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Blacksmith's fire and hammer at the forge

Blacksmiths and Wheelbarrows

By Rob Carney

Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
 

The Utah legislature is in session again, and higher education is being targeted again (the humanities, especially, are a waste of time), but I can’t start the new year thinking about politics, and I’m guessing I’m not the only one. There must be other things people can talk about, other common denominators. And one of them, I’m pretty sure, is that in high school we all read William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

We probably had the same question about it too, or heard someone in class ask the question: “Why is this is a poem?”

If you want to stop now and google that question, you’ll probably get a bazillion answers, but in a second I’ll offer you my own take, and I promise it’s going to be simpler. Simpler might be a kind of virtue.

Before I do that, though, I probably ought to short-circuit two pretty common misperceptions since I’ve heard people say they think poems are a kind of secret symbol and that the job of readers is to bang their heads against that symbol code until voila! as if the whole point of poetry is for people to go, “Oh, okay. Now I get it.” If this were really the case, then I’d think that poems are irritating also. But don’t worry. The red wheelbarrow isn’t a symbol; it’s an image. And rendered as it is, it’s also art. How come? Because in addition to its careful construction—the attention to assonance (the short-U sounds, long-A sounds, etc.), the patterned rhythms, and so on—the poem controls our imaginative eye in the same way as a film camera does, by zooming in on specific details, or by pulling back to give us wide views and turn our eyes skyward, or by jump-cutting to a different part of the scene. If film and photography are art (and they are, or they can be), then “The Red Wheelbarrow” is likewise art. That’s one reason.

A second reason is the frame. There’s a frame around the wheelbarrow because Williams found an image to capture, and the frame around it is important. It makes this image different than, and more than, merely walking outside and looking around, or standing there staring into the distance.  

Third, the implications of the poem tell us a lot too. Take the word choice “glazed,” for instance. Glazed means that it’s just finished raining; the rain stopped coming down minutes ago. And it shows us that the rain was drizzly. And it shows us that the sun is out now, or else shining a bit through the overcast. And we can infer (imagine, see, smell, feel) that the ground around us is wet, and that it’s browner in contrast to the red of that wheelbarrow and the white of those chickens. 

Fourth, a wheelbarrow has a purpose (try living in this place without a wheelbarrow, and you’ll definitely wish you had one), and it’s the same way with poems. What do I mean? I mean that living would be harder and less good without them—less imaginative and less colorful. Poems help teach us to use our senses so we know that glazed with rain water is different than full of rain water or dripping with rain water, and that’s not nothing because our senses do matter. They remind us to feel, and to be more fully alive.

I’m not trying to suggest now, by ending with my own poem, that I think it’ll be as landmark and lasting as “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Not at all. That would be ridiculous. But my own poem, likewise, is about function, craft, and attention, so I like to hope that it might have made Williams smile:

The Blacksmith’s Story

The blacksmith specialized in buoys.
And the whole coast said he was the best,

every cove and harbor, every inlet,
alive with his work:

those tones
when the swells rolled;

two sizes
so the bells rang in harmony…

if you slept under fog with the windows open,
the lost might visit your dreams.

Some thought his sweat from the forge
was the secret,

that the salt air in it
added buoyancy.

Others knew a few are just sculpted by labor:
more patient, and deeper, like the sea.

 

 

Rob CarneyRob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.

Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
 
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
 
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.

Header photo by Peter Freitag, courtesy Pixabay.