I Am Not A Painter Poem

The poem, “Why I am Not a Painter”, by Frank O’Hara contains the various terminology that is used by Bartholomae, Petrosky, and Waite. The specific language that is used by O’Hara contains a tone that can be described as prosaic or conversational. For example, instead of the narrator “visiting” Mike Goldberg, the narrator just drops in to see the progress of Goldberg’s painting. The author also says that Sardines is removed due to the fact that “it was too much.” O’Hara’s word usage is very similar to the words that are used in everyday life; he limits the specifics in his lines to show that everything in the poem is quite swiftly. The line breaks in the poem are very arbitrary in the sense that it makes people feel surprised when reading those parts of the poem. These line breaks point back at the words they follow and they reflect on the words to come. For example, the word “Well” alters the way O’Hara feels about not being a painter as well as
One of their arguments is the idea that reading involves a fair measure of push and shove. The word push from the phrase basically means to replace the author’s thoughts and feelings with those of your own. The word shove from the phrase essentially means to acquire a better understanding of what the author is saying through his or her feelings and thoughts. The push and shove in the poem occurs when O’Hara says, “There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life” (O’Hara 1). I can relate to the author in this scenario because whenever I am given a simple topic to write about, I tend to write many pages not even about the actual topic, so this causes me to mourn about life. This helps me understand what the author is trying to say because he is representing the life of a poet and how he would rather be a painter due to a painter’s easy