"She just read it to us": On the importance of seeing "The Red Wheelbarrow"

Image found here (along with a pretty good commentary on the poem).

so hard to talk
about

"The Red Wheel
barrow"

to one's smart
daughter

by phone and not
see it.

In all my excitement about envisioning middle-schoolers building a bed of nails, I forgot to mention that G. related to me that her language arts class is in the midst of a unit on poetry and that as part of one day's discussion her teacher read (and, apparently, only read) William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" to the class. Now, G. is not immune to feeling delight in the pleasures of words. For all I know her teacher isn't immune, either; but I do wish she had lingered a little longer, or at least in a different way, over Williams' poem.

Maybe what follows below the fold is a useful way to think about this poem. Your mileage may vary. All I know is that it works for me in the classroom.

G. began telling me all this by asking a question that, I strongly suspect, everyone who has taught this poem has heard many, many version of: "Why is this poem so important?" She said her teacher told the class that college professors make their students read "The Red Wheelbarrow" all the time, and then she read the poem to the class. End of discussion, apparently. So G. asked me what the big deal was about this poem, and as we talked she revealed that they hadn't actually seen how the poem is laid out, either on the page or on the board: "She just read it to us."

It may sound a bit odd to say of a poem justly famous for its single intense image that seeing the poem itself is important as well, but I think this is the case with "The Red Wheelbarrow." At least, I know that in my classes we talk its layout a fair amount. Though not technically a concrete poem, the temptation is strong to see the layout of each two-line stanza as schematized wheelbarrows. I wonder if that fact works at a subconscious level in the reader: the stanzas' visual shape quietly aids in reinforcing the image created by the poem's words. In addition to talking about that, we focus on the second stanza:

a red wheel
barrow

Notice how Williams breaks into its original pieces a compound-word that has existed in printed English since at least the 14th century: just for an instant, we read/see "a red wheel" and then "barrow." We thus have to spend a bit of time in mentally assembling and re-painting this thing (usually, it's the barrow's color and not the wheel's that determines the wheelbarrow's "color") and, in so doing, have the image reinforced in our mind's eye yet more.

As G. pointed out and as I confirmed, wheelbarrows are ordinary things. But they are so ordinary precisely because so much depends upon them--yet, human beings being what we are, we take them for granted: we leave them exposed to rain and chickens. But just saying that isn't enough, either. So the poem itself--its appearance on the page--is engaged in a kind of work analogous to the wheelbarrow's: almost unnoticed yet, if it weren't present, that work wouldn't get done. This fact serves as a reminder to me--someone who is always encouraging his students to read their assigned poems out loud--that seeing the poem itself and not just what the poem describes matters too.

Now: whether talking about all of this would have helped a few hormone-addled 8th graders to a greater appreciation of the poem is another matter. I do wish, though, that G.'s teacher had given it a shot by, at the very least, letting her students actually see the poem. You never know what might have happened.

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Wallace Stevens

Image found here.

Today is Wallace Stevens' birthday. Long-time visitors here know that Stevens' work is an important touchstone for this blog, so I would be remiss if I didn't post a little something in honor of this man on his day.

Below the fold: a couple of links to past posts of mine in which Stevens figures prominently, along with a poem of his.

First the posts, which also happen to be among the more commented-upon posts I've written:

A stretch of river XXXIX: Updating the wildlife census, and some thoughts on this blog's epigraph

Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is: A ramble through "the natural world"

And now the poem: a small but important poem for reading him, Stevens' "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" (text found here):

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

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Charles Wright

Image found here.

Though, as you'll see below, he often writes about Buddhist monks and, elsewhere, European cities, Charles Wright's voice is a distinctly American one: to my ear, an elegant fusion of Robert Frost's conversational style and Wallace Stevens' later poems' tendencies toward abstraction, and always, always rooted as firmly as the Transcendentalists in the landscape of the place of his birth, the central Appalachians. These are the sorts of poems that, if I were a poet and a whole lot smarter than I am, I would want to write.

Enjoy.

"Body and Soul II" [go here to see this poem's original spacing]

(for Coleman Hawkins)

The structure of landscape is infinitesimal,
Like the structure of music,
seamless, invisible.
Even the rain has larger sutures.
What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together,
Is faith, it appears--faith of the eye, faith of the ear.
Nothing like that in language,
However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms
Blown by the wind.
April, and anything's possible.

Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang.
A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India
And back--on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on
foot.
Ten thousand miles it took him, from 29 to 645,
Mountains and deserts,
In search of the Truth,
the heart of the heart of Reality,
The Law that would help him escape it,
And all its attendant and inescapable suffering.
And he found it.

These days, I look at things, not through them,
And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get.
The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral,
The neighbor's back porch light bulbs glow like anemones.
Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead.
This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark,
when everything starts to shine out,
And aphorisms skulk in the trees,
Their wings folded, their heads bowed.

Every true poem is a spark,
and aspires to the condition of the original fire
Arising out of the emptiness.
It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite.
It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by.
Shooting stars.
April's identical,
celestial, wordless, burning down.
Its light is the light we commune by.
Its destination's our own, its hope is the hope we live with.

Wang Wei, on the other hand,
Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River
Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains,
and lived there,
Off and on, for the rest of his life.
He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it,
A part of nature himself, he thought.
And who would say no
To someone so bound up in solitude,
in failure, he thought, and suffering.

Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small
Dollop of butter hazily at the western edge.
Getting too old and lazy to write poems,
I watch the snowfall
From the apple trees.
Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.

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Elizabeth Bishop

Today is Elizabeth Bishop's birthday. I don't have time this morning for a lengthy post giving you all sorts of reasons why, if you don't know this marvelous poet's work, you should, so instead I'll provide here the concluding lines of the last "movement" of her poem "At the Fishhouses" (go here to see the proper layout of the text--except for the double-spacing). Be sure to read it out loud:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

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A stretch of river XLIII: Wind and Wallace Stevens

This was going to be about the wind that Scruffy and I experienced and of the various roarings beneath the wind--traffic, airplanes, cooling units--and the indefinable Something that I could hear that was framing all this noise and motion. But as it happens, today is Wallace Stevens' birthday (thanks, Mr. Keillor), and Stevens was the sort of poet for whom wind is an important image. So: a favorite Stevens poem of mine in which wind figures prominently. (And a promise of a more substantial post soon.)

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

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