuming that he had been a nervous wreck, entirely short of breath. Creeley was forced to say explicitly, “No, I want the poems to sound
like that.”
In a 1988 documentary on Creeley by Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson, the poet speaks of going into a space one would ordinarily associate with musical composition rather than written verse:
My sense is that it’s a human capacity or capability or possibility that occurs much in the same way that someone’s ability to sing. I mean you train it, you can train it by practice and attention but you paradoxically can’t determine what it’s going to do.
I’m not sure that all poets experience these bracing fits of musicality, or they may experience this energy as fleeting. I sometimes feel as though I live in the sanctum of my inner ear, “die nightly for a change of style.” I have tried to duplicate the way Clark Coolidge leans into his abstractions, wearing them down so severely that his use of syntax becomes a sort of guardrail, or how Eileen Myles continually carves out their own colloquial shoulder of the lyric. The poet has to work each and every time to hollow out that space within their performance. There are only so many bars or syllables available with which to make your statement.
Robert Creeley’s tone is revealing in the same way Holiday’s singing style arrests us, catches our ear. The event of the poem is drawn out syllable by syllable. “Fire delights in its form” is another great Creeley quote via William Blake. Why does Creeley’s halting, gestural way appeal to me? I realized fairly recently that all the ticks and stutters and heavy breaths are in fact the mortar for any given reading, bristling at points.
This long unwinding of the song and its mortar have been expanded upon throughout the writing of Eileen Myles, a poet who has gone ahead to expand even that narrow space in which we speak between poems. Myles has written so well of what being courted by the poem actually feels like. The following passage is lifted from an essay at the end of their 1991 poetry collection, Not Me, an essay titled “How I Wrote Certain of My Poems”:
The process of the poem, the performance of it I mentioned, is central to an impression I have that life is a rehearsal for the poem, or the final moment of spiritual revelation. I literally stepped out of my house that night, feeling a poem coming on. Incidentally, it hadn’t started raining yet, so I wasn’t alone in being ready to burst. I was universally pent up. I had done my research, pretty unconsciously, celebrating the mood I was in…
I’ve had this feeling before—of going out to get a poem, like hunting. The night that comes to mind is the night I wrote the earlier poem. I felt “…erotic oddly / magnetic…” like photographic paper. As I walked I was recording the details, I was the details, I was the poem.
This idea of life as rehearsal for the event of the poem would seem to enable Myles’s gift for total emotional recall. When you read their poems alone after hearing the author aloud, their tone is available and on call forever after. Myles’s thin, broken line always provides for a brave leap out into the air as well as an iron grip, a gift for hanging on. The poem as a shelter becomes this slightly shrunken, tomblike space while the voice is sounding out from the ziggurat. But the poem must be attacked and ripped into with a vernacular, in order to have the desired pacing (the stream of imagery) even hinted at. We are keepers and carriers of the poem, as Myles says. This poem is also taken from Not Me:
VISTA
AFTER DAVID TRINIDAD
Here I am in
my house. A place
of permanence. Only
dried flowers are
allowed: Goldenrod
from Myra’s. Friday’s
rain is sizzling. No
wonder I won’t
budge. Unpeeling
yellow post-it
pads to reveal
the week’s
wisdom: “But this
is just the world.
It’s a real gong
show.” A little
stagey but nice.
“You shouldn’t
give money to
people you don’t
like. On days
when bums
disgust me I
don’t give them
a cent.” No
wonder I
stay in. There’s
my jeans with the
ass torn out.
An act of
time, not
violence. I lay
old clothes on the
trash cans
out front &
see how many
trips in & out
it takes for
them to vanish.
Once it took
two days for
a shirt to
be gone. To
feel so criticized
by the streets.
My thoughts aren’t
staying in. To live
in the streets,
what a thought
what a word.
A doorway could
be a roof, an
abandoned car,
it gets relative
I suppose. For
a few years
people who
know you
take you
in. Feed
you bathe
you, then
even that’s
over, if
you live.
I live here
& I write
poems, write
about art
though they
rarely print
it. There’s
a hermit in
my soul,
five apples
one with
leaves &
twig on
the wooden
counter. And
beyond the
rusty window
gates there
are trees. Robert
says you could
paint things
your whole life,
the same
things. Cezanne
did. Because
my trees have
gone sparkling
yellow in
the rain
after 11 years
of living
here, it’s
a first
to see
the yellow
bouncing
back after
the rain.
I did.
I did
stay here.
And how to reconcile my endless involvement with the image? I think I hold images in mind as unfixed or as distortion in motion. Perhaps this is why I have become so dependent on the writings of visual artists. Not just painters and sculptors, but filmmakers and choreographers too. Even music feels visual when looking at scores by John Cage. Or to witness the unfolding of pageantry in the Sun Ra Arkestra. I think that my addiction to artists’ writings stems from the possibility of picking up their way of saying things, their diction as well as the facts of their lives, their aspirations for a particular work or series. They are often testimonials on how to continue, as though they have finally reached a clearing wherein all the shadows cast are accessible as intimate and dissolving tones of voice. Artists’ writings always sound so devotional. After years of admiring their work in museums I am often ravenous for their writings, or any kind of transcription of voice. I definitely enjoy the writings of artists more often than I do the artwork of poets.
Agnes Martin, Philip Guston, and Joe Brainard are favorites. I have granted each of them a sphinx-like quality. A fantasy is played out of the artist turning a solid object into emotional language, and each of them manages this task differently. One could argue that Brainard was as innovative in his writing as he was in his visual work, and the same goes for David Wojnarowicz or the work of Etel Adnan. There is not only an equal strength to be found, but an active dependence on text, a need to state your beliefs that is similar to writing poetry, except the impulse feels less bridled to music and more like taking part in a long quest for imagery. In painter Agnes Martin’s writing, her concern is often placed on how to live life in such a way that the impulse to create is ensured to reappear. This is lifted from a longer piece titled Reflections: