A newcomer weighs in long after sensible people have concluded that the discussion was over and done with.
There are some canonical poems that deserve to be laughed off the stage (my first nominee would be "The Emperor of Ice Cream"), but WCW's red wheel barrow poem is not one of them. At the heart of the poem, I see a Westernized version of an Eastern poetic sensibility. Basho does not say, "So much depends upon the sound of a frog jumping into an old pond." Issa does not say, "So much depends upon this peony in my garden." But that is the implicit message of every short poem that directs the reader's attention to a moment of here-and-now communion with the natural world. The frog is just the frog, the pond just the pond, the flower just the flower, the wheelbarrow just the wheelbarrow, the rain just the rain, the chickens just the chickens. But in the moment that the poet observes any one (or any combination) of these mere realities, comprehends its universe-in-a-grain-of-sand significance, and finds the words to convey that moment of realization to the reader. . . . Ah, in that moment, so much depends upon that moment.
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