98% Pynchon Free

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 12:56 PM
Subject: Re: 98% Pynchon Free
>
> William Carlos Williams:
>
> so much depends
> upon
> a red wheel
> barrow
> glazed with rain
> water
> beside the white
> chickens.
>

My favourite poem, but tell me, Terrance, what does it mean? How do you
interpret it? Where does it get it's poetic force from? I couldn't even say
why I love it that much. Interpreting Rimbaud, W.C. Williams, Ezra Pound,
T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein or John Ashbery poetry really isn't easy.

Is it, like Majorie Perloff says, that Williams' poetry refuses "to cohere,"
that it, like a "Cubist painting (...) introduces contradictory clues that
resist(s) all attempts to apply the test of consistency."
(Majorie Perloff: "The Poetics of Indeterminacy," Princeton 1981, p. 128-29)

My idea is that the first line builds up a tension, raises expectations of
something really important. But these expectations aren't fulfilled by the
second line. A wheel barrow isn't that important, even if it glazes from
rain water. And chickens, oh je, what to make of that? Definitely the red
wheel-barrow, the rain water and the white chickens are those contradictory
clues that resist any consistency Perloff means.

"Williams insistence on working in the idiom of modern American speech and
on mining local terrain for his poems, however, veered sharply from the
classical allusions and Far Eastern experimentations of Pound and his
imagist set."
(W.C.W.: "Early Poems," Mineola, N.Y., 1997, p. iii)

Otto