So Far Away

“Why I Am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara exhibits O’Hara’s reluctance to generate a feeling of intimacy within his poetry. This demonstrated within the title of the poem itself, which reads as a stand-offish and deffensive reaction to the question “Why are you not a painter?” A long-winded and stream-off-conciousness answer to the this question would imply a certain desire to establish closeness to the question-asker, as the stream-of-concious ness writing style mirrors one’s thought process and thus functions as a gateway into one’s thoughts and emotions. O’Hara purposely avoids establishing such closeness and prohibits the reader from “entering into his mind” by providing the answer to the question in a concise, simple, and curt way: “I am not a painter, I am a poet.” O’Hara’s answer purposely doesn’t fully answer the question–he feels no need to explain himself and thus is relaying to the reader that he possesses a certain degree of self-awareness. In the middle stanza of the poem, O’Hara diverts the attention from himself to a painter-friend in a effort to put himself out of the equation and distance himself even further from the reader. The line of the poem acts as O’Hara’s final “push” away from the reader. O’Hara purposely ends the poem mid-sentance, as a way to shock and confuse the reader. It is likely that upon reading this final sentence many readers will think their particular copy of the poem was printed incorrectly, or that the website from which they are reading the poem has not fully loaded. Such a startling ending further diverts attention from O’Hara–the reader is no longer focussed on O’Hara or even on the poem itself, but rather on the medium through which they are encountering the poem.