William Carlos Williams as formalist
 

Can we have a vote? Is contemporary poetry better off since WCW abandoned formal verse for free verse? Some bemoan and decry the influence of the dreaded Wheelbarrow. I feel the exact opposite.

I vote a resounding yes!

Here's just one example of the kind of poetry William Carlos Williams was writing in 1909:


The Uses of Poetry

I've fond anticipation of a day
O'erfilled with pure diversion presently,
For I must read a lady poesy
The while we glide by many a leafy bay,

Hid deep in rushes, where at random play
The glossy black winged May-flies, or whence flee
Hush-throated nestlings in alarm,
Whom we have idly frighted with our boat's long sway.

For, lest o'ersaddened by such woes as spring
To rural peace from our meek onward trend,
What else more fit? We'll draw the latch-string

And close the door of sense; then satiate wend,
On poesy's transforming giant wing,
To works afar whose fruits all anguish mend.

Williams, William Carlos. The Early Poems of William Carlos Williams [Annotated] (Kindle Locations 337-347). Perscribo Publishing. Kindle Edition.

POET’S WORK

Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade

I learned
to sit at desk
and condense

No layoff
from this
condensery

— Lorine Niedecker

N.B. Faraj, will you join me in this thread? What do you think of the Niedecker poem? I have another in a similar vein to post, or link to, by the truly amazing poet, Basil Bunting. But I will wait to see if anyone comes along here first.

What makes that a poem, William? Is it because she says it is?

Williams began as a bad poet. So he started writing little pensees instead. That was an improvement. IMO.

Bill,

The first poem is a strong argument for destroying one's juvenilia, as I think Eliot did (and recommended, at least by example). I don't feel competent to voice an opinion on the whole state of contemporary poetry, but I shall say that the other WC Williams you posted hereabouts is much, much, much better. IMHO.

I'll follow this thread happily. I haven't read WCW in some years, but I almost brought him with me to CA ... I opted for Kipling's short stories instead. Ah, decisions, decisions, as you say!

Of course, John. You may recall that I've argued for that before.

The important question is not whether it's a poem, since it's certainly a poem. The important question is, "Is it a good poem or a bad poem?"

I think it's a good poem, but not nearly as good as the dreaded Wheelbarrow poem.

Keats began as a bad poet also. I might post one that I think is absolutely horrible. But I got in trouble on another board because people thought I was trying to besmirch the memory of Keats. Heaven forbid, as Paul might say. Keats remains one of my favorite poets, if not my favorite. It's so hard to decide on a favorite. But I do love Keats more than any other poet, on a wholly subjective and personal level, whether or not his poems are my favorites.

Don't all poets start out as bad poets, now that I think of it?

And yes, Michael. I destroyed nearly all of my first blights. Someone, the composer what's-his-name (dammit, memory), said, "First operas should be drowned, like kittens."

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pascal/pensees.html

Now I get it!

The Uses of Poetry

I've fond anticipation of a day
O'erfilled with pure diversion presently,
For I must read a lady poesy
The while we glide by many a leafy bay,

Hid deep in rushes, where at random play
The glossy black winged May-flies, or whence flee
Hush-throated nestlings in alarm,
Whom we have idly frighted with our boat's long sway.

For, lest o'ersaddened by such woes as spring
To rural peace from our meek onward trend,
What else more fit? We'll draw the latch-string

And close the door of sense; then satiate wend,
On poesy's transforming giant wing,
To works afar whose fruits all anguish mend.

Heck, WCW can be thankful he's not around to post that poem here for critique. Imagine the response he'd get. It's truly awful :eek:

But so is the The Red Wheelbarrow, IMO. (Sorry, Bill!)

Jayne

No need to be sorry, Jayne!

I value your opinion, but I love that dreaded cantankerous ratz-a-fratzin Wheelbarrow!

:D

Some poets have the knack for rhyme, meter, and tight form. WCW didn't. Pound did, but he quickly learned there was no way to advance past Yeats, though he would have done well enough as a decadent if that style wasn't old hat. So Make It New became his credo; he wanted to be in step with the modern artists in that respect. I like HSM as poetry, but I lose patience after that, just as Pound, I think, lost patience with poems for POETRY. There's a big difference between the two. Williams also tried POETRY in the Paterson books, but he should have stuck to poems instead. Poems are made; POETRY is written. I could go on and will if anyone has questions, but I'm in DC right now and have to limit my screeds. I will add that the silly red wheelbarrow was probably written as an "in your face" to those who had set definitions about what poetry is and isn't (or what a poem is or isn't) and it did work in that respect. The Armory Show of 1912 (?) was a watershed for the American arts in general.

Just one question, Sam,

When you say "poems are made", does that agree with what I am saying, and have said before, that

"if a person makes a pile of words and calls it a poem, then it's a poem"?

I said that ^ in an older thread about a poet who had gotten famous for slamming Garrison Keillor's "Good Poems". That poet had been well-known before for his poems, but he became even more famous for dragging a book through the dirt.

I still have to post that Bunting poem, if I can find it.

I propose we coin a new term, perhaps "Shmoem," which can cover all those things that free verse poets currently call "poems" as well as all those things that formal poets call "poems," thus eliminating pointless semantic debate and allowing us to focus on the merits or flaws of each individual shmoem we encounter.

Roger,

You seem to be agreeing with me on one hand and disagreeing on the other.

I agree that the semantic debate, ie "What is poetry", or "What is a poem?" is pointless. If a person makes a poem and calls it a poem, it's a poem, not a shmoem, whether you or I like it or not.

The discussion that merits attention is, like you say (and like I said), whether or not a poem is good or bad, whether it's a thing of value or a trifle not worth considering or spending too much time on.

Where the hell are the free verse poets who make up a big portion of what makes Eratosphere the site that it is?

I would like to hear from them as much as from the diehard formalists.

**Edited in: Roger, I imagine you were not being serious about your shmoem idea. I haven't lost my sense of humor quite yet.

I don't recall who attacked Keillor's Good Poems; maybe you can refresh my memory, but it really doesn't matter. "Good" when it's used as an adjective is always subjective--good food, good music, good wine, etc. There are all kinds of standards of taste that can be applied. The New Critics liked wit, wordplay, complicated metaphor, rhetorical skill, and all that, but very few contemporary critics hold to those standards. Which is to say, Bill, that I essentially agree that almost any verbal contraption can be called a poem, just as silence can be called music, just as any mixture of tints on a surface can be called a painting. But then when we get into, "Yeah, but is it a good poem?" we move into the realm of taste--one man's meat, one woman's poison. My own tastes are pretty limited; others' are far more catholic. Some are even more limited than mine; others' are far more catholic than others'. I do think that a century or so of hard experience should have told us that newness can't be equated with progress.

Oh yeah, you could read Stanley Fish on the "Is it a poem?" question, but you still wouldn't learn what a good poem is.

We definitely agree on that, Sam.

I hope I haven't implied that I think such a thing.

The poet who slammed "Good Poems" is August Kleinzahler. There was a thread about him hereabouts, which may be found in the archives? I posted this on that thread.

Onward!

`````````

I wonder if anyone can recall who wrote what many consider*** the first "free verse" poem in English. That would be William Blake, in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The poem:

The Argument.

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep

Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow.
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted:
And a river, and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.

Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.

Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility.
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.


***I recall reading that somewhere, but can't locate anything substantial.

For those who don't, or won't, click the link to the Blake article:

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a must read for anyone seriously interested in the making of poems. Sam will notice I avoided the word 'poetry'. I am not exactly sure what he means by the distinction between poems and poetry. Unless it be that poems are to be treated as individuals, and that poetry is an abstraction, hence not a real entity?

I mentioned in another thread (Trump Watch) that I'm a nominalist, ie, I don't believe that universals exist as real things (meaning: actual entities. They are words and symbols only).

This is important, but not necessarily important insofar as this thread goes.

Won't at least one person defend that dreaded ratz a fratzin freakin silly little Wheelfreakinbarrow?

It's a huge poem. It's an English, and/or American form of Haiku.

- emphasis mine.

I hope that 'you' up there doesn't refer to me, Sam.

Edited in:

Here's a relevant snippet from the Horse's* mouth:

*I think that's what got me banned for eternity from PFFA. I referred to Blake's 'proverb':

"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." - I referred to a moderator there as a "Horse of Instruction". Big mistake.

One more edit:

- Wikipedia. Never heard of this Fish until now. Glad you alerted me to him. As John Whitworth might say, we need more lerts. I won't bother with this Fish's thoughts on poems and poetry.

Sam,

I'd be happy to read your thoughts on the difference between poems and POETRY. It's a fascinating idea.

Andrew, it's just the difference between wanting to make good individual works ("poems") vs. writing as an accompaniment to grand schemes or ideas ("POETRY"). Lyric poets tend toward the former; epic poets toward the latter. Some are able to do both with celerity, but others aim too high for their talents. I think of Pound in this regard--good enough lyrical/satirical poet but no Homer.

I disagree, Sam. About Pound I mean. The Cantos are about as epic as it gets.

I am in total agreement about poems versus Poetry.

XXII
from Spring and All (1923)[1]
so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


Bill,
I’ll give it a shot. I don’t read Williams. In fact, if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t name another poem of his except this one and Patterson, and then there’s that one about plums; beyond that I’m clueless about WCW. But I do enjoy XXII. And I’ve enjoyed this thread.

I’m distilling some of what I have read from others and from my own enjoyment explicating poems. So here goes:

First, the whole poem is based on a philosophy of existentialism, which I think modernity, that is, individual liberty, secularism, subjectivity, et cetera, thrives on; in other words, the poem essentially says, The whole world depends upon how you, the individual, sees it. What could be more appealing to someone in 1923 (before the crash)?

In this way, the poem is not unlike other modern artwork and artists such as Picasso or Joyce. Hey, who wouldn’t want to read XXII instead of Finnegan’s Wake or avoid going cross-eyed looking at Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”? The sophistication/abstraction of modernism and its guiding philosophy is boiled down into words and images that are accessible and acceptable to anyone. We should never forget how rural America was and in some ways still is for most of its history. Most of the United States did not have electricity until after WWII.

Second, I think the poem has become known as The Red Wheelbarrow because of this object’s reinforcement of my point above. “Wheelbarrow” is one word, but WCW makes it two in this poem. The enjambment puts the emphasis on the “wheel.” I don’t need to go into the historical significance of this human invention. However, the wheel and the wheelbarrow are symbolic of self-reliance, work, construction, et cetera that also reinforces my point above.

The word “barrow” is interesting for anyone living a rural existence because it is a burial mound. Think of any rural cemetery. By separating the words “wheel” and “barrow,” WCW gets to have his life in death all in two little lines of poetry:

a red wheel
barrow

Finally, the image of the rain and the white chickens, of course, are rural notions of the basic water and food of existence. They could have been anything, really, but the simplicity of “red” and “white,” “rain” and “chickens” reinforces a simplicity to modern art that we don’t get in the complicated expressions of modernism. In short, it’s appealing to just about anyone.

So there you go. I think I may have just started a first draft to my next essay. Thanks for the inspiration.

Cheers,
Greg

Adding a note: I think XXII could be Williams' "I Hear Modernity Singing."

That's a snappy and on-point analysis: in all my years of knowing this poem--and even talking about at university, in a class--we'd never looked at it like that. I love it.

LOL! This thread is justified by that exasperated plea alone, Bill!

I can’t give as reasoned a defense of it as Greg, but I certainly don’t hate the poem. It’s interesting to me particularly if I think of it with Imagism as a reaction to Eliot and Pound and the intricacies of some of the Modernists. And I appreciate WCW’s desire to democratize poetry, in the sense of making it understandable and accessible to ordinary people, and not just to other poets and critics. That’s a big part of the genius of Frost, IMO.

It is like an American haiku. I like some haikus very much; others I read are like visiting a museum and stumbling on a Clyfford Still or a Barnett Newman: I’ll keep still for a minute or so, contemplate it, perhaps shrug my shoulders, and move on…

I think the poem suffers from being overhyped. But imagine coming on it without being primed by teachers saying repeatedly how great it is. You'd probably think it a pretty good poem. The "greatness" we ascribe to it today is not necessarily just due to how it might "move us" as a poem, but also to its influence on generations after.

Thanks, Gregory. That's a very interesting take on the little poem.

Before I explain what I think is great about the poem I should mention that I may have gotten off on the wrong foot by choosing an early WCW poem that is quite obviously wide open for attack. In my Kindle version of his early poems there are quite a few traditional poems that are not bad at all, and actually quite nice.

Nonetheless, I think he was wise to abandon formality and go into free verse. He is simply a much better poet in the latter, which virtually no-one who has read Williams extensively would argue about. I notice there are many who feel he wasn't a very good poet period, and they are welcome to their view. Of course I highly disagree.

Now, as to what I think makes the wheelbarrow poem so good:

First, its brevity. Brevity is the soul of wit, and no matter where you come from poetically, either as a formalist or free-verser, brevity and concision are virtues to strive for. Not that they are the sole virtues of good poetry. Lord knows I like to write ramblers, and there are many great long poems in our rich literary past and present, as well as epics; but by and large, strong poets look for ways to say what they want to say without any superfluous baggage. I know that once I get done with a draft, the first order of business it to strip away whatever I can readily notice is not necessary to the poem. Naturally, this is harder for a poet writing in a traditional form because of the numerous constraints imposed upon the poem by virtue of its having - sometimes - a fixed number of lines, and a well-defined structure, as well as rhyme and the restrictions of meter. Hence my preference for metrical, formal poems: I like to enjoy what liberty I can within defined limits. Free versers don't generally like these limits, which is one reason that when formal poetry is awful, it usually has at least the one redeeming quality of attention to craft, whereas when free verse is awful, it's almost always just plain awful.

The second thing I like about the wheelbarrow is its patent declaration of the image being of primary importance (So much depends). I don't see any formalists arguing about that. Most of us agree that imagery is an essential value in a poem. There is discussion of that in another thread, where it seemed I was defending the use of abstractions when I really wasn't, but simply answering the question "can a poem containing mostly/all abstractions be any good"?, or words to that effect. It takes a very good poet to make productive use of abstractions.

The third thing I like about WCW's poem is its use of white space and line breaks. The white space and "white chickens" go hand in hand (or wing in wing, as it were). Written as prose, the poem looses much of its poemy-ness, but not all of it.

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

Gregory has done a great job of talking about the linebreaks. But just to say something else on the subject: So many free verse poems suffer from the poet not knowing how to break a line. If you're going to write in free verse, you had better know how to break a line! If you don't, then you are much better off writing in fixed forms.** This is a no-brainer. There are lots of places to get instruction on how to make the best of linebreaks. Our free verse forum here is one, and PFFA is another. If you don't want to workshop your stuff, you can always read up on it. No excuses.

