Incendiary Lit

This reading took place at Florida State University, and is quite entertaining. I just reread her poem “The Laws of Probability in Levittown” again, in the Blue Billy Collins (2006) Best American Poetry. Check, check, check, a check it out.

Click here now. (audio file)

Kurt Vonnegut is sort of a religion to me, and if I didn’t have so much school to blame it on, I could very likely commit Hari Kari for not knowing about Armageddon in Retrospect, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s new and uncollected writings. Mark relates a few anecdotes from his introduction the posthumous book. Never has an egg metaphor been so sad. Learn a little bit about American literature, listen to this excerpt. Then buy his books and read them all (but don’t start with Galapagos. You need to work your way up to that tremendous, but very odd novel). I’m a huge fan of Bluebeard, Player Piano, and Cat’s Cradle, and Siren’s of Titan too, but I’d say read one of the other three I mentioned first. Plus, if you don’t care which edition you get, pretty much all of the books I listed can be found for about $1. So spend the ten dollars that would use to buy a burger (without tip) at Chili’s, and get three books that will make you laugh a minimum of ten times, as well as have interesting and imaginative plots. Do it. Go Vonnegut.

Here is the poem.

The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

——

OK, I’ll break this down via form, and meaning. Not to say this is what was intended by Mr. Williams, but this is how I’m looking it, so take it as you will.

——

Form: Syllabically the poem is structured, line by line: 4/2 - 3/2 - 3/2 - 4/2. That’s only 22 syllables total. Remember that. The middle two stanzas break a compound word at the line break, without a hyphen. Very short poem, very tightly structured.

——

Meaning: OK, it’s imagistic. It’s minimalistic. The last three stanzas set the scene. We see the red wheelbarrow, that it is out in the rain, and that there are chickens. So much depends upon the words “So much depends / upon” in this poem. You can bring literary theory about the symbolism of rain, or color theory with the red, but in my mind those are less important. The first stanza, that’s another story. Why would so much depend upon a wheelbarrow? What do we know about, well, anything, in the universe of this poem, but what do we know of the location, the world? We know there are chickens and a wheelbarrow. Where would you find those two things? A farm is my guess. Why would so much depend on the wheelbarrow? What is a wheelbarrow to a farmer? A necessity. A farmer needs a wheelbarrow to complete his tasks, maintain his livelihood, his very life. Thus, so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.

This audio clip is from The New Yorker, yes, the Atlantic, I mean, New Yorker. *Giggle* OK, enough foolishness. This is a cool little podcast, TC Boyle answers a couple questions, then reads the great short story. Not sure why, but since I re-read the story again a couple years back, I can’t help but picture Anders as the film critic Mr. Farber from Lady in the Water. Enjoy.