Trying to squeeze in the post I promised on ‘The Red Wheel Barrow’ - it’ll have to be notes.

Riddles of Form – Five



so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

(William Carlos Williams)


I.

The notoriety of this poem – one of those that I’ve heard certain people (colleagues, students, etc.) say trumphantly: “now that’s why I think poetry is a load of rubbish”). Is it the poetic equivalent of the Carl Andre bricks or John Cage’s 4’33”?

Maybe.

Then again, I’ve heard the opposite response: “Ah! At last a poem that says something – what a lovely picture.”

It’s not a question of ‘who’s right’ but I do think this poem is working in more interesting ways than either of these reponses suggest.

II.

Line.

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

Take away the line breaks and you destroy the poem.

Why?

II.i.

The line breaks impose a pace to the reading of the poem – slowing it down. This forces concentration and attention which – it seems to me – are integral to the poem’s ‘meaning’.

We are made to scrutinize a (red) wheel barrow and some (white) chickens.

We are made to scrutinize these sixteen words. Only sixteen? So much depends upon sixteen words ... is this possible?

We are made to scrutinize the world around us (if WCW is making such a deal about wheel barrows and chickens what’s going on around me?)


III.

“so much depends”

You can read this as asserting the extra-ordinary importance of this (seemingly) so un-extra-ordinary scene.

You can read this as asserting just so much (and no more) depends upon these items. A weighing of words and establishing of values.

WCW is intent on a purification of language, reconnecting words to things, to life, to experience. I sense an aesthetic but also political and moral dimension: what it means to speak accurately (later, Allen Ginsberg will talk of the inherently bogus nature of political speech in terms of its thirdhandedness).

III.i.

But do the lines initiate an idea or argument?

Or do they read as a continuation or qulaification of a foregoing discussion?

“Having said ... so much depends upon ...”.

III.ii.

There is an uncertainty as to the poem’s borders – where it begins.

As with the Creeley poem this might be to suggest continuties between page and the ‘outside’. In the specific volume ‘Spring and All’ there is most definitely an attempt to blur edges – prose/poetry, explanatory writing/imaginative writing, art/life – and the poems themselves demand to read in series. (Thus the typical ‘first encounter’ with ‘The Red Wheel Barrow out of its original context deforms the text).

“So much depends upon”. Correction – it is as much what surrounds as is ‘within’ the text. (A point not lost on WCW).

III.iii.

I hear a ‘voice’ – an educated early 20th Century American voice. Conversational – not at all ‘high flown’ or puffed up. Not at all the voice of Victorian British poets intoning majestically. This could be a phrase said in a town hall meeting, a discussion over breakfast.

The language of poetry and the language of everyday life are one and the same.

IV.

Enjambment.

so much depends
upon

the break between “depends” and “upon” allows “so much depends” to exist as a grammatical unit of meaning. Then the little ‘thunk’ effect as the eye goes down to the next line. Literally, then, depends upon.

a red wheel
barrow

the break here brings the activity of reading and conceptualizing to the foreground. At the end of line three the reader ‘sees’ a “red wheel”. As the eye moves to the next line the concept is modified: “red wheel barrow”. WCW subtly alerts us to the provisonality of all perceptions – most especially in terms of language and the physical act of reading. Long before Derrida, WCW seems to be exploring the ‘differance’ and play of signification at work in writing. (And in Derridaean style, let’s not overlook the fortuitous echo of “read” within “red”. Literally – a ‘read’ wheel, no, red wheel barrow ... as if there were really a wheel barrow there at all!).

glazed with rain
water

the effect of the break here seems to be one of making distinctions, of perceiving with subtlety. Rain is not rain water. One is the action of precipitating, the other the product. (Ask a gardener). Again, a driving force behind the poem seems to be that of paying attention: in life as in language.

beside the white
chickens

here the colour adjective hovers uncertainly in space – WCW foregrounding the fragility of grammatical constructions and what slight nudges can send things haywire. (Look at Miles Champion’s early volume ‘Compositional Bonbons Placate’ for an amusing development of this).

“chickens” arrives with a sense of relief and closure – but also anticlimax and bafflement. You mean that’s all it was? So much depended upon – uh?

Actually, this is one of things I really like about the poem: that it refuses the trick, the punch line moral, the and-what-I-have-really-been-talking-about-is ... . No. The poem is as it is. No symbols. No metaphors. No similes. No allegory.

No ideas/ but in things (‘A Sort of Song’).

V.

Sound.

There’s plenty happening, though, in terms of WCW’s language. (As always with American English poetry I have to factor in my own British English pronunciation.)

V.i.

subtle interplay of ‘s’ (its placement at the start or mid-position as against end of the word) and hard ’z’ sounds

so - depends - glazed - beside – chickens

V.ii.

activation of unvoiced vowels

much – a – (wat)er – be(side) - the

although I’m aware that these could be said more actively

V.iii.

approximate sounds being set against each other

(de)pends – (u)pon; depends – glazed (inversion of dz/zd); much – chi(ckens)

V.iv.

vowels

so – barrow; glazed – rain; beside – white

V.v.

What seems siginificant is the ‘buried’ quality of such sound interplay – WCW avoids (rather than isn’t competent enough to do) assertive rhymes and echoes. The ‘heightened’ language of a reader’s expectations is being strategically held back.

Another way of looking at it: WCW is challenging lazy expectations of poetic sound. Other logics are at work, so many different ways of working sounds. Decisions made step by step, word to word. Not a scheme or a projected shape.

VI.

Let’s prune the poem back still further. Chop the first four words -

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

What is lost?

Might not this work rather well as a Poundian Imagist poem or elongated haiku?

But this isn’t – it seems to me - what WCW is after.

The opening phrase “so much depends/upon” gives the poem its meaningfulness. To put it better: it establishes an attempt to provide meaning. WCW evokes the kind of phrase which connotes meaningful discourse. This is the language of essay writing, of philosophical texts, writing which clarifies, apportions value.

The subsequent three sections do work like an Imagist poem. Effectively WCW collages. The language here is simple statement (“a red wheel/barrow”) and (“beside the white/chickens”) combined with elementary description “glazed with rain/water”) – the last phrase the closest, perhaps, to ‘conventional’ poetic writing. Certainly there is a rupture in style with the expectations set by section one.

We were made to expect meaning – now this!

Common sense and daily experience allow for white chickens to be in the vicinity of red wheel barrows (and here there’s the invitation for lazy projections onto the poem of WCW’s celebration of poverty, daily life etc – what Ron Silliman pinpoints as the School of Quietude’s appropriation of WCW. Yes?).

Grammatical habits also allow for the chickens and wheel barrow to exist together – WCW retains cohesion by means of “depends/upon” leading to the “wheel/barrow” which is, in turn, “glazed” by the rain water, and stands “beside” white chickens. Descriptive and prepositional logic are sound.

And yet, the “wheel/barrow” and “white/chickens” are NOT meaningfully connected.

Yes, you could see this scene in a million back yards.

Yes, you can read the lines a hundred times and they make perfect grammatical sense.

Yet why the hell is this poem putting a red wheel barrow and white chickens together? And claiming that so much depends upon them?

Is this surrealism? ("beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella" – Lautreamont). Hardly! Yet the effect is nothing short of transformatory the moment you allow for what WCW has done in this poem.

To recap:

- exploded conventions about line and sense units
- made the reader aware of the actual reading of the poem and – by extension – habits of thought and inattention in daily life
- effected a change in the poetic voice and/or what language is available to poetry
- expanded what had been a limited range of sound possibilities and enabling sound to develop according to its own ‘in situ’ logic while also avoiding ‘beautiful’ and sonorous effects
- juxtaposed different ‘discourses’ of meaning within the poem (expository/ grammatical/ imagistic collage/ common sense) to break apart lazy habits of reading. (Is ‘The Red Wheel Barrow’ where L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry begins? Why Clark Coolidge would become so fond of the word “so” as to entitle an entire volume ‘The So’?)

The effect for me is of a poem sliding apart in terms of all these different ‘dimensions’ or movements. Ironic, given the utter stasis of the purported ‘subject matter’ (what a poor term that is).

Nothing is happening.

So much is going on!

What’s for sure is that to either rubbish the poem or to see it simply as a reassuring ‘slice of life’ is to be asleep to what depends upon these sixteen – yes, only sixteen - words.

The word must be put down for itself, not as a symbol of nature but a part, cognizant of the whole – aware – civilized. WCW)