[Robert J. Clawson]

Yes, Susan, I did attempt irony.

[Ernest Slyman]

The wheelbarrow glazed with rain might intend that the narrator is speaking about a day without work (responsibility lightened). Therefore, the freedom that one yearns for has arrived. That weight lifted. And the result is a release of newfound energy.

This shared bit of expectations, yearning might settle well and universally connect with the reader.

That such a short piece should accomplish such a delicate and precise connection with the reader is perhaps unique to poetry. The brevity accomplishing much with so much speed and deftness.

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[David Mason]

Mr. Slyman might not know, unless he is just being a sly man, that WCW wrote the poem while on a housecall to a gravely ill patient. It was not a day without work.

[Hugh Clary]

I am also counted among those unaware of that juicy nugget.

You got me hooked now. I gotta know if it was to a farmhouse or not. Where can I learn more?

[David Mason]

I'm sure one of the biographies would give the anecdote in detail, but all I've got in my home office is a footnote in the Kennedy/Gioia Introduction to Poetry: "Dr. Williams's poem reportedly contains a personal experience: he was gazing from the window of the house where one of his patients, a small girl, lay suspended between life and death. (This account, from the director of the public library in Williams's native Rutherford, NJ, is given by Geri M. Rhodes in 'The Paterson Metaphor in William Carlos Williams's Paterson,' master's essay, Tufts U, 1965.)"

[SteveWal]

Whenever I read The Red Wheelbarrow, I'm reminded not of another poem, even one by Williams, but by a "work of art" that performs a similar function. It's that "ready-made" of Marcel Duchamp's, "Fountain". A toilet, placed in a glass case, placed in an art gallery, is art. That wheelbarrow and those chickens all so incredibly ordinary: but that's the point: poetry is found everywhere.

What this short poem does is question the whole idea of what a poem is: it says this rather dull sentence, when you break it up into lines and put it into a book, becomes a poem: not because the poem is good or profound or musical but because it's in a book of poems.

The question of whether it's a good poem or not is a side-issue in this case; because its notoriety is based not on its relative merits as a poem, but on whether it is a poem at all. My students, mostly adults brought up on rhyme and metre of a very limited kind, are more likely to be shocked by being told that it is a poem.

As to what it means, again, it's a kind of side issue. It's the most "writable" poem he ever wrote: just create your own story and it's as likely to be true as anything else, including whatever incident inspired it in the first place.

These are a few of my thoughts on TRW, and I suppose it probably will continue to challenge us for years to come. Is it a good poem or a bad poem, and how do you decide? and why are your criteria for saying so any better than mine (just because they've been around longer?) That's what I think he's saying.

[Clive Watkins]

About the wheelbarrow poem....

"Hollywood critics applauded what they thought was far-out avant-garde technique for title credits of the new Peter Sellers film "The Bo Bo". Then they realized a gaping fifteen-foot hole had been torn in the screen." (Daily Express, UK, 1967)

Sorry: I no longer have the exact date for this quotation.

Clive Watkins

[Len Krisak]

Calling a cathedral a can opener
doesn't make it one.

That little thing still sucks
and it's still not a poem.

[Susan Vaughan]

Len, you are right on the mark. I could call a roll of cash register receipts a "poem" and even get some magazine editor, maybe out to prove he was avant-garde enough to get people to sleep with him, to publish it. But it still wouldn't be a poem by any meaningful definition.

Yet oddly enough, from what I have heard, it seems some people just rubber-stamp the motion when someone else nominates any little upchuck of alphabet soup as a poem. Guess I should just understand that such folks are too brilliant and important (never too lazy, I'm sure) to learn about and formulate their own poetic standards that actually mean something.

Guess I can only wish such folks accidental encounters with the real thing! That is, poetry that is powerful, well imagined and expertly crafted.

[SteveWal]

I don't care if Len Krisak or anyone else thinks it's not a poem. It's still a poem. So there. Nyaaah!

Which is what it comes down to really: your definition of a poem versus my definition. Which probably gets us nowhere, but hey, wars have been fought for less excuse.

I don't think it's the best poem I've ever come across, but then "Summer is y-cummen in" doesn't amount to much either but it's still a poem.



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Steve Waling