Sardine, Oranges and Contemporaries

In the 1960s, when poet Frank O’Hara worked at MoMA, he often spent his lunch breaks roaming the streets of midtown Manhattan, finding inspiration in the bustling city and its people and writing poems about his encounters.

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 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 O'Hara

"With its use of the present tense and its offhanded delivery, "Why I Am Not a Painter" seems, at first glance, to tell a "true" story. One thinks, reading it, that O'Hara wrote a prose poem called "Oranges" at the same time that Goldberg painted Sardines, and that the conjunction is an accident. It turns out, however, that "Oranges" was written in 1949, when O'Hara was still a Harvard undergraduate, many years before he met Goldberg..." (http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/ohara/painter.htm) 

Can we say that the work oranges and sardines are not contemporaries because they were temporally separated from one another? Giorgio Agamben explains that "Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it." In a way, his distortion makes Goldberg and O'Hara's working experience more contemporaneous.

Now in response to O'Hara, here I write Why I am not a poet: 

I meet O'Hara and sit down for a coke. He is writing his poems in his lunch break, having a bite off his sandwiches. It has words in it that reads, "it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience/ which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it." This is talking about painters. While he is taking in the marvelous experience and putting them into words, I look at her neck, her hair, and my paint brush dances. I am here now and the paint is still wet and it is breathing and moving. So here I am painting, but I would rather be a poet. And I call my painting WHAT IT IS. Frank's poem is called  HAVING A COKE WITH YOU. 

I can still have coke with Frank O'Hara in 1960's, just as he wrote Oranges when Goldberg painted Sardines. Moments like this happen everyday. 

Sorry about profuse use of quotation.