Kasey Mohammad is an excitable boy: he says my comment on O'Hara's "Why I Am Not A Painter" is "a heinous affront against poetry, all art, and humanity in general." Makes me feel like I shouldn't tell him his original answer to that comment was a much better exposition than the well duh interpretation that Michael Magee sent to him. Kasey almost made the poem sound interesting, quoting O'Hara to say that technical matters in poetry are "just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you."
Trouble is the pants don't fit. Here's the poem:
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 an 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.
Kasey says, "The formal elements in the poem—which basically amount to its division into lines of verse and three stanzas—are conspicuously unmotivated, as though they were there for no reason other than to lend perfunctory evidence for the poet's claim that he is a poet." But whereas for Kasey there's an "as though" that turns Kasey on and makes "the whole apparatus just sexy enough to win our assent," for me it seems literally true that the line and verse breaks mean nothing beyond an empty pose, just as there's nothing behind the faux epiphany "how terrible orange is / and life."
Kasey also calls this a "toy poem." He's right, but there should be a sticker warning "Some Assembly Required."
9:33:27 PM 
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