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spacestationtrustfund's review
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:
Simplicity is not inherently profundity, but O'Hara masters both.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.
niamhelizabethfennell's review
5.0
I’ve been reading his poems while I’ve been going through a period of mixed emotions. His words really do resonant with me and have inspired me during my own Creative process. “Having a coke with you” echoed my current feelings of pain and love, while “Why I am not a painter” reminded me, that to write authentically cannot be forced. So even if you set out to write about oranges, along the way you might find you’ve not even mentioned an orange (the fruit nor the colour) and O’Hara has taught me that this is just fine.
jenniferaimee's review against another edition
5.0
O'Hara has been one of my favorite poets since I first read "The Day Lady Died" and "Why I am Not a Painter" in my freshman poetry class. Poems Retrieved is the first poetry book I read for fun, and it is also the first book I read after finishing college, and so of course I loved The Collected Poems. I've said before that long poetry collections are difficult for me to finish—I prefer to read my poetry in infrequent poem-packed sprints, and shorter books are better suited to that. (Long books can obviously be read the same way, I just get frustrated when it takes over a year to finish a 500-page book.) Still, I enjoyed reading this, and as I was approaching the end, I started feeling sad at the thought of not having any new O'Hara to read. I also got extra melancholy over the fact that he didn't know his last poem was going to be his last and that I was coming to the end of his life via poetry.
O'Hara's poems are personal, chatty, and remind me of the impressionist movement because he wrote about everyday events. The poems conjure the atmosphere of O'Hara's New York City—both the busyness of life in Manhattan and the vibrancy of his social life. I love the sense of community he created in his writing, the poems for his friends, and the offhand way he mentioned them in his poems. O'Hara's poems seem genuine; I appreciated how little pretension there was in his writing, despite his privileged upbringing, his career at MoMA, and his deep involvement in the art world (which, actually, may have tempered some of the pretension).
He wrote, "Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them." I do, though, and I find O'Hara's poems relatable and fun/easy to read.
Some of my favorites are: "[When your left arm twitches]"; ["Is it dirty"]; "At Joan's"; "Lines for the Fortune Cookies"; "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island"; and "Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul."
O'Hara's poems are personal, chatty, and remind me of the impressionist movement because he wrote about everyday events. The poems conjure the atmosphere of O'Hara's New York City—both the busyness of life in Manhattan and the vibrancy of his social life. I love the sense of community he created in his writing, the poems for his friends, and the offhand way he mentioned them in his poems. O'Hara's poems seem genuine; I appreciated how little pretension there was in his writing, despite his privileged upbringing, his career at MoMA, and his deep involvement in the art world (which, actually, may have tempered some of the pretension).
He wrote, "Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them." I do, though, and I find O'Hara's poems relatable and fun/easy to read.
Some of my favorites are: "[When your left arm twitches]"; ["Is it dirty"]; "At Joan's"; "Lines for the Fortune Cookies"; "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island"; and "Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul."