You do know what a fruit *is* don’t you?

See if this doesn’t help clear things up:

Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O’Hara

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.

As to yer Madonner (as they say here) maybe such images are (consciously or unconsciously) contrived to foster the right attitude by switching off a sexual perception? Religious context apart, carting a baby about is a signal of unavailability due to an existing relationship.

And the picture of Felix dressed as a chicken made you think of … ? … chicken nuggets? … grade A extra large?

But of course! Others, I surmise, focus on the little bugs introduced to show off the artist’s skill in minutae. Or maybe they focus on other critters (lower right corner). And I suppose an apple could give me a fuzzy feeling about life in the The Garden before the temptress got hold it (the apple, I mean).

Madonna?

(She intended to reference bad poetic metaphors; she’s making a point about how common cultural abstractions are.)

Would agree, have always agreed, with the prospect-refuge theory. It must be one of many primitive neuropsych structures, like music, that evolved to help us survive. In this case, survive boredom. Oooh La La do I sound like Jung or somebody?

I agree, but – for me anyway – the process is nothing like their description of mapping landscape on to pathetic fallacy (of a sort that looks like the tritest of nature poetry). While I can’t say I’m consciously guided by it, prospect-refuge theory (see Landscapes in mind) is the best description I’ve seen of my own approach to landscape photography, more to do with primitive reactions to landscape than with complex constructs like pride or majesty.