William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” must be among the most anthologized poems in English. Rita Dove picked it as one of the fifteen best American poems of the twentieth century alongside “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” To teach a poetry course without pausing to listen to it strikes me as academic malfeasance.
Still, during my thirtysomething years of teaching, whenever I assigned the poem, even the English majors (especially the English majors) would stare back at it as if discovering on the soles of their shoes something they’d inadvertently stepped in. “What does it mean?” they’d groan, and get the customary caution about the limits of “content analysis” before I contemplated its crystalline beauty once again.
I suspect some of their resistance to the poem had to do with its tone. Just as Wallace Stevens can never let you entirely forget he’d become the Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company even as “concupiscent curds” of ice cream are being whipped for a wake, Williams never completely loses the way he probably spoke as a pediatrician to young mothers, reminding them to wash their hands and not to shake the little nippers. He’s not just looking, he’s educating us about how to look. It can seem like a déformation professionnelle rendering the sensuous reality of the red wheelbarrow a bit chilly.
Nevertheless, my heart sank when in the mid-eighties as an adjunct lecturer I was asked to sub for a colleague who’d suffered a mild stroke. He was teaching “How to Read and Understand Poetry” to a class of about thirty students. I had no idea going in what poems he’d assigned; I knew only that he was using the then current edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Not only had he asked them to read “The Red Wheelbarrow,” he’d left them with the impression that the poem was merely clever. Ditto the poems about the plums and the cat in the jam closet, What did they mean?
At that very moment, however, one of the Muses, probably Erato, tapped on my shoulder to remind me there was another poem in the anthology also eight lines long, in couplets, Shelley’s “Music When Soft Voices Die,” which would let these scholars do something they loved—compare and contrast. And so we did, discovering all the gewgaws Williams implied we could do without—meter, rhyme, “sweet violets” and “rose leaves.” As he wrote elsewhere, “the rose is obsolete.” I even got to mention that wheelbarrows, used to carry loads from one place to another, echo the function of metaphors—a moving van in Greek is a fortigaki metaforon. And okay, at this point, I lost them again.
But this brings us, thirty-five years later, to the occasion for my poem “COVID Roadshow.” I had been writing a poem a day for several years and posting them a day or two later on Facebook. As a student at NYU in the Sixties I’d overheard someone at the Poetry Project declare that his poetry project was writing a poem a day. I later learned Emily Dickinson had done it a hundred years or so earlier, but it still seems to me a particularly New York School undertaking, at the other end of the spectrum from Elizabeth Bishop taking twenty-six years to complete “The Moose.” The venture seemed to induce a state of mind not unlike that promised by meditation, even if the actual poems were unlikely to wind up published in The New Yorker or read at a Harvard commencement ceremony.
A former colleague at Philadelphia Community College came upon some of these poems, contacted me, and at lunch when he happened to mention he was lecturing about Williams, I shared the experience recounted above and got invited to be a guest at his next class, being conducted on Zoom. He was discussing “The Red Wheelbarrow,” comparing and contrasting it with Jack Spicer’s “A Red Wheelbarrow.” My poem, written a day or two after the class, spun off the discussion.
I would think the obvious question about “COVID Roadshow” is why it’s in more-or-less rhymed quatrains instead of an open form like that of Williams’s and Spicer’s poems. I could suggest that it’s meant to echo the Zoom screen’s grid of faces, but if you were to stumble across Skip Tracing, Michael Klausman’s selection of my poems-a day, you’d notice they’re mostly loosely rhymed quatrains. I relied on the form the way Robert Johnson or Thelonious Monk relied on twelve-bar blues. Near rhymes and slight variations in rhythm and line length can upset expectations in the same way that a musician’s rhythmic displacements can surprise and delight. That’s the theory. And rhyme can provide an aleatory dimension as I write. I mean “Procrustean” and “comparison”—is that even a rhyme, and did I see it coming when I sat down in the afternoon to write my poem of the day?
I also didn’t foresee the comparison of the images on the Zoom screen from the waist up to an open casket displaying the upper half of a body. The crack about waiting for the other shoe to drop refers to something I learned dating an undertaker’s daughter—people are usually buried without their shoes. The reference to an undertaker at the end is probably an echo of Wordsworth’s “We murder to dissect.”
