Poem of the Day: "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams

The Red Wheelbarrow (1923)

by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

At last count, 247,822,409 American students have been driven crazy by the stature of this poem in the literary world. Many of them, in good faith, have offered that it celebrates farm life. While I don't find that wrong, I don't see why so many American teens don't think it's enough for a poem to say, "Look." Or, more elaborately: see? These ordinary objects, these items and creatures are in the world. What do you see in the world? How might it matter? Can rain or light transform them? Can you?

I recently assigned my college freshmen a descriptive sketch in prose, explaining that they need to be aware of their obligation simply to see--to witness--all they can of what's around them before they start trying highfalutin stuff like comparing and contrasting or defining or classifying. One more time, youth was baffled. "What are we supposed to see?" Or, "My world's boring." Or, "The picture frame on my desk is brown. So what?"

They don't seem to agree, or care about, Williams's and the Imagists' notion of "no ideas but in things," though it surely makes some important sense, no matter how limited or limiting it might seem compared to fancy endeavors like transcendentalism or ethics. If you don't perceive the material world, who cares whether you think you've transcended it or moralized about it effectively?

On Bill Moyers' Journal today, guest and journalist Mark Danner said that countries like the U.S. repeatedly become entangled in wars and other messes because they don't realize how much they don't know about Country X until they're already embroiled in a situation from which it would be embarrassing if not impossible to extricate oneself "honorably." And of course, embarrassment and dishonor are more critical than death. Once troops are physically there, palpably in the realities of a place, its people and terrain and objects and situations seize policy makers by the throat; new strategies have to be implemented--despite the inconvenience of moving corpses out of the way.

I don't see how it's far-fetched to say this amounts to a failure of imagination, which in turn is a failure to see, touch, hear, and smell what was there all along, but was inconvenient and inconsistent with preconceived notions--what we thought was there, what we needed to be there.

Is it really absurd to posit that this begins with noticing red wheelbarrows? And caves, really, really deep caves where people can hide? Wheelbarrow, cave, wheelbarrow, cave . . . . That stone wall and the path to it--are they glazed prettily with rainwater or merely slick enough to slip on?

There might be ideas in addition to things, but if ideas ignore things, details, as the ideas are getting born, I have a strong opinion on how much they're worth.

(By the way, I found Wikipedia's information on "The Red Wheelbarrow" interesting and helpful. It's brief and I have an eyebrow raised about some of it, but it's a beginning).

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