[William A. Baurle]

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.