April is National Poetry Month, and as I have mentioned before, I was always horrible at writing poetry. This has always led me to have a profound respect and admiration for those who are able to create works in this most enigmatic and elusive art form.

There are many poets I enjoy, and numerous poems I have held dear to my heart and committed to memory. In honor of this month’s celebration of the world’s poetry past, present, and future, I have chosen to reprint two of my current favorite poems from two very different artists - the hauntingly beautiful and melancholic Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, and the disarmingly bracing and urbane American poet, Frank O’Hara.

Solemn over Fertile Country

Solemn over fertile country passes
The white cloud, ineffectual, fugitive,
Which from among the fields for one black instant
Raises a lukewarm breath.

Flying high in my soul the slow idea
Blackens my mind, but already I am turning
- Like the field’s self to itself - to the daylight
Of imperfect life.

- Fernando Pessoa

—–

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