• Why I Am Not a Painter
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• 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.
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• "Why I am not a Painter"-by Frank O'Hara
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