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Mike Goldberg's Why I Am Not A Painter

Decent Essays

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 …show more content…

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

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