Hvers vegna ég er ekki málari

 Það sagði mér skáldkona í gær að hún hafi farið á ljóðakvöld og þar var stappað út úr dyrum. Fólk er augljóslega farið að leita í einhver dýrmætari gildi en fyrir mánuði síðan.

Þess vegna og í tilefni aldarminningar Steins Steinarr þar sem Lesbók er undirlögð ljóðalist hans ætla ég að birta eitt af mínum uppáhalds ljóðum sem ég m.a. hef notað mikið í kennslu.

Ljóðið er eftir bandaríska Beatnikk skáldið Frank O´Hara "Why I am not a painter" sem er eftir  frá árinu 1961. 

Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

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.

"Sardines" eftir Mike Goldberg frá árinu 1955.