A review by spacestationtrustfund
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara by Frank O'Hara

3.0

Frank O'Hara really was the master of polyptoton, ploce, antanaclasis, and paronomasia. This particular poem, "Why I Am Not a Painter," one of my favourites, is antithetical to the surface-level poetry that's so widely plagued the internet: every line has another layer underneath. "I am a poet," O'Hara states, in the first line. He's a poet: there's nothing he can do about it. Near the end of the poem, he repeats himself, emphatic: "I am a real poet." The deceptively colloquial tone belies the nuances of identity (poet, painter) and the associated actions (writing poetry, painting pictures). Why is O'Hara a poet? Because he writes poetry. Because he's not a painter. This is the poem:

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.

Simplicity is not inherently profundity, but O'Hara masters both.