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Red Wheelbarrow

Beautiful essay on the Red Wheelbarrow and other poems that use words that are are so ferociously alive that they may almost bite. They dare you to make sense of them, mock the reader as if they would ever understand what the poet intended. You are left with words like so many pieces of hot coal - do with them what you may but they will leave their mark. You don't forget a poem like Red Wheelbarrow and you likely don't come much closer to understanding what they poet meant in any number of readings of it. Even so, it wan fun to read another poet's view of this poem

“The Red Wheelbarrow,” like so many Williams poems, is experimental. It lacks punctuation, relies on erratic or unusual lineation, and generally dissolves the traditional boundaries between one thing, or idea, and another. He had a famous maxim, “No ideas but in things,” which I take to mean that to speak about ideas, emotions, and abstractions, we must ground them firmly in the things of the world. All but the first two lines of “The Red Wheelbarrow” is devoted to one image.

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