WHITE NOISE, WHITE ELEGIES

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

So opens Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” his elegy for the complicated and brilliant singer Billie Holiday, a woman entirely absent from the rest of O’Hara’s rambling ruminations on money, privilege, and the ambiguous social position of the White bohemian class. O’Hara’s poem is a list of things—bottles of Strega and cartons of Gauloises cigarettes, anthologies of Ghanaian poets, cheeseburgers and translations of French poetry lavishly decorated with drawings by Bonnard—all of which O’Hara purchases to feed himself, whether figuratively through aesthetic appreciation, or literally through a kind of cultural bartering, as most of the objects will become gifts he’ll offer friends and his financial betters for a nice meal. All of O’Hara’s relationships in the poem are transactional: Miss Stillwagon, the bank clerk, knows him only by how little money he has in his bank account. O’Hara’s friendships are themselves framed through gifts. O’Hara does not know the people in the Hamptons who will feed him, but because O’Hara is the sparkling, educated kind of man who can tell you the exact date that Bastille Day falls on, he is invited to the lavish parties he himself cannot throw.

I read the poem as a sly examination of class and, perhaps, homosexuality, since O’Hara, a gay man, is clearly obsessed with wanting to fit in, and in this poem the primary way of fitting in for an outsider occurs through the accumulation of things. Buying and appreciating art objects become an elaborate performance of self that might perhaps soften the fact of O’Hara’s homosexuality to a more conservative, though culturally appreciative, Hamptons crowd. But the poem is about more than just fitting in. Though O’Hara purchases bottles of Strega and agonizes over whether to buy a book by Verlaine, Lattimore, or Behan, he doesn’t stick to purchasing only Western European items. In fact, O’Hara just as often purchases items and services produced by or about Black people. He begins the poem, for example, by getting a shoe shine, then moves on to purchasing an anthology titled New World Writing “to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days,” then considers buying Les Negres by Genet, before recalling a night in Harlem watching Holiday perform, the memory itself drifting up after he has purchased a New York Times with Holiday’s own face on the cover.

Throughout the poem, O’Hara quietly consumes Black art, Black services, Black cultural icons. He treats them as part of a seamless and interchangeable stream of products that entice him: they are, in essence, no different to him from the Verlaines and Lattimores, but they are no more special, either, than his Gauloises and cheeseburgers. O’Hara’s self-reflexive mix of “high” and “low” cultural references here might be seen as a mark of the poem’s—and poet’s—modernity, but it can also be seen as a cynical evaluation of the meaning of art itself—a meaning that is always, and finally, attached to money.

But, of course, that reading of the poem is never far off from the poem’s elegiac trajectory; it complicates, but doesn’t entirely negate the poem’s devastating last stanza:

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered