Why I Am Not a Painter, was written in 1957 by Frank O'Hara. The poem reflects upon the creative process. A casual moment in the life of artists, to address different types of art: poetry and painting, with a certain irony and bohemian glamour, the medium is the difference - words and paint
It is about the importance of not having a subject. The subject doesn't matter. That's straight out of Abstract Expressionism.
The original inspiration for the painting (ultimately called Sardines) is preserved only in the title of Mike Goldberg's work, because paintings are made of paint, not words, and the process of painting may erase any of the artist's preconceptions. And since poems are made of words, not ideas or colors, the orange that incited O'Hara exists only as the title of his work.
Poem full of reversals and sly surprises, a characteristic example of the New York School's aesthetic of irony, ambivalence
The poem seems to address the differences but
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It gears on real names, characters and events, uses social conversation and colloquialisms. It is humorous and informal.
The effect of the poem moves backwards and forwards between stanzas, quasi-narrative dimension. The poem deconstructs its temporal dimension through simultaneity.
In his “Personism: A Manifesto,” O'Hara critiques poets who force their reader to experience something that does not amount to what a “real” experience should consist of, when reading and referencing poetry. It seems O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems do not truly consist of his thought process, but instead his poetry evolves out of the moment when he has “stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives” (O’Hara).
O’Hara’s work is usually conversational and casual in tone. Mind the movement of the line and repeated structures “I drink; we drink.”, “I go and the days go by” in the poem. Most lines use enjambment, in a quasi-narrative
The reader experiences euphoria and extreme amusement reading the entire poem which flows in a very stupefy way. But, it also promotes
Poet Dwight Okita uses imagery in his poetry to give the reader different relatable scenarios for a better understanding. In the first stanza of his poem, “Voice,” it says,
In the poem “Why I am not a painter” by Frank O’Hara he shows the reader that a poem and a painting are very similar to each other even though they appearvery different. His poem explains how he is not a painter in the first stanza and then talks about how his friend Mike Goldberg made his painting in the second stanza and then Frank talks about how he made his poem and shows that they are very similar to each other in the last stanza.
The poem's structure consists of four stanzas. The first, second, and third stanza follow an abcc rhyme scheme, and the last stanza follows an aabb rhyme scheme. A the reader progresses through each stanza, it is seen that the narrator's dissatisfaction of her confinement
“He frequently presents his poetry as the outgrowth of occasions on which objects or events in the present trigger a sudden renewal of feelings that he has experienced in
The poem lacks many of the inclinations that Koch discusses in Chapter Three. O’Hara almost puts away all personification and lies to make sure that everyone pays more attention to the emotion. He uses these emotions to ensure the
Apart from that, the poem consists of a series of turns that reflect different parts of the speaker’s feelings and the experiences he had. The significance of these turns is made possible through the use of stanza breaks. For example, the first
This can assist the reader to put his/her view in the author's point of view, which he does in those stanzas. This poem is used by both literary devices which makes
Poetry, what first comes to mind? If your anything like me, poetry can seem somewhat monotonous, rather like a locked door exclusive, complicated, and hard to understand. I think poetry tends to be a big game of “Guess what I’m thinking!” and I hate that game. I’m not a mind-reader. I think a lot of people who get excited about poetry are really pretentious. This possibly comes from believing that they actually can guess what other people are thinking. When we think poetry, we tend to know poetry by it’s traditional forms of having sonnets, ballads, often rhyming (but not always) and they tend to have a specific and symmetrical structure (APA). Throughout this essay I wanted to consider poetry through different explorations and how subverting the traditional conventions of poetry might be an effective way of engagement or in an opposing way of demotivating the reader.
Because the poem is long, it won’t be quoted extensively here, but it is attached at the end of the paper for ease of reference. Instead, the paper will analyze the poetic elements in the work, stanza by stanza. First, because the poem is being read on-line, it’s not possible to say for certain that each stanza is a particular number of lines long. Each of several versions looks different on the screen; that is, there is no pattern to the number of lines in each stanza. However, the stanzas are more like paragraphs in a letter than
In his text entitled “Modernist Painting”, Greenberg focuses on the development of painting between the 14th and 19th century and emphasizes on what distinguishes Modernist painting from previous forms of painting, particularly those of the Old Masters. Greenberg begins by relating Modernist art to Kantian philosophy claiming that, the same way Kant used reason in order to examine the limits of reason, Modernist art is when art became self critical because it uses the technique of art to draw attention to its status as art. Indeed, he explains how without this self-examination similar to that of Kant’s reflection on Philosophy, art would’ve been “assimilated to […] therapy” like religion, because
“The relationship between the energies of the inquiring mind that an intelligent reader brings to the poem and the poem’s refusal to yield a single comprehensive interpretation enacts vividly the everlasting intercourse between the human mind, with its instinct to organise and harmonise, and the baffling powers of the universe about it.”
He transitions the tone of the poem from one of despair and hopelessness to one of encouragement which adds a realistic effect to the poem while still encouraging the reader. There is a thin line between being completely discouraging and being realistic; the speaker in the story seems to keep the perfect balance between these two lines. With the skillfully organized tone, the author helps the reader better understand the mood of the story as well as the difficult
The poem suddenly becomes much darker in the last stanza and a Billy Collins explains how teachers, students or general readers of poetry ‘torture’ a poem by being what he believes is cruelly analytical. He says, “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Here, the poem is being personified yet again and this brings about an almost human connection between the reader and the poem. This use of personification is effective as it makes the
The short stanzas containing powerful imagery overwhelm the readers forcing them to imagine the oppression that the speaker went through in