When I introduced poetry to students, I would offer the concept of letting a poem sing to the soul, like a song. It’s easy to ‘teach’ what words put together are analyzed to mean, but that doesn’t make the explanation true. I told them a poem is like a small rock you drop in a stream. Most days it will sit in calm waters, but the mind, like turbulent currents, can change the shape and passage of what you perceive as it turns it over and over.
A hundred years ago, William Carlos Williams wrote several deceptively simple poems. Few words. No Capitalization. No Punctuation.
“so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens”
16 words that so many students told me made absolutely no sense. They couldn’t make any connection to being out in the rain, with a wheelbarrow of any color, or being close to chickens.
“What if I asked you to pick the most important word out of those 16?”
They would ponder it, and most always thought ‘chicken’ or ‘wheelbarrow”. And I would tell them I didn’t know the answer to the question, or even if there was an answer. I just wanted them to get the images in their heads.
“What word do you think in the most important?” they would ask.
I would pause, because truthfully it did change. Depending. Depending on what had occurred recently. “Well, today, I think the important word is ‘glazed’. I say that because it seems to offer ‘hope’. There is a red wheelbarrow by white chickens–that might be a normal occurrence on a farm. But it’s ‘glazed’ by rainwater. Think of how we look out on a rainy day. The ground is wet, soaked, there might be mud. But this wheelbarrow is ‘glazed’. That’s a soft description– it’s peaceful and it seems to offer a vision of hope that the sun will come out to a lovely sight of a juxtaposition of color.”
They didn’t all buy it. Some wrote it down in their notes just in case I quizzed them on it later. I didn’t of course, not that way at least. A few times I asked them to re-write the poem and change the 3 items that would fit in their life at that moment.
“So much depends” on (what 3 factors)? Our life choices always depend on…something.
I have made the decision to find members of my ‘new ‘ family even though the main players are mostly in a cemetery–a delicate balance of maintaining the past and embracing the new.
Today I would write on my quiz paper–
“so much depends
upon making family from
strangers
with tracks from tear
drops
holding hands with
my past.”
In my head, I hear some of my past students say, as they often did, “Ms. B be tripping!”
So true. In four days, I am heading south to meet my newly discovered uncle and step-mother. And later, to meet my newly discovered half-sister Emily.