ModPo 2013 Assignment #3:Choosing the Materials for Language: On O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter"

SARDINES by Mike Goldberg

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.

Instructions:

In a short essay of approximately 500 words, offer a close reading of the poem that (at least partly) addresses this question: What is the poem ultimately saying about why O'Hara is a poet and not a painter?

Your essay should offer a close reading of the poem that considers how key lines, phrases, and/or terms contribute to the central argument of the poem.

Essay:


What is delightfully surprising about the poem of O'Hara is that he baits the reader with "Why I Am a Poet" in the title but doesn't really provide a straightforward explanation. Well, what would be the point, right? He is a New York school poet and he deals with non-narrative or anti-narrative. From that alone, I shouldn't be expecting a cause like "I don't know how to paint" and an effect "Which is why I am a poet."

 In the first stanza, the speaker makes a statement: he is not a painter, he is a poet. We aren't yet in the "I-do-this-I-do-that" mode but rather, the speaker is setting up a premise. He then asks "Why?" He doesn't answer. He just states that he would rather be a painter, but he is not. He then says, "Well" which is followed by a line break.

In the second stanza, the "I-do-this-I-do-that" mode begins. He gives an example ("for instance"), presumably to explain why he is a poet, by way of stating that Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. His tone is very conversational, very casual. He drops in and Goldberg invites him to drink. He says "I drink; we drink," and interesting choice of words because he very well could have just said "we drink." This reminds me of "The Day Lady Died" when the speaker says, "Everyone and I stopped breathing." He creates a distinction with pronouns. He is saying that "I" and "we" are distinct. That's a clue, I think. The speaker then goes on to comment, "You have SARDINES in it." I like the sneaky way the "it" has come in. "It" most likely refers to the painting (what else would there be to comment on?). Then the speaker mentions that the painting is going on. He drops in again and "the painting is finished." "Where's the SARDINES?" the speaker presumably asks. The speaker then says that all that's left is just letters." It begs the question: letters of what? Letters that spell the word sardines? It makes us go back to the speaker's original observation about the SARDINES. Was it an image of SARDINES? Or was it letters that spelled SARDINES? I had to take a look at the painting itself and I discovered that it had the words "SARDINES" and "EXIT" on it but barely visible, faint etchings against the predominantly red abstract painting. "It was too much," Mike says. WHAT was too much? Was it the actual image of the sardines that was too much? Here, the poem points out gaps and assumptions that we make in any language. "It" substitutes for both painting and poem and subject, a polyptoton that means a different thing in different contexts. "It" will resurface once again in the stanza about poetry. I don't really know what was too much. It's vague. "It," meaning the title of the painting? "It," meaning the image of sardines? or "It," meaning the original rendering of the word "SARDINES" on the canvas? We don't know.

The third stanza then goes back to the speaker. "But me?" He asks, rhetorically. He says that he is thinking of a color: orange. He writes a line about orange. The reader assumes that he means a "line" of poetry. But then this gets confused in the next lines because he says that he wrote a whole page of words, not lines. Here, there is a parallelism with painting. Because a painter can paint a whole canvas (page) with paint...the way a poet can write a whole page with words. It is at this point that the speaker draws our attention to the medium of both painter and poet. The speaker then says that there should be so much more: not of orange but of "words." And these words are "about" how terrible orange is and life. WHAT's terrible? The color orange? Whatever is signified by orange? And what does this all now have to do with life? Days go by. And the speaker says that "it" (there's the word again) is even in prose, I am a real poet. He is referring to prose poems, presumably. But what does it have to do with being a "real poet?" Is he making a statement about the kind of poem that he prefers? Modernist prose poems? Versus traditional verses? My poem is finished, the speaker says, drawing once again, a parallel with Goldberg's "finished" painting. And the speaker has not mentioned "orange" yet. Does he mean, the "word" or what was signified by the word "orange?" The speaker says "It's twelve poems" (perhaps a jibe, a one-up-manship against Goldberg who only produced one painting). He calls them ORANGES. The speaker then says, "And one day" (very much like a "once upon a time" of a straightforward narrative) he sees Mike's painting, called SARDINES. In the end, he names the poems and the painting. But by naming them and going through the process of both the painting and the poem, he is also saying that both the poems and the paintings aren't about SARDINES and ORANGES. 

