William Carlos Williams and Joseph Hutchison

            What depends upon a red wheelbarrow? So much. I’ve loved this modest, beautiful poem for years, and this week I was excited to hear the poet himself read “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the recording posted. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed. I listened again, hoping it was fluke, and my disappointment was confirmed. The disappointment soon turned into an… I don’t know, irritation? The thing was, I had this annoying voice in my head telling me I couldn’t possibly “like” the poem if I didn’t enjoy it when THE POET HIMSELF read it.

            I went back to the words on the page, and realized that a huge reason why I love the poem is because it speaks to me visually. The odd lineation –Williams’ use of enjambment– cause me to slow down. Of course, wheelbarrow is one word. But what happens when “wheel” has a big blank space next to it? Although “barrow” follows, it gets its own line. So even though “barrow” is clearly connected to “wheel,” in this poem it also stands alone. The same is true for “rain / water” and “white / chickens.” In all fairness to Williams (as if he needs my fairness) I don’t think there is a way to read that sense audibly. It has to be seen. Audibly hearing, “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow…” is simply not the same thing as reading and seeing the words as they are arranged on the page.

            The red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, sits beside white chickens. But Williams gives “barrow”, “water”, and “chickens” space to exist apart from the words that modify them. Even still, “so much depends,” somehow, on the image of the entire scene. The poem can’t be reduced to “chickens” (or any other word for that matter). Without the first two lines, the poem would read more like a list. But “so much depends / upon” each of the ordinary objects that make up this vivid scene.   

            Speaking of brief, Joseph Hutchinson goes about the task of transforming an ordinary object in his one-line poem:

“Artichoke”

O heart weighed down by so many wings

            Like Williams and his red wheelbarrow, Hutchinson makes me pause over something as mundane as an artichoke. The poem’s brevity, and even its lack of punctuation, contribute to the notion that paying attention only requires a moment. Whether its a leafy artichoke, or the rainwater glistening in a wheelbarrow, both are made significant upon closer look.

T.S. Eliot and Jorie Graham

I love “Burnt Norton” because it reads like music feels. It’s the experience of time I guess, as it moves through the poem. The movement is what makes it beautiful, because it kind of carries you into awareness of the present.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Consciousness doesn’t last longer than a moment, and maybe that’s a good thing. Without the limitations of time, at least in these mortal bodies, I think we would be crushed. Eliot is gesturing towards a paradox: immediate experience can’t be divorced from the past or the future. Even in my imminent frame, I can’t deny the pressure of transcendence bearing down on the moment.

But there is relief in the still point. These lines from “Burnt Norton” are some of my favorite lines in poetry:

And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Jorie Graham is another poet who is like, hyper-aware of the present. Sometimes it gives me anxiety. There’s a sense that the speaker of the poem desperately wants to bear the reality Eliot’s bird said humans can’t handle. She really wants to know it. I was binging on Jorie Graham poems for way too long, and then I stumbled across an interview she gave in the Paris Review. Anyway, she talks about this profound experience she had in a tiny little chapel in Italy. Something about that experience, and wanting to distill it into a poem, keyed her in to her own “desire-for-belief” –a huger for presence. This hunger links her to Eliot for me. I think she has his capacity for presence, but it seems to torment her more. It's almost as if she wants to be freed of it.

From “Covenant”

O sweet conversation: protozoa, air: how long have you been speaking?
The engine [of the most] is passing now.
At peak: the mesmerization of here, this me here, this me
passing now.
So as to leave what behind?
We, who can now be neither wholly here nor disappear?
And to have it come so close and yet not know it:
how in time you do not move on:
how there is no "other" side:
how the instant is very wide and bright and we cannot
                                                                     ever
get away with it--the instant--what holds the "know"

Graham’s poetry is stunning because it presses the limits of language and presence. Her hunger is loud, and far from being satisfied. 

T.S. Eliot and Billy Collins

Perhaps in an (indirect?) nod to Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot uses titles to disrupt typical expectations in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Love Song will do something like this this to the reader of his poem-- and Eliot appears to be aligning this poem with all those other poems in the history of Western poems about love. Before reading the translation, even the poem’s epigraph (in the “romance language” of Italian) seems to enforce this idea. The third moment where the reader’s expectation is brought to its height is in the poem’s opening couplet:

“Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky”

only to come crashing down on the next line:

“Like a patient etherized upon a table.” 

Formally, Eliot is aligning himself with the poetic conventions of end-rhyme (I and sky) setting himself up to make the perfect love-song metaphor. Unfortunately, comparing the evening to a numb human body kind of ruins the mood.

What follows is perhaps more depressing, but a lot more interesting than a typical love poem. Prufrock is paralyzed with self-consciousness. The poor guy can’t make a decision to save his life, and that’s because he’s sort of talking to himself, Hamlet style, about how pointless it is to try to articulate or realize his internal desire. I think Prufrock wants to disturb the universe, but he’s scared. In the end, he can’t even claim Hamlet's greatness because he’s “Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous . . .” Prufrock’s Love song ends with death:  “till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

Billy Collins writes another unconventional love poem, but in a slightly less dramatic register. “Litany” begins with an epigraph from Belgian poet Jacques Crickillon:

 “You are the bread and the knife, / The crystal goblet and the wine.” 

The first stanza continues to use this model, comparing the beloved next to the morning dew and then to the sun. The speaker begins to run out of steam in stanza 2, when he seems to become disturbed by all the things his beloved cannot be compared to.

“However, you are not the wind in the orchard… and you are certainly not the pine-scented air, / There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.”

His digression (very Prufrock) eventually leads into a profession of his own identity: “It might interest you to know, / speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, / that I am the sound of the rain on the roof.” In the last stanza he finally brings the poem full circle, wandering back to the initial object of the poem. “But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife. / You are still the bread and the knife.”