0 William Carlos Willams

Though I am so very tempted to feature my idol (and yours) Joss Whedon again today, I thought I might change things up a bit and revisit my English teacher roots (that's right...I used to teach English. Fear that.).

April, as some of you may know, is National Poetry Month. It was this time of year when I'd spring upon my students the dreaded poetry unit. William Carlos Williams was always one of my featured poets.

Williams was born in 1883, lived primarily in New Jersey, and died in 1963. He worked as a pediatrician but also received a Pulitzer prize for poetry. His work (writing-wise) was a part of the Imagist movement which was devoted to the creation of poems sticking to four basic principles:

1. Concentration on the image—the thing itself.
2. Use of common language and precise words
3. Creation of new rhythms
4. Freedom of choice subject

The first time I ever heard of Williams was in a high school English class. It was either my sophomore or junior year, but I honestly can't remember which. It doesn't really matter though because the set-up was still the same. My high school English classes typically saw me sitting in the back of the room, my textbook shoved into the corner of my desk and maybe open to the page the teacher had requested while I worked fervently on whatever story I happened to be writing at the time. But, for whatever reason, I happened to look up the day we covered William Carlos Williams and read what is possibly his most famous poem—

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon 

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

My initial teenage reaction to this poem was "Are you freaking kidding me? That guy's famous for this?" My second reaction to this poem was to create in my notebook a special section entitled "Stupid Poetry In The Style of William Carlos Williams" which contained such gems as the following:

In A Nutshell

in a nutshell
are, in fact,
the contents which
compose a nut.

Anyway, teenage ignorance aside, I never forgot the red wheelbarrow poem. It made a very lasting impression upon me, and the more I thought about it (and I thought about it a lot), the more brilliant I found it to be. It's one of my favorite poems now, and part of that is because of how elegantly I think it illustrates what the Imagist poets were trying to do. So I went on to teach it to each and every group of students with which I did a poetry unit. And each and every time, I told the kids about an analysis of this poem that I had once read which stated that this poem was particularly brilliant because even the stanzas looked like wheelbarrows. It led to many fun and spirited debates.

But whatever side the kids landed on, they all ended up spending more time—independent time even—checking out the works of a great American poet and others like him. And others not like him.

Which was, really, the whole point.

Happy Friday, everyone. I hope y'all have a great weekend.