Chris:
It's good to see this thread brought back into view. The conversation has really become a discussion about what makes a poem a poem, about who gets to say what's a poem, and maybe about how willing we are to take a chance on looking foolish for being taken in by a sham poem.
I disagree about "The Emperor of Ice Cream." That's one of a handful of Stevens's poems that speaks right to me. But I agree, sort of, about "The Red Wheel Barrow." It seems to me to be about both the interconnectedness of things and the insurmountable thinginess of things: just a wheel barrow, yes, but everything, in being merely what it is, depends in a sense upon everything else's being merely what IT is... No ideas but in things, as WCW said.
The problem for me is that the poem works conceptually but not viscerally, or not much. "The Emperor of Ice Cream" makes me feel things as well as think about things. "The Red Wheel Barrow," for me, is almost all thought.
RPW
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