misterbadger:

Alice Neel, Frank O’Hara, 1960, oil on canvas, 34 x 16 1/8 in.

Why I Am Not a Painter, by Frank O’Hara

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.

Filed under: Frank O’Hara

(via theparisreview)

Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky,” from Meditations in an Emergency

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Hear Don Draper read it.

“Meditations in an Emergency” by Frank O’Hara

You know who knows that poetry works? Advertisers. They understand something about delivering an image.
—Lynda Barry

(Apologies to Maris…)

PS. Michael Leddy has some good posts on the O’Hara / Mad Men connection. (Thx, @mattthomas!)