Poem of the Week: Why I Am Not A Painter - Frank O'Hara

I love Frank O'Hara. I just love his New York style. Basically, he's like a New York comedian in the form of a poet - he's just makes observations of everyday life as he sees it, and rather than making jokes he makes poems. Actually, they've often got jokes in them too. You should read some of his stuff if you've got the time.

As it happens, he got a job one day at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (at the front desk) and from that point on he was totally into the art scene, but he was never an artist himself. He was a critic, reviewer and curator, but never an artist. This poem is about that (and about watching Abstract Impressionist Michael Goldberg paint). I can't paint either, and I love art. So this poem resonates with me. Hopefully you like it too.


Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

© 2008 by Maureen Granville-Smith, from Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara, edited by Mark Ford. Random House, Inc.