Week 4

Everything speaks.–James Joyce, Ulysses

Good day!  Hope you are well.

Last week we ended class discussing the free verse poem "The Red Wheelbarrow," by William Carlos Williams, a poet who strove for simplicity and directness of language, which is one means of making poetry more accessible and of showing how everyday, ordinary experience speaks to us, or can, in poetry.  The still life scene of a barnyard, "red wheel / barrow/ glazed with rain / water" (lines 3-6) at its center, arrests our eye in an act of pure contemplation.  The "white / chickens" of the final lines enliven the scene.  In what sense can the poet maintain "so much depends / upon" (lines 1-2) these humble elements?  One answer is that art depends upon our immediate sensations and perceptions of the animate and inanimate alike, and our ability to make some sense of it all, or to order it in seemingly meaningful ways.  The Imagists drew inspiration from the poetry of the East, including haiku and tanka, in which precise, concrete images, strictly limited by syllable number and line length, tell the whole story, however indirectly.  

We are fascinated by objects ("materialism" to the side) and our emotional ties to objects remains strong.  Size, shape, color, number–each is a marker, meaningful, bespeaking our collective history and language itself.