Why I Am Not A Painter

Why I Am Not a Painter

by Frank O'Hara

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.

Michael Goldberg
Sardines
1955

This poem (and painting) was the source of inspiration for my first solo show in 2006 at the Avellana Art Gallery in Manila. It was, in fact, the title I gave to the show itself.


Frank O'Hara, the New York School poet, was mad about art and heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. Many of his friends were painters, and he eventually became a curator for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He wrote in loose and broken prose, and despised rhythm and formal constructs in poetry. He wrote in the 'everyday language' that had no set rules. A pure beatnik.

I found this poem particularly empowering. It made me feel that I was on the right path. That my creative method had not gone astray, and that there was some sense to it. It wasn't sloppy; it was story telling. I was simply chronicling my creative act. Many layers in my paintings have become invisible - buried under a stratum of thought and competing forms. But this never meant death to the original idea, may it be a color or a type of fish.