Royal College of Art

‘I am not a painter, I am a poet, Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not’, Frank O’Hara writes in his poem, ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’. Art and poetry, artists and poets have long been considered fruitful allies, as though the two forms share something fundamental that does not belong to other disciplines or modes of making. What might this be? What does it mean to describe something as ‘poetic’? What is…