On we go through Elisa New’s questions about poetry from the Harvard MOOC on Emily Dickinson. This week’s question is, in full: “Is the making of a poem, that essential creative act, different from making a painting?” She goes on to wonder, “Is it different from playing an instrument? Does one, while making a poem, hold a little linguistic instrument while one makes a painting hold a little brush? Does one hold that brush in mental fingers? Ply language on some sort of cerebral tongue?”
This is a much more specific question than how poetry is similar and different to all the other arts. But as I said in the last Elisa New post, there seems to be more of a brain-to-body coordination necessary in fine arts like painting and sculpting or than in playing a musical instrument. Those all take physical and mental practice. Children learn to write pretty fast and it doesn’t take much time to learn to type on a keyboard.
Impulsively, conceptually, though, there may be similarities.
So da Vinci had opinions (as seen in the image above). Frank O’Hara also thought about this quite a bit, about the intersection of painting and poetry. Probably as part of his job description. He worked himself up through the ranks to curator at MOMA in New York City and was friends of many of New York’s abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s. Two of his painterly poems are “Why I Am Not a Painter” and “The Michael Goldberg Variations.” Funny I came across this later poem today because yesterday I finished The Loser, a novel by Thomas Bernhard which features the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and his performances of “The Goldberg Variations.”
I also wrote a poem about the conversation between painting and poetry while I was a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College (so this would be the mid-1990s at the house at the top of Brandt Terrace in Yonkers, New York), a poem that ended up in my first book of poems about space exploration to Mars, Why Photographers Commit Suicide (2012). I remember sitting on the floor writing this. The movie title, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, was on my mind and Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” was on the radio, which is where the bristle bone line appears. In fact, I think a workshop edit suggestion at the time was to change the verb unbreak to healing in order to further distance the poem from the song, which was getting a lot of radio play at the time.
On a Clear Day You Can See Jupiter
Mary McCray
Some nights when the universe dips in and out of my street
like a dancer, I can see Jupiter through my window.
And I wonder where you are and how things are for you,
like performing resuscitations on a dream.And although we are together—fundamentally here
on the same hemisphere, you don’t have to answer me.
You don’t have to reply to this untethered planet heart.
It’s too late for us and I surrender to the war
of my fates—where poems burn into pieces of litter.Take your watercolors and color my window with Jupiter.
Crack open the glass with your knives and turpentine.
Paint these words of mine, life-full of hue and value
and watch my heart healing like a bone
inside the tornado of a thousand bristles.You don’t have to answer me. You just need to know—
on a clear day you can see Jupiter—in my eyes
and on your fingertips, where the universe
dips in and out of your street like a dancer,
in my words and through this window where I’m on the horizon.
I would probably change the bristles from a thousand to a hundred. That’s a bit much. As was the melodrama of too lateness already in my mid-20s. Wow. What did I know?
More conversation between O’Hara and his painters:
This summer I finally was able to watch Schmigadoon on AppleTV. I decided to watch Ted Lasso after that since I had heard so many good things about it. I finally finished the three great seasons last night. One of the best TV shows period. 
