What's for Lunch? Sardines and Oranges

 

Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter” displays many of the features of New York School poetry. First, it uses a modified “I-do-this, I-do-that” style. It is not a list of daily behavior but the poem does have a conversational, even improvisational tone suggesting the poet is sharing his thoughts as they occur to him. In addition, “Why I Am Not a Painter” is exclusively in present tense, adding to its immediacy. This approach allows O’Hara to use the NYS’s classic wit.

NYS poems often make use of references. Here, O’Hara refers to modern artist Mike Goldberg, whose work hung in the MOMA where O'Hara worked. The fact that O’Hara talks about a museum in New York City illustrates the movement’s reliance on both the both the urban and urbane. The intellectual quality combined with the casual tone adds to the humor of the poem.

O’Hara makes use of the NYS technique of pastiche as he plays off of the work of painter Michael Goldberg. He combines the two meanings of pastiche as ironic stylistic copying and as jumble. Goldberg’s sardines and O’Hara’s oranges are both simple everyday unromantic objects, both words which become dissociated from their meanings, and both ideas that motivate the production of creative art.

It is this dissociation between letters and art that leads O’Hara to explore the concept of palimpsests. O’Hara watches Goldberg paint sardines (both the object and the painting), then sees him remove the object in order to complete the painting. The echo is heard in the painting by leaving the visual “letters” of the word “sardine” in the work. And if one views the actual painting, one sees that O’Hara means quite literally that the letters remain. For the poet, the color orange works in a similar way. The idea of the color orange allows him to write multiple poems, poems about subjects as deep as life itself, even though the poet finished without ever actually discussing the color orange itself. His use of palimpsest is to use the plural “Oranges” to title the collection of poems inspired by the color. Interestingly, the pluralization of his inspiration implies a shift in meaning: the food (oranges) rather than the color (orange). In a sense, this is an example of the traditional use of polyptoton (use of repeated versions of the same word), another feature of NYS poetry.

Perhaps the most obvious NYS style used in this poem is parataxis. While the title of the poem promises an explanation of why O’Hara is not a painter, or perhaps a direct statement explaining why he does not paint, we never get a straightforward answer. Instead, we get two images, that of the painter and that of the poet, that we have to work to reconcile. Although O’Hara makes it clear that he is making a comparison between the two, his argument is unclear. The two seem similar in their usage of palimpsests and in their reliance of words in their art. The two seem different since the painter has to remove from his work while the poet simply stops adding. Unlike the limit the painter felt when he removed the original sardine (“It was too much”), the poet has infinite freedom to write with no restrictions on how much to put into his poems.

I love that the poet best known for his “lunch poems” writes about sardines and oranges even when his bigger theme is the analysis of different approaches to creativity and art.