More than citing differences, O'Hara actually creates a lot of parallelisms between painting and poetry in his poem. Both are pieces of art and both have titles. Both also have a basic medium: one is paint and the other is words. The poem calls attention to the fact that both painting and poem are languages. They have basic building blocks: paint and word. They deal with arrangements: form/ structure in images and lines of words. In the case of Goldberg and O'Hara, they are both in a movement that deal with dissociating their art with a set meaning in the traditional sense. In a traditional painting or poem, when the title is "Madonna and Child," the content will be about Madonna and Child. In both Goldberg's and O'Hara's pieces of art, they do away with the association between "subject" and "content." So, what is the poem ultimately saying about why O'Hara is a poet and not a painter? He ends up saying that poetry and painting are intertextual (and to some extent interchangeable) languages. They are both in the "business" of the signifier and the signified. And that both he and Goldberg are also in the business of stretching the signifier and the signified. The only difference is the medium (if this is even considered a difference, ultimately). He is saying that there is a very thin line that separates pieces of work in art because all art deals with language: how to communicate all this to you. Meanings are not pre-assigned. Only the materials vary. And O'Hara chose words.

ModPo 2013 Assignment #2:Robbed: On Williams' "Young Woman at a Window"

Instructions:

Your job in this short essay is to look closely at the poems and to argue that interpretative position - that version 2 is "more imagist." You should do so by showing how version 2 follows the manifesto but you can also do so by showing how version 1 does not.

Essay:

The second version of Williams' poem, "Young Woman at a Window," is more faithful to the Imagist Manifesto and I'll be discussing each point of the manifesto and how the second poem fulfills each point.

The first point talks about "using the language of common speech but to employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word." Both poems are actually sparse already and both employ the language of common speech. However, the first poem uses words that are not "exact" because they are interpretive rather than descriptive. "This little child/ who robs her/ knows nothing/ of his theft" are conclusions that can only be made due to the interpretation of the speaker in the poem. Thus, these are not "exact words" but rather nearly-exact. Also, I noticed that "this little child" was further reduced to "child" removing anything superfluous. "Child" already suffices without needing to add "this" and "little."

The second point talks about the individuality of the poet being better expressed in free verse rather than conventional forms. While the first poem is in free verse, there is a playful juxtaposition of robs and rubs, two like-sounding words that begin with the same consonant and ends with the same consonant but have different meanings. One could call it a pun, two similar-sounding words used for intended humorous or rhetorical effect, thus employing a "conventional form."

The third point talks about "absolute freedom in choice of subject." Here, I cannot see how the second is more imagist than the first simply because they both have the same subject.

The fourth point talks about "presenting an image." There shouldn't be any "vague generalities" and the manifesto rejects the "cosmic poet" or one who deals with something inconceivably vast. One manifestation of this might be the omnipresent speaker. The speaker in the first poem identifies how the mother has been "robbed" by her child. This is strictly outside of the image and is an internalization, a judgment made by the speaker in the poem. Thus, it is less imagist than the second version of the poem where the speaker's judgment is not heard.

The fifth point talks about "hard and clear" poetry, one that isn't "blurred or indefinite." For me, this means: present the subject as it is not as how the speaker sees the subject. I see it as an attempt very similar to journalistic objectivity: don't color the facts. But as I brought up in the first and fourth point, there is a "blurred" and "indefinite" statement regarding a "robbing." One cannot be sure if the child has indeed robbed the young woman. It is subjective and, therefore, not hard and clear.

Lastly, the sixth point talks about "concentration" as the "very essence of poetry." By sheer word count alone, the second poem far outstrips the first, thus adhering more closely to the Imagist Manifesto.

