Frank O’Hara – “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.

After researching Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter,” I discovered that there is a lot going on in the poem, but it is basically about the many similarities between the painter and the poet in the world of the arts. So instead of writing further about this poem I will show the general essence of the poem through one of my artworks which lends itself to saying words but refuses to because the omission tells just as much as having the writing included.

AD MCM

Charles Simic – “Country Fair”

If you didn’t see the six-legged dog,
It doesn’t matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

After the first reading of a few of Charles Simic’s poems, I am left wondering what happens and what Simic is trying to prove with the difficulty of penetrating his poems at first inspection. I further explored “Country Fair,” one of his poems with which I am left confused. The concept of the poem seems straightforward at first: a fair-goer (the narrator) observes a six-legged dog and is not overly impressed by the fact that the dog has six legs but by the way in which the dog looks at him. I am sure that I would be surprised to see a dog with six legs, but the narrator says that “One got used to them [the extra legs] quickly” (5). The way that the narrator feels like he can easily think about other personal issues such as the way in which the weather affects him and how the two kissing people are captivated with themselves rather than the dog leads me to think that Simic may be saying that we are too involved in our own affairs to worry about the major concerns facing society. The purpose of this dog is for entertainment. In order to attain this goal some sort of genetic manipulation or birth defect must be exploited. The dog’s quality of living (in terms of just being a dog to show off, having useless legs, and having to fetch a stick out of necessity as opposed to for pleasure) is lower than that of the average four-legged dog. When the people who are supposed to enjoy the defect of the dog do not enjoy the defect, then the process of creating the defect is pointless and just serves to harm the dog. The dog, who has surely seen other dogs with fewer legs, must wonder why he is different and why the other dogs get to roam free while he must stay cooped up at be looked at all day. Hence the last line, “And that was the whole show” (16), shows the reader that the narrator may have realized the poor situation of the dog through his exchanged look with the dog. The narrator who realizes that people, like those who are kissing and even him, do not appreciate the entertainment as much as they should in order to justify the harming of the dog.

William Wordsworth – “On The Banks Of A Rocky Stream”

Behold an emblem of our human mind
Crowded with thoughts that need a settled home,
Yet, like to eddying balls of foam
Within this whirlpool, they each other chase
Round and round, and neither find
An outlet nor a resting-place!
Stranger, if such disquietude be thine,
Fall on thy knees and sue for help divine.

Using CPR to analyze this poem gives us a few plausible answers to questions not immediately present in the text. Literally the poem describes a stream, which is likened to both the human mind and a whirlpool. It refers to an uneasy “Stranger” who must ask for help in sorting out his or her thoughts. One odd aspect of this poem is that it is talking to the reader and instructing him or her to “behold” and “fall on thy knees” and “sue.” Following this pattern makes the reader wonder if he or she is the stranger, which ends up being the case. Another question brought about by reading this poem is why the stream and human mind are alike. The poem tells us that the mind has many thoughts which are all flowing around and trying to find a “resting-place” to stay or an “outlet” to get out. The whirlpool is like all the thoughts swirling around in our mind in that it does not allow circulating water to escape. We also wonder what the “help divine” to which Wordsworth refers is. Based on the knowledge that Wordsworth was a Romantic poet who used nature as inspiration, we can possibly say that this “help divine” is nature and that the way to find peace in a hectic mind is through spending time in nature.

Tu Fu – “Day’s End”

Oxen and sheep were brought back down
Long ago, and bramble gates closed. Over
Mountains and rivers, far from my old garden,
A windswept moon rises into clear night.

Springs trickle down dark cliffs, and autumn
Dew fills ridgeline grasses. My hair seems
Whiter in lamplight. The flame flickers
Good fortune over and over — and for what?

“Day’s End” by Tu Fu seems very self-explanatory and literal with the exceptions of the concluding line of each stanza. The first stanza describes how the narrator had brought the “oxen and sheep” down from the pastures. He now sees the moon come up over the “mountains and rivers” in the distance. The second stanza clarifies that aside from the end of the day it is also the end of the summer season. The season is fall, and according to the metaphor of life and the seasons, the man, as shown by his white hair which seems whiter in the artificial light used to replace the sunlight (light of life), is nearing the final stretch of life. The line at the end of the first stanza is problematic in that there is no wind in the vacuum of space. Tu Fu may just be saying that the moon seems to be being pushed by the wind. “Good fortune over and over” could possibly mean that the artificial light gives life to the old man even in his and the world’s declining state (lack of sun and fall season). The old man realizes that he is growing older and may be wondering why the light is giving him false fortune and hope when he should be in a state of decline.

