Frank O’Hara: Why I am not a painter

Why I am not a painter by Frank O’Hara

This is considered by many critics to be one of O’Hara’s greatest poems.

What is the poem about?

Unlike Larkin’s High Windows, this poem is not as cryptic and yields its ordinary narrative meaning relatively easily. It is very obviously about the differences (and parallels) between painting and writing poetry.

The narrator, the poet, visits a painter-friend, Mike Goldberg, at his studio while he is painting. There is almost no attention given to describing the painting or its creation. Instead, O’Hara describes how the narrator and Goldberg share a friendly drink. Goldberg seems to resist interpretation of the painting. Over the course of days the painting goes on, almost of its own volition without Goldberg’s input.

The narrator and Goldberg are both portrayed as being in dialogue with their work. They do not dictate the final product. The work itself influences the creative process and the final outcome.
Goldberg creates by taking away (sounds like poetry and the revision/paring down process, doesn’t it?). O’Hara, on the other hand, keeps adding words until he has an entire page. He struggles to express in words what the painter can do by the simple use of a colour. And what the poet thinks needs adding is not the original idea (orange) but themes which are far removed form the original idea.

Context

What is necessary, however, to fully and properly appreciate O’Hara’s poem is to realise that there is an artist called Michael Goldberg who painted Sardines in 1955 and that, at the bottom of the painting, the word “Sardines” appears. (The word “exit” appears at the top for reasons which are not clear to me.) According to the narrative in O’Hara’s poem, Goldberg puts the word “Sardines” into the painting during its early stages and then, by the time it is finished, the word is obscured to the extent that, even to someone who knew that the words “sardines” was there, it is now just “letters”. O’Hara wrote a poem known as “Oranges: 12 Pastorals.”

In a parallel process the poet-narrator starts the poem with the word “orange” but never actually gets to use the word during the poem. Goldberg deconstructs his word “sardines” into letters. The poet-narrator’s line about orange similarly devolves into a whole page of words (note not lines, but words). At a time when abstraction was becoming fashionable in art, O’Hara’s piece is concerned with representation: the representation of sardines in paint and orange in words. Poetry, unlike art, will never be able to completely break itself free from the chains of representation given that words, of necessity, always retain elements of representation – they stand for something, unlike orange which can represent anything at all.

Tone

The tone is conversational and casual. It reads as if O’Hara wrote it off the top of his head and without much consideration for craftsmanship or revision. In fact, at least one internet site which can be found using google suggests that O’Hara was lazy and offers an “improved” draft in which what that writer regards as excess verbiage is trimmed off. While words can be trimmed without losing the narrative sense of the piece, it loses its conversational tone if this is done and becomes more “poetic” and self-consciously crafted.

O’Hara sets up a chatty tone through his choice of words. Instead of “visit”, for example, his narrator pops in. The creative process is crafted in the most prosaic terms. Sardines is removed simply because “it [was] too much.”

O’Hara is on record as distancing himself from the “conventional” poetic techniques. The elements which I am trying to unpack on this blog. This piece is written in free verse and, as he comments in this piece, Oranges is even written in prose. As a result the language is conversational and not in the least “poetic”, in the way that we would typically understand it.

Unlike in so many other poems where the writer will be at pains to point out that the narrator is not necessarily the poet him- or herself the narrator here is clearly O’Hara. He is answering a question asked of him and giving his view of what poetry should be. However, Oranges was written in 1949, before O’Hara met Goldberg and before Sardines was painted. So the poem is not factually true. One must be careful about too readily assuming that a piece is confessional or autobiographical.

I think O’Hara intends to make a point with this though. What appears to be spontaneous and off the cuff is actually the product of calculation and planning. Innovation requires planning and preparation and poetic achievement does not require fidelity to the truth (in fact the opposite is most often the case).

Linebreaks

O’Hara breaks the lines on words like “be”, “well” (which is also a stanza break) and “he” or starts a new line with the end of the previous sentence, as in the example “life”. The breaks seem somewhat arbitrary and cause surprising effects when reading.

Typically these words point both ways – back at the words they follow and they reflect on the words to come. The “Well”, for example, changes the way O’Hara feels about the preceding sentence (the fact that he is not a painter) as well as introducing the example of Goldberg to illustrate why he would like to be a painter. “Life” is connected to how terrible orange is as well as introducing and transitioning to the “days go by” phrase which is introduced. Marjorie Perloff has called this technique “floating modifiers” – words that point both ways.

Structure

Despite O’Hara’s freedom of style this poem is not without a formal structure. After the three line introductory stanza, there are two stanzas of thirteen lines each. The first stanza sets up the premise for the piece. Stanza two discusses Goldberg and his painting and stanza three brings it all together.

Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is a long literary tradition (the word comes from Greek) where the writer describes or analyses a painting or work of art in order to draw some truth or principle from it. But O’Hara’s piece is different to the usual tradition of ekphrastic poetry in that it does not describe a painting. Rather it describes the process of composition.

Imagery and pacing

In a poem about painting, visual images are noticeably absent from the piece. What we have instead is the movement of the line, the repeated structures “I drink; we drink.”, “I go and the days go by”, “The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in”, etc. Through movement of the line the depth and texture of the creative process in the passage of time is conveyed.

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