Personally, I prefer the first version of the poem to the second, though. The imagist manifesto has the impossible task of presenting an uneditorialized picture of the subject, a hard, clear image. However, language itself has many gaps. An "exact" word, while ideal in the imagist manifesto, still leads to some interpretation. Exactness implies only one interpretation. While both poems draw the reader in, it is the first poem that interests me...in Cid Corman's words in his poem "It isnt for want," it "detains" me. While I like the particularity of the imagist poem, I want a point for conversation. The word "robs" in the first poem starts that conversation for me. I could ask it of the imagist movement as well: Does the imagist movement rob poetry of the richness of polyvalence?

ModPo 2013 Assignment #1: Enlightenment, Better Than Drunkenness, Better Than Sex: On Dickinson's "I taste a liquor never brewed"

Image from gradesaver.com.

I taste a liquor never brewed --
From Tankards scooped in Pearl --
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air -- am I --
And Debauchee of Dew --
Reeling -- thro endless summer days --
From inns of Molten Blue --

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door --
When Butterflies -- renounce their "drams"
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats --
And Saints -- to windows run --
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the -- Sun --

Instructions: 
In your short essay, do a close reading of this poem of 500 words. Use as a model the close readings done in the several filmed discussions of other poems by Dickinson.

Essay:
The first thing I notice about the poem is that it is a ballad: four quatrains make up the poem, it has a ballad meter or the first line is an iambic tetrameter followed by an iambic trimeter and so on, there is also a rhyme scheme of ABCB (with the exception of the first line where Pearl is "forced" to rhyme with Alcohol").

The first stanza deals with the "un-brewed" liquor which is assumed to be precious given that the speaker drinks from it from "Tankards scooped in Pearl." It is also of a certain quality because the speaker compares it to "Alcohol" from the vats upon the Rhine (presumably cities from France, Switzerland and Germany that produce wine and beer or it might be referring to the precious waters of the Rhine itself). From liquid, the metaphor shifts to air ("inebriate of Air --am I--") in the second stanza and then proceeds to dew, presenting a picture of a drunken speaker reeling from "inns of Molten Blue" or the sky.

The third stanza comically identifies bees and butterflies as fellow drinkers of the liquor mentioned in stanza 1, further stating that the speaker can out-drink them when they have given up. The last stanza turns to heaven, making references to angels (seraphs) and saints running to watch the speaker, the "little Tippler," leaning against the sun, completing the picture of the unapologetic drunk rejoicing in her "liquor," supported by no less than the sun, a metaphor for God.

At first, I saw a Dickinson acting in a Whitmanian way: thoroughly enjoying herself, thoroughly enjoying what is there, drinking up everything indiscriminately. It is a delightful look at the speaker "going wild." One way to read it is to refer to the liquor as nature itself. One can "drink" it in without ill effects and one can even say that it provides a real ecstasy to whoever drinks it in. However, viewed from 2013 eyes, nature is not unlimited. It only seems that way but even nature has limits.

Another way to read it is to relate the liquor to art and creativity -- poetry, the possibility that she referred to "I dwell in Possibility." Dickinson draws images from nature and contrasts them the unwholesome activity of getting drunk to something ultimately more sublime. In a boast, the speaker says even angels and saints would want to watch her oblivion. And, as a drunkard would lean upon a wall outside a tavern, the speaker has no less than the sun, than God Himself, to lean upon.

Here, Dickinson is preoccupied with heaven as contrasted to Whitman who celebrates the earth, earthliness, the flesh, what is concrete. In the end, the poem is an invitation to taste the liquor of her particular brand of enlightenment. Her poem takes the form of the ballad to capture a celebratory mood. But even in a light and comic mood, with images of drunken butterflies and bees (come to think of it...these are metaphors for sex!), even with the frame of what could be earthly and lewd, Dickinson is inviting the reader to the opposite of this: to delight in enlightenment. In short, try this, it's better than getting drunk, it's even better than sex!