Charles Bukowski – “Metamorphosis”

a girlfriend came in
built me a bed
scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor
scrubbed the walls
vacuumed
cleaned the toilet
the bathtub
scrubbed the bathroom floor
and cut my toenails and
my hair.
then
all on the same day
the plumber came and fixed the kitchen faucet
and the toilet
and the gas man fixed the heater
and the phone man fixed the phone.
noe I sit in all this perfection.
it is quiet.
I have broken off with all 3 of my girlfriends.
I felt better when everything was in
disorder.
it will take me some months to get back to normal:
I can’t even find a roach to commune with.
I have lost my rythm.
I can’t sleep.
I can’t eat.
I have been robbed of
my filth.

The first things that caught my attention after reading “Metamorphosis” were the words “noe” and “rythm.” I determined that “noe” was not a typo of “now” because every reproduction of the poem has this spelling. The name Noe means peaceful, so I chose to interpret this part as “peaceful I sit in all this perfection.” This interpretation is ironic in that it brings up an opposition to the narrator saying that he does not like the cleanliness and perfection. Peaceful is also a binary opposition to chaos so the opposition is what he is actually feeling. This opposition along with the fact that the narrator was “robbed of my filth” instead of given cleanliness represents his adoration of disorder. This part reminds me of a quote by M.C. Escher that “We adore chaos because we love to produce order.” Following what this quotation says, the narrator should actually like the process of making order but not necessarily the result, which is how it turns out. He would rather live in filth because it is familiar and welcoming.

My next concern with this poem is the word “rythm.” Unless it was the custom at the time Bukowski wrote this poem to spell “rythm” without the first “h,” I wonder why he omitted the first “h.” My only possible explanation is that he wants the reader to correct him. The only word which is capitalized throughout the whole poem is “I.” Whenever I see a word which should be capitalized and is not, I want to capitalize it. This happens at the beginning of every sentence which does not start with “I” in this poem. I think Bukowski purposely leaves words without capital letters and misspells words to force the reader to create order. Once we make order, we may be artificially happy but deep down we realize that it was left filthy and disorganized for a reason.

Similarly to the way Bukowski makes the narrator go through a change from filthy to clean and wanting to go back to filthy, M.C. Escher constructs similar transformations and cycles in his artwork.

M.C. Escher's Reptiles

Marianne Moore – “The Steeple-Jack”

Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.

One by one in two’s and three’s, the seagulls keep
flying back and forth over the town clock,
or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings –
rising steadily with a slight
quiver of the body — or flock
mewing where

a sea the purple of the peacock’s neck is
paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed
the pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea
gray. You can see a twenty-five-
pound lobster; and fish nets arranged
to dry. The

whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt
marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the
star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so
much confusion. Disguised by what
might seem the opposite, the sea-
side flowers and

trees are favored by the fog so that you have
the tropics first hand: the trumpet-vine,
fox-glove, giant snap-dragon, a salpiglossis that has
spots and stripes; morning-glories, gourds,
or moon-vines trained on fishing-twine
at the back door;

cat-tails, flags, blueberries and spiderwort,
striped grass, lichens, sunflowers, asters, daisies –
yellow and crab-claw ragged sailors with green bracts — toad-plant,
petunias, ferns; pink lilies, blue
ones, tigers; poppies; black sweet-peas.
The climate

is not right for the banyan, frangipani, or
jack-fruit trees; or for exotic serpent
life. Ring lizard and snake-skin for the foot, if you see fit;
but here they’ve cats, not cobras, to
keep down the rats. The diffident
little newt

with white pin-dots on black horizontal spaced-
out bands lives here; yet there is nothing that
ambition can buy or take away. The college student
named Ambrose sits on the hillside
with his not-native books and hat
and sees boats

at sea progress white and rigid as if in
a groove. Liking an elegance of which
the sourch is not bravado, he knows by heart the antique
sugar-bowl shaped summer-house of
interlacing slats, and the pitch
of the church

spire, not true, from which a man in scarlet lets
down a rope as a spider spins a thread;
he might be part of a novel, but on the sidewalk a
sign says C. J. Poole, Steeple Jack,
in black and white; and one in red
and white says

Danger. The church portico has four fluted
columns, each a single piece of stone, made
modester by white-wash. Theis would be a fit haven for
waifs, children, animals, prisoners,
and presidents who have repaid
sin-driven

senators by not thinking about them. The
place has a school-house, a post-office in a
store, fish-houses, hen-houses, a three-masted schooner on
the stocks. The hero, the student,
the steeple-jack, each in his way,
is at home.

It could not be dangerous to be living
in a town like this, of simple people,
who have a steeple-jack placing danger signs by the church
while he is gilding the solid-
pointed star, which on a steeple
stands for hope.

Marianne Moore starts her poem by discussing Albrecht Dürer, a famous German artist known for his landscape paintings and woodcuts. Dürer incorporated the principles of mathematics, perspective, and ideal proportions in his artwork. Moore pays tribute to these characteristics throughout her poem by mentioning “eight stranded whales,” “formal” waves which are “etched,” “one by one in two’s and three’s,” “twenty-five-pound lobster,” the way the pitch of the church spire is not “true,” and “four” columns of the portico. The poem is also organized so that the number of syllables in each line (11 for 1st line, 10 for 2nd, 14 for 3rd, 8 for 4th, 8 for 5th, and 3 for 6th) remains the same for each stanza. Moore contrasts these concrete, mathematical ideas with the more abstract idea of hope. She leads the reader to believe that the steeple-jack is sacrificing himself with the dangerous job of setting the star right in order to give the rest of us hope.

