Using the ideas of the New York School like anti-narrative and alt-narrative, juxtaposition, simple present tense and continuous present (I drop in, I go, the days go / Goldberg is starting a painting, I am thinking of a color), and parataxis (the only conjunctive word used is “and”, it shows up four times in the second stanza and only once in the last one) the poet Frank O’Hara explains why he isn’t a painter.
“Why I Am Not a
Painter” is an anti-narrative poem, it is uncompromisingly narrative and tells
a story about a poet and a painter who come together at about the same time as
each of them are in the middle of their creative progression. Although the poem
looks like a spontaneous narrative of two creative processes happening
simultaneously, it is actually calculated because the creation of Sardines and Oranges didn’t happen at the same time: Oranges: 12 Pastorals was written in 1949
(1) when O’Hara was still an undergraduate at Harvard and SARDINES
was painted in 1955. (2) So it is safe to state that O’Hara did not
actually visit Goldberg while he was in the middle of creating SARDINES. It is interesting
to point out that this poem or anecdote is a retelling of another anecdote
depicting that the medium is one of the differences between the painter and the
poet. A century ago in Paris, the painter Degas had lamented that
his poems weren't any good though his ideas were wonderful, and the poet
Mallarme responded, "But my dear Degas, poems are made of words, not ideas."
(3)
There are also hints of
“alt-narrative”, as described by Professor Al Filreis, as Frank O”Hara utilizes
the I do this and I do that (I drink; we drink), and although juxtaposition does exist by
the author placing the creative process of painting and poetry close together
there is a clear connection, which is the creative process itself.
Meta poem is evident here because O’hara states “Pretty soon
it is a whole page of words, not lines…” he is describing the use of parataxis
in his composition of ORANGES, he has written a whole page of words that one
can assume the placing together of sentences,
clauses, or phrases without the use of conjunctive words.
The poem says O’Hara is a poet and not
a painter because he finds the medium of painting a bit limiting. Both the
painting and the poem begin with different words as inspiration. Goldberg
ultimately removes the word SARDINES as the main focal point of his painting
because it was “too much” and fills his canvas with abstract images in yellows,
oranges, blues, browns, reds and black. O’Hara states that he wrote a line
about orange after he thought of the color, but that line then morphed into a
whole page of words, then into another. Unlike Goldberg, O’Hara doesn’t feel
like his multiple pages filled with words are “too much” so he keeps writing
and is ultimately left with ORANGES: 12 PASTORALS;
which is written in prose and O’Hara playfully exclaims, “I am a real poet”.
O’Hara enjoys playing
with language and is happy to take what could have been a simple poem about the
color orange to the length of a dozen poems; he points out to the reader in the
final stanza that though the poem is indeed called oranges he makes no mention
of the word. Goldberg kept the word SARDINES in his finished work, kept it
within the four sides of the canvas, whereas O’Hara finds no restriction in the
writing of words, of pages, of a dozen poems; they could go on and become
volumes because, like Mallarme pointed out, poems are made up of words.
(1) The
Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, University of California Press, Donald Allen,
ed. ISBN-10:
0520201663. 586 pages.
(2) Smithsonian
American Art Museum, http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=40531
(3) David
Lehman, http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/lehman.html