**It has been argued that some people just don't have a knack for rhyme and meter. That may be true, but in my 16 years of workshopping online, I've seen people who were dreadful at it improve remarkably. I think anyone who is willing to put in the work can do just about anything they set their minds on. There may be something like a "gift" for writing, or for doing whatever, but that's always debatable, and perhaps best left for another thread.

If I could get Tony Barnstone to come by, I think he might have some interesting things to say. He's a brilliant translator of Chinese poetry, and I have one of the books of Chinese poetry he edited and contributed to as translator. (Can't think of the title now and can't find the book!)

I think there is something both haiku-ey (Japanese) and Chinese about the dreaded little wheelbarrow: absolute attention to place, to scene, to a moment in time, with a bare minimum of tell.

With Williams' poem, though, I honestly think it's more about making a statement in esthetics than anything else. If it were an ancient Chinese master, it would be more about the scene and the moment in time than as a literary device. But Tony might have something entirely different to say.

For anyone who likes to read abstruse literary criticism (is there any other kind?) on Williams' poem, Check out this site at Modern American Poetry

Cheers,
Greg

One thing to remember about "The Red Wheelbarrow [sic]" is that it was part of a numbered sequence called "Spring and All." Removing it from its context as part of a longer work has never made much sense to me. Section IV of The Waste Land is only 8 lines long and would be just baffling standing by itself. Maybe some of the Cantos (like the usura canto) work as individual poems, but they still belong to a larger context. An older poet told me, when I was young, that I should try writing a sequence. "Sequence of what?" I asked.

- Gregory P

The book I have is Selected Poems, edited by Charles Tomlinson, put out by New Directions. While there's a good deal I don't like, there are some dynamite poems in there. To tell the truth, I never got much into Patterson. I much prefer the shorter poems that are, in my opinion, a lot like what I've read of Chinese poetry.

New Directions has an amazing catalogue of great books. My book collection would suffer without ND.

I think that the thread went off track. I intended it to be about a poet, and it became all about a poem. But that's my fault!

My favorite poem by Williams is one I posted in another thread hereabouts. Some of you here may have missed it:

Pastoral

When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.

xxxxNo one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.

This page has a good selection.

**

Good point, Sam, but oddly enough, one of my all time favorite poems is also one frequently anthologized and taken out of a sequence, but one which I think works fine all by itself:

I will write songs against you,
enemies of my people; I will pelt you
with the winged seeds of the dandelion.
I will marshal against you
the fireflies of the dusk.

- Charles Reznikoff

I used that last line as the title of a novella I wrote.

Edited in:

Not to nitpick, or to argue for argument's sake, but I haven't thought of The Waste Land as a sequence? I think of it as a single poem with numbered parts. A sequence, unless I'm mistaken, is a series of separate poems on a common or somehow-related theme? The Cantos would be a sequence, and not really an epic, per se, like Paradise Lost orThe Odyssey.

So, I should qualify what I said before: The Cantos are "epic" in scope, but not literally an epic.

(Put the guns away)

All legitimate poetry is metrical, in my ear. Poetry we call “free verse” is simply improvised metric poetry. Like jazz, I think.

But poetry, like all art, is in the eye of the beholder. It’s a judgment call. Though if it doesn't have a cadence, a rhythm to it, I don't care for it.

One Williams poem I really like:

"Between Walls"

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

I've heard it argued that language itself is metrical, and since we speak with stressed and unstressed syllables, that might be true, if you really want to stretch it that far. I think what most mean by metrical poetry is that wherein the stressed and unstressed syllables are arranged in recognizable and repeated patterns. Some poems that are "metrical" but devoid of repeated patterns I classify as free verse, more or less, like much of the work of Walt Whitman, whose training in tight form never left him entirely, as much as he tried to shake it off. James Dickey writes in highly cadenced lines and patterned forms, but he called formalism "suspect."

Just curious, but what do you mean by (Put the guns away) ?

I was going to cite that one, Andrew. Pure image, and good use of white space and line breaks.

Bill,

I think Jim was referring to my off-handed comment that you quoted.

Greg

*D'oh!*