Moore also presents us with the perspectives of four different worlds: the ocean side New England town, the tropical atmosphere, the artist (Dürer), and the more knowledgeable college student. The start and end of the poem are describing the town in nautical terms and the middle of the poem shifts to a tropical environment. Ambrose, the college student, has a name which means immortal, and he seems to be god-like in that he has a better view of the whole town from the “hillside” and is able to observe the workings of the steeple-jack. The student seems to be an outsider displaced from the town but is still very much a part of it. Dürer, similarly to the way in which the student observes from a distance, has the ability and privilege to see the confusion of hope (the star messed up by the storm) and is able to recognize the troubles of life and name them by depicting them in his artwork. Therefore the steeple-jack and Dürer are similar in the way they are both able to control hope in some way: the steeple-jack displays it while the artist explains it for us. Moore says that “The hero, the student, the steeple-jack, each in his way, is at home.” Even though the hero (the person who can order confusion so we do not have to), student, and steeple-jack all have different functions in life, they can all find what they are looking for in the same ocean side town.

View Of The Arco Valley In The Tyrol - Albrecht Dürer

Stephen Crane – “A Man Adrift on a Slim Spar”

A man adrift on a slim spar
A horizon smaller than the rim of a bottle
Tented waves rearing lashy dark points
The near whine of froth in circles.
God is cold.

The incessant raise and swing of the sea
And growl after growl of crest
The sinkings, green, seething, endless
The upheaval half-completed.
God is cold.

The seas are in the hollow of The Hand;
Oceans may be turned to a spray
Raining down through the stars
Because of a gesture of pity toward a babe.
Oceans may become grey ashes,
Die with a long moan and a roar
Amid the tumult of the fishes
And the cries of the ships,
Because The Hand beckons the mice.

A horizon smaller than a doomed assassin’s cap,
Inky, surging tumults
A reeling, drunken sky and no sky
A pale had sliding from a polished spar.
God is cold.

The puff of a coat imprisoning air.
A face kissing the water-death
A weary slow sway of a lost hand
And the sea, the moving sea, the sea.
God is cold.

Crane compares the sea to God and more specifically to His ability to bring about instantaneous death either through controlling the seas as the poem describes or any other circumstance which the tumultuous sea of life represents. A man adrift (without the power to control his movement) clings to his life on a “small spar” or whatever keeps him afloat above the dangers in life. The first three stanzas are from the perspective of an observer who can see the man, but is someone other than God because the observer is not omniscient and refers to God as being cold. The last two stanzas change to the perspective of the man who has the potential to die at any moment because the sea, as well as God, is unforgiving.

Wallace Stevens – “The Snow Man”

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

I think this poem is trying to communicate that in order for us (humans) to see the true beauty of nature during winter, we must be a part of it. The snow man, which is a part of the winter wonderland once being introduced to it, is the only “man” actually able to see the characteristics of winter: “the frost,” “the pine-trees crusted with snow,” and “the junipers shagged with ice.” Every other human takes on the role of the listener and cannot observe these occurrences because he is too concerned with the facts that winter hinders his ability to continue his daily work and that he thinks winter contains nothing.

Richard Wilbur – “Boy at the Window”

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a God-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

Richard Wilbur’s “Boy at the Window” caught my eye because of the winter theme. I usually take a deep sigh of disgust at the thought of reading poetry, but this poem does not read or feel like a poem. I became involved in the world created by the poet and was not concerned so much with the rhyme scheme or poetic aspects as with the narrative-like story. I like how Wilbur manages to tell an interesting story and yet still convey deeper meaning. The snowman seems to be more human than the boy in that he is able to name death whereas the boy does not want to accept that the snowman will die someday. The snowman is also able to sympathize and almost empathize with the boy because he is able to put himself so well into the place of the boy that he even shares a tear with the boy.

William Shakespeare – “Sonnet 2″

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a totter’d weed of small worth held:
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

Shakespeare’s sonnet is about male procreation and succession. Shakespeare is trying to convey that as a young man grows old he loses the beauty of his youth because of the “deep trenches” in his field of beauty. He is past the prime of his “lusty” days, and because he is not beautiful anymore, it is important that he has a child to carry on his former beauty. Having this child will allow his own likeness to live on in a new body as he dies, and the transference of beauty from the father to the son hints at the idea of succession which was in place in the English kingdom at the time of the sonnet’s writing. I think Shakespeare is trying to say that the only meaningful creation to come of a man’s reproductive age is his child, and everything else is useless.