OK so my name is Catherine and this is my second year in college. I’ve lived in Oregon for almost twelve years now, and before that I lived in South Carolina. I am the last of five children, two brothers on my mom’s side and a brother and sister on my dad’s side, and the youngest by eleven years. I have taken various poetry classes over the years and have decided definitively that I absolutely do not like free verse, stream of consciousness, or automatic writing. Basically I am not a fan of poems without constraints. Another thing that just annoys the beejesus out of me is when, usually in poetry classes, when people are analyzing a poem, the most common question is “What is the underlying meaning?” Why can’t a poem just be taken literally? Like William Carlos William’s The Red Wheelbarrow:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
I always hear people saying well maybe the red wheelbarrow means this, or maybe the chickens represent this. Can’t the poem just mean what it says? I can go on forever about over analyzing poems.
Here is a poem I wrote a long while back. I don’t currently have most of my poems because I’m not home but here is something.
You Can’t buy…
You can’t buy freedom,
You can’t buy happiness,
You can’t buy love,
But most of all,
You can’t buy one more minute,
Or hour, or day, or year,
To stay alive and spend
That day with a loved one.
So if you can’t buy what you need,
What you really need
Then what’s the point of buying
Anything?
I like your points. You're subconsciously alluding to Freud's "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." I agree that sometimes it is much easier to just take poetry literally as it sometimes hurts my brain to analyze the depth of someone's work. So many factors are included. People like to parallel the poet's work with the poet's personal life (I'm not of that school of thought unless it is blatantly obvious). But wouldn't you want the ambiguity of the real meaning of a poem in order to make it interesting? The millions of interpretations are what makes poetry enigmatic and exciting.
ReplyDeleteI like your poem, it reminds me of Aesop's Fables. Where the reader knows exactly what moral you're trying to convey. I can see that you like to write poetry in that same manner. While I think that your lesson is a good one, but I can't help but feel let down that there was nothing to question or nothing to ponder after/while reading it. Maybe that's just me acting like those people you talked about that were commenting on the wheelbarrow poem. In my opinion, and you certainly don't have to listen to my opinion, I think if you developed it a bit more, it has potential.
*I added an extra "but". Ooops. :P
ReplyDeleteJust a bit of nitpicking: you seem to group stream of consciousness among the forms of writing you dislike because they are "without constraints." As I explained in my post, stream of consciousness is no more (or less) free of constraint than any other method used in narrative forms like novels, short stories, some poems, etc. It's an entirely calculated discursive technique, just like dialogue or third-person narration. This doesn't mean you have to like it, of course! I just wanted to make sure you weren't confused about how very different it is from automatic writing.
ReplyDeleteI share your frustration with those who talk about things like getting at the "underlying meaning" of poems, though I suspect we may differ on some of the details thereof. I agree with you, for instance, that "The Red Wheel Barrow" is very simple in terms of its basic meaning: it's practically impossible to paraphrase its referential content in any way that isn't less clear and direct than the poem itself. Sometimes people like to speculate about what exactly depends on the wheelbarrow. It's a free country, I guess, but this seems like a colossal waste of time. All we know is what the poem tells us, and anything else, no matter how reasonable on its own terms, is going to be extratextual speculation. So I'm totally on your side there.
This doesn't mean, however, that I think the poem can't be analyzed interestingly, in ways that avoid the whole "what does it mean" trap. For me, the poem is best read not as a single isolated lyric, but in the context of the book in which it appears (Spring and All) as well as WCW's other work, and the entire modernist period of American poetry. The more you learn about the larger sphere of literary production and theory in which it is a part, the less reason there is to get bogged down in simplistic questions about what the poem "itself" means.
Another take on the poem: part of its importance is its ability to get generations of readers arguing over what it means when it is so patently simple. How many other famous poems are like that? This is, of course, a question of reception, canon-formation, and so forth rather than one of interpretation per se (though I can imagine readings that try to explain the poem's persistence as a textbook staple by examining its language in some way. I'm not convinced such readings would be fruitful, but...).
I find your poem poses a question to our society's needs to consume everything when material possessions will not bring us happiness or any satisfaction. The ironic part in this play we call life is that we spend and buy to fill a bottomless void that is only filled with love and acceptance.
ReplyDelete