Why I'm Not a Painter Poet?

Why I Am Not a Painter is one of my favourite Frank O'Hara poems. He wrote it after a series of visits to his friend Michael Goldberg, the American abstract expressionist painter.

Why I am a poet not a painter?

In “Why I Am Not a Painter,” O'Hara asserts his identity as a poet with bravado, noting that “ORANGES,” the poem he is working on, “is even in / prose, I am a real poet.” In other words, O'Hara is so confident in his skills as a poet that he does not even need to write his poems in conventional verse.

What am I not a painter?

Frank O'Hara's poem “Why I Am Not a Painter,” perhaps the most celebrated meditation on the relationship of painting to language, turns on what's shared in painting and writing and what isn't. In the poem, the symmetry is made neat: a painting has the word “sardines” in it, while a poem is about the color orange.