[Richard Wakefield]

Alicia: Delightful and, best of all, faithful to its perspective. If we get more like this, by all means let's keep the thread going and going.
Richard

[nyctom]

Indeed a delightful piece of writing. But is it transcendental enough or spiritually elevating enough to be considered a "poem" and not just rhyming prose that follows a metrical pattern?

Just a thought.

Tom

[ginger]

Here's a perspective on TRW that no one's mentioned yet. It's from Robert Wallace & Michelle Boisseu's "Writing Poems" (required reading this semester). In the book, TRW is presented as a "picture poem." Say the authors,

"Each stanza seems to show a miniature wheelbarrow in side view, with the longer first line suggesting the handle. If so, the radically enjambed line-turn may give us an oral image of the wheel."

It comes complete with a diagram that shows students how to 'see' the various parts of the wheelbarrow in William's lines. You guys see it, right!?

In defense of those who have ripped Williams apart here, I think he set him self up for the ripping, by himself putting forth his own definitions for poetry and prose. The following is from Spring and All (in Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, Volume One eds. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris):

"...prose has to do with the fact of an emotion; poetry has to do with the dynamization of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination.

prose: statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectual states, data of all sorts--technical expositions, jargon, of all sorts--fictional and other--

poetry: new form dealt with as a reality in itself.

The form of prose is the accuracy of its subject matter--how best to expose the multiform phases of its material

the form of poetry is related to the movement of the imagination revealed in words--or whatever it may be--

the cleavage is complete

Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect?

The cleavage goes through all the phases of experience. It is the jump from prose to the process of imagination that is the next great leap of the intelligence--from the simulations of present experience to the facts of the imagaination--

the greatest characteristic of the present age is that it is stale--stale as literature--

To enter a new world, and have there freedom of movement and newness.

I mean that there will always be prose painting, representative work, clever as may be in revealing new phases of emotional research presented on the surface.

But the jump from that to Cezanne or back to certain of the primitives is the impossible.

The primitives are not back in some remote age--they are not BEHIND experience. Work which bridges the gap between the rigidities of vulgar experience and the imagination is rare. It is new, immediate--It is so because it is actual, always real. It is experience dynamized into reality.

Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself--sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity..."

I don't wholly disagree with what he has to say, but I do think that by saying it, he invites readers to challenge his work. And I don't think that's a bad thing.

Ginger

[Julie]

Oh, you just have to love a good argument about WCW. There's a reason he shares initials with World Championship Wrestling.

Yes. I do feel "The Red Wheelbarrow" is a poem. I used to think it a terrible poem; now I merely think it a boring one.

Why is it a poem? Because as a poem, it is complete. No, he doesn't tell you what depends on the scene, but it's a complete thought.

It's not prose. Being written in complete sentences (well, complete sentence) does not turn something into prose. The entire thing, the whole damned thing, is self-contained in one sentence. You may not be impressed with what the sentence says, heck, you may even argue that it doesn't say anything, but it is complete. It isn't missing the rest of it. It doesn't need a short story tacked on to the opening sentence.

It isn't an essay. It isn't a short story. It isn't a novel. It is neither fiction nor non-fiction. It is not part of a larger whole. It is not made up of smaller fragments.

It is a poem.

And I still don't like it.

Julie

[Chris O'Carroll]

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.

[Richard Wakefield]

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

[Tim Murphy]

The "poet" of "The Red Wheelbarrow" isn't worthy to shine the shoes of "The Emperor of Ice Cream."

[SteveWal]

I put "The Red Wheelbarrow" into a special category all of its own.

I call it a "That's Not A Poem! Poem" because whenever I teach it, people say, "but that can't be a poem!"

It shakes people who have fixed ideas as to what a poem is or can up to be told that this short, not terribly interesting sentence, is a poem. It sometimes shakes them up so much that from then on their poetry changes, often for the better because they stop looking for self-conciously "poetic" subject matter and start looking around them for material.

I still think "no ideas but in things" is damned good advice for a poet, though only if you don't take it the way a fundamentalist takes the first chapter of Genesis (ie, literally.)

I've caused some great discussions in class by introducing this poem. Of course it's not the greatest poem on the planet, but boy is it good at causing an arguement!

------------------
Steve Waling

[Chris O'Carroll]

So much depends upon an ability to distinguish between the virtuous simplicity of Williams and the skimble-skamble showboating of Stevens. "Love calls us to the things of this world," says Richard Wilbur. Might Williams, seen in that light, be wheeling a great love poem in his red barrow? As for the monarch of frozen treats, here's a bit of rudeness that I published a while ago.


THE EMPEROR OF BIRTHDAY CAKE

Call the plump, periphrastic one,
The insurance executive,
The poet as the letter P,
Roller of big cigars as the letter C.
Let be be befuddled by fake,
The only emperor is the emperor of birthday cake.

Bid him whip curdled words for philosophy soufflé,
Purvey 10¢ ideas in $12 packages,
Author of “Thirteen Ways
Of Saying Give Me a Break.”
The only emperor is the emperor of birthday cake.

[Clive Watkins]

Alas....

Clive Watkins