No Things But Ideas: A Portrait of Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter”

Why I Am Not a Painter

 

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.

 

 

Frank O’Hara’s poetry versus painting poem opens simply. It is a declarative sentence that will unfold into a declarative poem. Particularly note the present tense, which will remain constant as a tennis net between two players. The question why introduces the second line, and with that question, the challenge is set down before the jousters. O’Hara takes up the gauntlet, and since he is the poet, our expectation is that he will answer by telling us why poetry is better—at least for him.

 

O’Hara affection for painters is obvious. He says he would rather be one, and then, before you know it, he is drinking with one. Goldberg is clearly a friend. How casual and upfront the verb phrasing is here: I drop in, I drink, we drink, I look up. Everything is very immediate, very everyday, a bit prosaic, and sounds like something out of Dick and Jane. Goldberg, however, is drinking while working, or at least drinking during his work day. When O’Hara creates his poems in stanza three, he will not be imbibing, he will be thinking.  

 

As the second stanza continues, O’Hara makes a obvious observation: sardines are a prominent part of the painting. The actual word SARDINES stands out. How could it not? It’s the only word in the stanza that is all in caps. When O’Hara creates his poems on orange, orange is not in caps, at least not until the end. Another word here that has a lot of coverage is go. Between go and going, there are six appearances of the verb, five of which occur in stanza two. One feels the activity of painting going on—the slash and flash of color and brush—the action in the action paintings of Goldberg. Painting is an act of doing. The stanza closes with the completion of SARDINES, but oddly enough, all that’s left of the fishes are the letters that spell the word.

 

The last stanza showcases O’Hara’s creative process. He begins by thinking—it’s a mental construct, or should I say, a work of mental construction. O’Hara is thinking about something a painter might contemplate as well. A color: orange. He writes a line about orange, that soon turns into words, not lines. Here, he is playing off the meanings of line. Line is a basic tool in the painter’s kit, and therefore, of no use to O’Hara. Days go by is the only phrase that is exactly repeated from stanza two. O’Hara is interjecting a note of similarity between the two processes, which I would summarize as art takes time. In the end of this quirky story, O’Hara writes twelve poems called ORANGES, without mentioning orange, that express the terribleness of life. Goldberg’s SARDINES still has the word “sardines” in it, but unlike ORANGES, no clue is given as to the meaning or content of the painting. Abstraction wins out over the representational. We have a reversal, a chiasmus, of Williams’ famous quote, no ideas but in things—no things but ideas.