Must have 10 characters...

Yes, Greg's right -- I was feeling glib and played with his off-handed comment in #20, 'if you put a gun to my head'. It backfired. I was hoping it would be disarmingly cute. (The mood these days in our world sits on a hair-trigger, I'm afraid).

Perhaps I shouldn't have stretched the definition of 'metrical' as I did. Of course I realize metrical poetry refers to the adherence to established forms of poetry that is composed with stressed and unstressed syllables in recognizable and repeated patterns.Maybe it's better expressed by calling it classical metric. I don't know. I'm just learning.

Jim, the best thing you can be is "teachable".

I plan to remain teachable until my last breath. Heaven forbid there should come a time when someone can't teach me something.

My hat is off to anyone among us who is beyond being taught something.

Is there anyone like that here?

Nope.

I have it on good authority that James Dickey started his poetry classes by having his students write ballads. One thing about verse-writing, it can be taught, and it can be learned. Reading poetry can be taught as well, and it also can be learned. Williams embarrassed himself into learning how to write poetry.

Before I joined my first online workshop, I didn't know how to read poetry, and was only slightly okay at writing it (time will tell if I've improved any). The best thing that happened over the years is I learned how to read poetry. When I was on my own I missed 80% of what I was reading, because I was in love with words and language and sound. Meaning took a back seat. That is no longer true, but I can still catch myself reading without paying much attention: a habit I find hard to break.

Before this thread dies I do want to search my book of WCW's early poems to find a traditional piece that isn't a clunker. He did pen a few.

I wonder if many here have read Allen Ginsberg's first blights? He wrote in a very old style, and in tight forms. Some of his formal poetry wasn't bad, but most of it was pretty overbearing.

If anyone happens to stumble across a sequence of hymns I wrote, they will no doubt want to choke me. I am in a slow process of revising them.

AG's father, Louis, was a traditional poet in the Poetry Society mode. I've seen a few things here and there. Is Allen's early work available online? His first teacher was Mark Van Doren, who was very traditional, and I've heard that AG's early Columbia poetry was in the metaphysical style. I guess I can look it up.

https://scarriet.wordpress.com/category/louis-ginsberg/

(Added in: no luck finding AG's student poems online)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Enough about those #%&!? chickens !! HERE!

I have Ginsberg's Collected Poems 1947-1980. In the notes section it says that in his college days Ginsberg wrote "imitations of Marlowe, Marvell, and Donne (and Hart Crane)". I searched for the first poem on offer, and it seems to be in at least three places.

Here's the poem:

A Modest Proposal

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will some old pleasures prove.
Men like me have paid in verse
This costly courtesy, or curse;

But I would bargain with my art
(As to the mind, now to the heart),
My symbols, images, and signs
Please me more outside these lines.

For your share and recompense,
You will be taught another sense:
The wisdom of the subtle worm
Will turn most perfect in your form.

Not that your soul need tutored be
By intellectual decree,
But graces that the mind can share
Will make you, as more wise, more fair,

Till all the world's devoted thought
Find all in you it ever sought,
And even I, of skeptic mind,
A Resurrection of a kind.

This compliment, in my own way,
For what I would receive, I pay;
Thus all the wise have writ thereof,
And all the fair have been their love.

- A.G. 1947

The page I copied from is this one.

The author of the blog made two typos, which I've fixed. But that's not the funny thing. Look at her name. It's Kristina. Where's my tinfoil hat!

There are only 4 poems from Ginsberg's college days. The second one is an imitation of Marvell, the third looks and sounds like Donne and Cowley, and the fourth is a long poem in very archaic octaves.

I've typed out the first stanza from the second poem, which looks & sounds (sort of) like Donne and Cowley:

xxxxLet not the sad perplexity
xxxxOf absent love unhumor thee:
xxSighs, tears, and oaths, and laughter I have spent
To make my play with thee resolve in merriment;
xxxxFor wisest critics past agree
xxxxThe truest love is comedy.
Will thou not weary of the tragic argument?

Your term is good. My own term, an acronym, is maybe more positive: LBOW.

That is, an LBOW is a Long Bit of Writing. LBOWs include Pound's Cantos, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, and Howl, besides efforts by WCW.

Williams' "Plums" is a SPOW (Short Piece of Writing), that is, a largely metrics-free item, which, in the case of the Plums, I like. SPOWs are the order of this epoch, and most are hopelessly forgettable. Most modern LBOWs are too.