Fall                                                                      Samhain Moon

The wood got split.  The Latin trounced me.  Two essays on pragmatism, one by Richard Rorty and one by Cornel West, put philosophy into the day and the next to last essay in ModPo just went into cyber space.  It’s below, if you’re interested*.  The assignment was a few posts back.

Saw two good movies tonight, too.  Once Were Warriors is a difficult movie to watch since it shows domestic violence in as raw a way as I’ve seen.  About Maori’s living in contemporary New Zealand Warriors has a long tragic arc which only lifts near the end and then to recognize the role of tradition in a tribal people.  Most of it is grim and much of the grimness comes from self-loathing generated by rootlessness, abandonment of the past for a present with no cultural handles.  It’s definitely worth seeing.  The funeral of Grace had me in tears.

Then a longer, unusual Hollywood movie, the Place Beyond the Pines.  This Ryan Gosling/Bradley Cooper movies has a surprise narrative arc as a major character dies halfway through the movie.  This is a movie about consequences, too, like Warriors, but here the past is not so cultural, it’s personal and it skips a generation before it comes to ahead.  I liked the longer plot line, an unusual choice in a mainstream Hollywood movie.  An actual adult movie.  Also worth seeing.

*All That’s Left Is Letters

The title “Why I Am Not A Painter” answers the existential why of the poem’s second line before the poem itself ever starts. O’Hara is not a painter because he writes poetry. For example, here’s one titled “Why I Am Not A Painter.” The poem is his work as the painting hung in the gallery is Goldberg’s. Thus, O’Hara is a poet and Goldberg a painter.

He thinks he would rather be a painter, but he says, “I am not. Well,” This is, I guess, a soft end-stop, a sort of pause here and think construction which suggests a wry answer to the question. He is not well, at least not well enough to be a painter.

The two long stanzas provide an alternative narrative to the usual description of the creative process and in so doing give an insider’s look into the difference between painters and poets.

“Mike Goldberg is starting a painting”, this line in the continuous present, puts us with Goldberg and O’Hara until in the third to last line the painting is finished. What has happened? O’Hara dropped in, had a drink, noticed the painting had the word SARDINES in it. He leaves, comes back, leaves, comes back. Then he returns and it’s finished.

O’Hara asks, “Where’s SARDINES?” In what I read as a plaintive or mock plaintive note, he notes, “All that’s left is just letters,” “It was too much,” the painter says.

In the alternative narrative of a painter painting, we get no description of the painting itself save for the word SARDINE and then its absence in the final work. Even one word was too much.

So, having shown us a painter at work, O’Hara says, “But me?” The poet. What does he do? Well, ironically, he thinks of a color: orange. He writes a line, then a whole page of words, not lines. Like SARDINE this is at the beginning of the creative process. As with Goldberg, O’Hara lets days go by, then he says, “It is even in prose, I am a real poet.” I don’t understand this line except perhaps as irony meaning something like, I’m a real poet so even prose is poetry.

The twist comes at the end and like a magician there is a big reveal. When he names his twelve poems, he calls them ORANGES in spite of having not mentioned orange in any of them.  When he sees Goldberg’s painting in a gallery, it is named SARDINES.

Painter and poet are alike in what they leave out, but different in that with Goldberg “all that’s left is just letters.” O’Hara, on the other hand, has words. That’s the key difference between the two, when their work is done, O’Hara has words and the painter only letters.