poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

So much depends upon one's life experience... a poet shares a point of view or a vision...the reader takes away what they may, depending upon what they bring to the reading. .
For me, the poem evokes strong memories, scents, sounds...in this, it is important...to me. A personal reverie perhaps....a little touchstone.

Ah, a question to the elevated...
just what DOES pablum taste like?

To Preston Grey:

Read the book "Imaginations" by WCW. He explains it all himself. Why you are right and why you are not.

I have always found this to be a frustrating poem. When I first encountered the poem many years ago in anthologies, I assumed it was about the toiling farmer (a la Millet) and the importance of hard work and simple overlooked things like the trusty farmer's wheelbarrow. A nice warm, fuzzy little poem.

Then later I learned that no, this poem was more akin to Deschamps urinal: the importance of the thing itself rather than what the thing might symbolize or reference. The confrontation with the thing itself could propel us INTO a kind of exstasy. (I'm still waiting in this case).

I don't think that I would have ever come to that conclusion just by looking at the words themselves arranged on the page. I (at least) needed the the theoretical underpinning explained to me. In other words for me it is a poem that needs attachments.

Perhaps it is not fair to really pull this poem out of its context in "Spring and All" where it has more company. Just stand alone, I find it lacking--even with its inventive placing of words on the page.

try:

http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/review/review2.htm

But don't plagiarize!!

Well gee, Mr Grey, somebody seems to have quite a large bee in their bonnet!

I, also, never saw much of anything of value in Williams' short and unexploratory "The Red Wheelbarrow" -- that is, until I came to this site and looked at the comments posted here. By seeing how it affected others, I began to understand how it urged the reader to look more closely at small, overlooked things and the subtle ways they can capture our attention, as well as how Williams may have affected later poetry to such an extent that those kinds of observations are now seen as typical. You, Mr Grey, on the other hand, seem happy to skip right over such insights, and dismiss them, as well as the entire life works of other poets, as "spittle" too low for your "elevated opinion." I do wish so much that you would take another look at least at the works of Plath, and some of the comments that I and others have posted thereon on this site. That is, if you aren't elevated so high above such pablum-tasting pettinesses as learning FROM others that you can't reach your keyboard.

I have read quite a bit about this poem and would like to add a few comments. I hope I am not completely off-target.

The first question that comes to mind when I read this poem is: Why does so much depend on this wheelbarrow? I think a key is that this wheelbarrow is red and “glazed with rain water”. That it is red suggests to me that it is new; that the rain water glazes it suggests that it isn’t scuffed up at all and is, therefore, brand new. Since we know FROM the white chickens that this is probably a poor rural setting, the money spent to buy this brand new wheelbarrow is hard earned and scarce and that the purchase wasn’t made easily. We also know that, if that is the case, that this wheelbarrow will need to last and do a lot of work during its lifetime.

The rain might suggest the heaviness of the decision and that work that needs to be done has to be delayed. The wheelbarrow that so much depends on can’t be used. It could also suggest sadness. If I think about it, the whole scene is a little sad, that so much depends on a humble wheelbarrow, that the wheelbarrow and chickens are the focus of whoever is looking out at the scene.

I don’t know what to say about the chickens. I don’t know if the fact that they are white, that they are standing out in the rain instead of inside a coop, etc. mean anything. Anyone have any insights to this?

Does anybody think that they may be reading INTO this poem a little bit too much? For all we know, the red wheelbarrow represents a tongue, the rainwater is saliva, and the white chickens are teeth. And that makes a lot more sense to me than some of these other comments. I just wish that some people wouldn't try to find some hidden meaning in every single poem that they read. Sometimes, to truly enjoy poetry, you just have to read it while not trying to think about it too much. Thank you.

Oh, yes. Now I see the light. We should just stop thinking, for that is the message that poetry finally means to convey. Poet after poet, throughout history, has again and again said, in essence, "Don't think!"

I think it is important to interpret poetry. What I hate is pulling the poem apart until it becomes meaningless. I don't think anyone who has posted comments here has gone that far.

I find it interesting with this poem the way that every stanza depends upon the others for meaning. None of the stanzas make sense on their own as concrete entities, it is only by reading the poem as a whole that you get the meaning. By structuring the poem in this way, WCW has paralleled the way that everything depends upon the red wheelbarrow. I think that's pretty clever.

My other favourite WCW poem is "This is just to say", which is also on this site: http://www.plagiarist.com/poetry/?wid=1048

P.G. -- Imagine my chagrin. I had planned on naming a character in my endlessly in progress great American novel "Preston Grey". I thought the name perfectly evoked what I've envisioned for this character: the kind of haughty, erudite, ultimately effete, snob of the literati who uses his intellect and wide reading to remove joy and wonder FROM the world rather than to add to it. But, alas, now it's a little too late for me to claim that resemblance between my "Preston Grey" character and persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Other than that bit of remorse, pleased to make your acquaintance nobel critic and, no, I won't be rising to the bait.

D.S. -- Thanks for recommending the book. Looks like I can pick it up used FROM Amazon for less than ten bucks and I likely will.

Kyle -- Ah yes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes a red wheel barrow is just a red wheel barrow. But when are either something more or something else? Well, it depends . . . in fact, "so much depends . . . "

To All of the Above, All Others and, really, Any:

I would recommend Dana Gioia's book CAN POETRY MATTER? to anyone enthusiastic about and interested in Mr. Grey's area of considerable expertise. In the chapter NOTES ON THE NEW FORMALISM, Gioia points out that what Williams has written here is actually "two rather undistinguished lines of blank verse." Read the first line through to "barrow" and the second line through to "chickens" and you'll see for yourself. But in breaking the lines where he does, Williams relies on visual devices of text as much as, perhaps more than, the aural outcome of the poem. This may smack of trickery to those with la-dee-da airs, but it's clever trickery--brilliant even, in my less than elevated opinion.

And Williams was one of the first, if not THE first, to push the visual elements of the text in this way (along with e.e. cummings, which is probably why our buddy P.G. also holds him in such disdain as well).

Yes, my opinion may be in the gutter but FROM there it looks at the stars.

Ross wishes you all peace.