Why I Am Not A Painter - 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 the SARDINES?"
All that is 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 eve 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.
>This poem is 3 stanzas. 27 sentences. 29 lines long so it is an odd balance.
>The second stanza is about dropping in on the painting process.
>The third stanza is about the poem process.
>There is a question in each stanza with an answer explained after.
>There is character dialogue in the third stanza.
>Line 10 - 13 uses the word "go" 5 times with in 32 words.
>Lines 6-7 uses the word "drink" 3 times with in 14 words.
>Most lines appears to be close to the same length even if the amount of words differ.
>There is a semicolon used in this poem.
>The font changes for every sardines mentioned in this piece.
>The font changes for Oranges only when it is revealed as a title.
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