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This Old Poem #7:
Frank O’Hara’s Why I Am Not A Painter
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 7/16/02

  In an earlier essay I tackled much about poet Frank O’Hara’s talent & influence on a concurrent & posthumous generation of American literata. This piece will be a piece of cake, by comparison. FO has about 10-12 poems a person could legitimately cite as his best known work. The selected poem is among them. It’s not a bad poem as much as it is a good poem with greater potential. Why isn’t it a better poem? Simple, FO was a very lazy poet.
  This poem is an archetypal ‘moment poem’- a poem where the whole crux is to bring the reader to a point of insight, revelation, or the poetic O! This poem breaks from the Classical trope of such poems by performing a sort of Möbian wraparound upon itself- narratively speaking. Usually moment poems plow straight ahead until they stop at the O! Also, this is an archetypal poem to show how enjambment can make or break a poem. This poem is pretty well devoid of clichés, has a good solid music, & a unique situation. The speaker of the poem is also more philosophical than your average poetic protagonist. But FO’s supreme laziness is what prevented this poem from being great. I will show, just by dropping a few redundancies, & tightening up the enjambment, thereby improving the poem’s multiple layers of meaning & music, that this is 1 of those poems you just shake your head at & say- ‘So close!’ Because enjambment is key to improving this poem a side-by-side, line-by-line comparison is needed. Thus, the original on the left, & the improvement on the right:

  1^st off, the title is good, & masks the humor 1 might expect to find in a similarly titled poem written 100 years earlier. But, the 1^st 2 stanzas of the original have no dramatic reason for being broken that way

  Given the title the very repetition of that statement in the 1^st sentence is superfluous. By removing it you make the title that much more active in its role as a de facto 1^st line, as well. Line 1 ends with nothing to pull the reader over in to line 2. In my version line 1 contains a query & an act of rumination on it. In the original Line 2 starts with the query, & ends with a nebulous reply. In my version you get the end of an equivocation carried over from line 1 & a definitive statement in its own right- if taken as a line. Imagine each line of a poem slowly popping up as if from a teletype machine- it can be whole, unto itself, &/or the start/end of another thought. Line 3 ends stanza 1 very weakly. Literally, the line can be seen as the poet declaiming himself not healthy- a result of his not being a painter? & why the break? Is that line or thought so important it needs to be at stanza end? No. I conjoin the 2 stanzas here & the whole thought process retains coherence & musical flow. Recall a line break is a pause & a stanza break a longer pause. Line 4 in my version ends actively, while the original seems to have been broken for no real reason. Line 5 is, originally, rather blasé, yet rewritten it has a rat-a-tat staccato pulse that inclines the reader to feel a crescendo is coming. Ending with the word ‘sit’ also seems to make it a command. The poem seems more self-assured. Line 6 breaks at ‘he’ for absolutely no discernible reason- & the line below does not benefit from the break either so 1 cannot justify the break at 6 retroactively, either. In my version the good break at 5 justifies the rather perfunctory line 6 is. Line 7’s addition (in my take) of the ‘he’ from line 6, in the original, gives a much better music to the line, as well as clarifying it narratively. The last 2 lines are the same. Overall the music of my version is superior, & there is a bit more leeway for the narrative to take & be perceived by the reader. The speaker is much more sly in the rewrite. On to the poems’ respective middles:

  As we hit these 2 stanzas we continue the theme developed earlier in the poem. The speaker is an interestingly bemused speaker. Line 1 drops the word ‘by’ in my version- because it is predictable, unnecessary, & will have a little more impact if it appears 1^st later in the poem. Dropping the ‘and’ in line 2 retains the staccato feel from the start of the poem. ‘On’ should go from line 3 for the same reasons ‘by’ was dropped in line 1, + the painting merely ‘going’ is more interesting & active than ‘going on’, as well more in sync with the staccato rhythms the poem is developing. Moving ‘go’ up from line 4 adds to that feel, & also gives a little more bang to the 1^st entry of the word ‘by’- although 1 could do without the word entirely. It’s a debatable point. A better enjambment for lines 4 & 5 is achieved by dropping ‘is’ from the end of 4 to the start of 5. Lines 6 & 7 are similarly improved, however, by moving ‘letters’ up from start of 7 to end of 6. Laziness is the only apparent reason line 6 originally ends with ‘just’- I mean there’s no aural conflation with the concept of justice- that’s a real stretch. On to poem’s end:

  Let’s bring this baby home. The original’s 13 lines have become 14 in the rewrite, but the enjambment is much better. By now I hope you will be able to recognize bad line breaks without the need for me to hand hold & explain the obvious. Therefore, line 1 loses its original end word of ‘of’. Moving ‘about’ up from line 3 is just a more solid break that allows a seamless moving of ‘whole’ from line 4 to 3. What does this do? It allows line 4 to be a statement unto itself, & a more philosophical 1- in sync with the poem’s earlier (rewritten) duplicitous thrusts. & you lose the pointless end line of ‘a’. The original line 4 is fine- but its presence basically warped the other badly broken lines about it. Because we’ve improved them this line suffers slightly- it loses a bit of its solo integrity, but gains a little bit of drama with the hanging ‘then’. The next 2 lines are similar, except we snip the nasty hanging ‘of’ from line 6 down to line 7. By line 8 we come to another line breaking improvement. The word ‘in’ is not moved, but removed. ‘Even’ then can refer to the smooth transit of time in the poem. The days ‘even’ become prose- see? Replacing the comma after ‘prose’ with a period harkens us back to the staccato pulse earlier established. Dropping line 10’s ‘mentioned' to line 11 allows line 10 the duplicity of meaning the speaker is moving beyond his poesizing- a good trajectory for the poem to allude to. The 3 word version of line 11 is the end of a statement, rather perfunctory- but an improvement over the long sloppy version of 11 in the original. Line 12 is enhanced by the full statement in my version, as well as dropping the needless ‘it’. Ending this line with the speaker’s title both mirrors & augurs the poem’s end- something absent in FO’s version. The breakage I’ve done has left line 13 as the end of FO’s poem- solid but not whiz-bang. The 13^th & 14^th lines in my rewrite give us both the O! moment: ‘I see’, & the thing itself: ‘Mike's painting, called SARDINES’.
  My version is an obvious improvement. A point to recall, though, is that even though prior This Old Poems have had a greater numerical enhancement of the poem rather than the mere 8 points of this rewrite, the higher up on the scale you go the greater difficulty it is to go up a point: i.e.- an 8 point upping from 87 to 95 is a lot more impressive than say taking a poem rated a 55 & upping it to an 80- a more than 3-fold numerical increase, but not as great an improvement because poetry improves exponentially as it crests toward that perfect 100. Regardless, FO could have written my version of his poem if he’d only had a bit more of a bug up his ass, rather than a bugger!

Final Score: (0-100)

Frank O’Hara’s Why I Am Not A Painter: 87
TOP’s Why I Am Not A Painter: 95

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