[Gail White]

Thanks, RCL, for knowing the author and the right line breaks!

This is one of my favorite parodies of all time.

[ross hamilton hill]

Gail in some ways the original is ironic, is paradoxical, as 'nothing' depends on what is happening, to me the poem is itself a parody of Zen poetry.

eg
a leaf falls
and across the river
a crane flies south

I made this up but you know what I mean.

[Michael Juster]

For those of you already confusing these poets, you probably should avoid further confusion by not reading "Prufock's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Red Wheelbarrow Glazed with Rain beside White Chickens" in Sleaze & Slander (Measure Press), due out next fall.

Otherwise, order early. Think about humor as the perfect holiday gift.

[Ann Drysdale]

"Three apprentice farm mechanics found this old wheelbarrow.

What they did next will blow your mind!... "

http://wp.me/P57cpZ-RgZ


.

[R. S. Gwynn]

Dana Gioia wrote about this years ago.

[Gregory Dowling]

Yes, I was sure he had but couldn't find it. Found it now: his essay "Notes on the New Formalism".

[Tony Barnstone]

Hi All,

It's word count meter, one of the few famous examples of it (3 words/1 word in each stanza).

The poem is one his interesting transitional poems, in which he blends his great love for Whitman's declarations with the precepts of Imagism.

He does very interesting things with line breaks, such as breaking the wheel/barrow into two, mimicking perception and breaking the machine into its component parts, just as in "The Right of Way" he makes little jokes such as depicting "a girl with one leg/over a balcony" as way of suggesting first what we see (one leg, the other being hidden by the balcony) and second a joke on the meaning of "enjambment" (to straddle, from the French for "leg," jambe), and also makes a fine joke on the profile when describing "the man’s half/averted face."

The Right Of Way

In passing with my mind
on nothing in the world

but the right of way
I enjoy on the road by

virtue of the law—
I saw

an elderly man who
smiled and looked away

to the north past a house—
a woman in blue

who was laughing and
leaning forward to look up

into the man’s half
averted face

and a boy of eight who was
looking at the middle of

the man’s belly
at a watchchain—

The supreme importance
of this nameless spectacle

sped me by them
without a word—

Why bother where I went?
for I went spinning on the

four wheels of my car
along the wet road until

I saw a girl with one leg
over the rail of a balcony

There's a lot in this little poem, but I won't go on....

Best, Tony

[ross hamilton hill]

Tony, this is one reason I hang around the Sphere, to read poems like this.