Frank O Hara's Why I Am Not A Poet

Although it may initially appear to discuss the differences between painting and poetry, Frank O’Hara’s poem “Why I am not a painter” rather serves as a manifestation of the similarities between the two arts. What struck me during the reading of “Why I am not a painter” is that it bears an elusive similarity to ekphrastic poetry, the type of poetry wherein the poet discusses a work of art (a painting, a poem) and thereby tries to extract a concluding truth or principle. But instead of using poetical aesthetics to produce a cryptic succession of words and result in a memorable declaration, O’Hara takes the New York school approach and urges the reader to find meaning in their own reading of his work, not in the end result. To achieve this, he
The poem is wholesomely written in free verse, boasting a highly colloquial vocabulary. Overall, the language is vernacular and not in the least poetic, not in the way that we have come to expect when reading e.g. poems of the early-19th century romantics. The informality in language becomes evident when, for instance, “visit” becomes “drop in” (5), or “observe” is rather crassly put as “look up” (7-8). Similarly, the tone is conversational and casual, so much that the poem almost reads as if O’Hara wrote it off the top of his head, without much consideration for craftsmanship or revision. In fact, the speaker embroiders the painting process in such chatty terms that the whole romanticized nuance of an artist frantically working on his canvas is stripped naked of its charm. Goldberg will casually pause his work to share a drink with the speaker, and will nonchalantly remove Sardines because “It was too much” (16). Personally, I think the reason why O’Hara chooses to ‘communalize’ his speaker’s language and to demystify the process of creating art is because he tries to communicate with readers who probably lack his own attunement to the subtleties of the poetic art and thus attempts to translate his work in a more simple language, at the same time retaining its poetic
In this case, it can firstly be located by examining how the transition from one line to the next appears improvisatory. Although Goldberg and O’Hara each start with an evident source of inspiration – Sardines for the painting and the color orange for the poem – the creative process appears to veer off in its own direction, almost having a volition of its own, as seen in “The painting is going on” (11) –also a metonymy for Goldberg –, and “I write a line (…) Pretty soon it is a whole page of words” (19-21). This idea of unconscious artistic creation not only overlaps with O’Hara’s philosophy as a student of the New York School artistry, but also justifies the structural ‘irregularities’ in the poem’s structure: namely line breaks, and a rather circular substructure connecting the first and third stanzas. While most lines are linked by line breaks, certain line breakers are more important, in the sense that they accelerate the impression of an automatic, incessant genesis of a work of art. Such line breaks are found in “The painting/is going on” (11), “and the days/go by” (12) and “pretty soon it is a/whole page of words” (19), abruptly cutting one line off to jump to the next and maintain the swift pace with which the painting/writing processes are described. Also, the line breaks in “The