[Gregory Palmerino]

Originally Posted by William A. Baurle

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.

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."

[Ian Hoffman]

Originally Posted by Gregory Palmerino

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

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.

[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.

[Gregory Palmerino]

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

[R. S. Gwynn]

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.

[William A. Baurle]

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.

- 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.

[Jim Moonan]

(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.

[William A. Baurle]

Originally Posted by Jim Moonan

(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.

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.

[Gregory Palmerino]

Originally Posted by William A. Baurle

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

Bill,

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

Greg

[William A. Baurle]

*D'oh!*

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