Frank O'hara and "Why I am Not a Painter" (Critical Essay‪)‬

While it is often claimed that O'Hara's use of language in his poems is similar to Pollock's use of paint in his abstract paintings, this notion fails to take into consideration the essential differences between the two mediums. Nowhere are these differences clearer than in O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter" (1956), which is a comparison of the processes of creation in Mike Goldberg's painting SARDINES (1955) and O'Hara's poem "Oranges: 12 Pastorals" (1949). While there are indeed a number of similarities, in particular between the process of creation in painting and the process of creation in writing, O'Hara makes a number of distinctions. In fact, the title of the poem is a play on a proposed but never completed book by Apollinaire called Et moi aussi je suis peintre (And I Too Am a Painter), the advertisement of which was printed at the end of Robert Motherwell's 1949 translation of Apollinaire's Les Peintres cubistes (1913). In his chapter on Picasso, Apollinaire writes that Picasso uses words and numbers in his paintings as "pictorial elements" (The Cubist Painters. Trans. Peter Read. [Berkeley: University of CA Press, 2002]: 35-36). The implication for Apollinaire, as it becomes clear in his Calligrammes (1918), is that if the painter can use words as "pictorial elements" to create simultaneous meanings, the poet, too, can create a form of simultaneism by using the "plastic" elements of words pictorially. O'Hara, however, makes a clear distinction between himself and Apollinaire in the poem with respect to the plasticity of words. The opening lines of the poem state that it will be about "why" O'Hara is not a painter--that is, "why" what O'Hara does (i.e., writing poetry) cannot be considered painting. Despite this, O'Hara nevertheless begins with a shared aspect of his and Goldberg's work: both are created out of a process of exploration. O'Hara writes: