The document is a poem by Frank O'Hara describing a visit to his friend Mike Goldberg's studio while Mike is painting. O'Hara watches as the painting progresses over multiple visits. When the painting is finished, O'Hara notices it is titled "Sardines", but the sardines that Mike had included early on are no longer in the finished work. Similarly, in O'Hara's own poetry, he begins writing about the color orange but ends up with a 12 poem work titled "Oranges" without ever mentioning orange itself.
The document is a poem by Frank O'Hara describing a visit to his friend Mike Goldberg's studio while Mike is painting. O'Hara watches as the painting progresses over multiple visits. When the painting is finished, O'Hara notices it is titled "Sardines", but the sardines that Mike had included early on are no longer in the finished work. Similarly, in O'Hara's own poetry, he begins writing about the color orange but ends up with a 12 poem work titled "Oranges" without ever mentioning orange itself.
The document is a poem by Frank O'Hara describing a visit to his friend Mike Goldberg's studio while Mike is painting. O'Hara watches as the painting progresses over multiple visits. When the painting is finished, O'Hara notices it is titled "Sardines", but the sardines that Mike had included early on are no longer in the finished work. Similarly, in O'Hara's own poetry, he begins writing about the color orange but ends up with a 12 poem work titled "Oranges" without ever mentioning orange itself.
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.
Frank OHara (19261966)
On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing The Delaware At The Museum Of Modern Art Now that our hero has come back to us in his white pants and we know his nose trembling like a flag under fire, we see the calm cold river is supporting our forces, the beautiful history. To be more revolutionary than a nun is our desire, to be secular and intimate as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile and pull the trigger. Anxieties and animosities, flaming and feeding on theoretical considerations and the jealous spiritualities of the abstract the robot? they're smoke, billows above the physical event. They have burned up. See how free we are! as a nation of persons. Dear father of our country, so alive you must have lied incessantly to be immediate, here are your bones crossed on my breast like a rusty flintlock, a pirate's flag, bravely specific and ever so light in the misty glare of a crossing by water in winter to a shore other than that the bridge reaches for. Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.