Sardines & Oranges

As I was poking around online and through my poetry anthologies, Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) kept popping up, so he'll be the focus for this post. I confess that I have read very little of his work so far, so if anyone has any other input, that'd be wonderful.

A Frank O'Hara Festival will be held at the end of November, co-sponsored by MOMA and the Poetry Project. More details can also be found on the Poets House website.

And because I'm violating enough copyright laws already, here's a link to Ploughshares (literary journal of Emerson College), where you can read "Two Poems for Frank O'Hara" by Campbell McGrath.



Why I Am Not a Painter

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.

poem from Contemporary American Poetry, 7th Edition, ed. A Poulin, Jr. & Michael Waters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001)

painting is Michael Goldberg's 1955 "Sardines" at the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution