The following day when I met with him and he sensed that he was going to receive further consequences for his transgressions, he became agitated and tried to argue “but I served a block of in school suspension.”
I stopped him and acknowledged his perspective, but I asked him what would happen if students who did what he did were to receive just one block of in school suspension.
He listened to what I had to say, thought about it for a minute or so, and then said, “We’d go hard.”
‘Yeah,” I said, “And we’re not going to “go hard” here at this school.”
LOL – and what does all of this have to do with my Dickinson plog (poetry blog)? Well, I came across a Reels video recently about William Carlos Williams’ poem about the red wheelbarrow, and the person in the video states, “One of the funniest and most true things I heard about poetry was from meme that my brother sent me and it was someone who said poetry made so much more sense when I realized that it's just sentences that go hard – and yeah, that is what poetry is” – and later, poetry is “language from which we have no defense.” The video is HERE. I also found a second video where the poem is read by WCW himself, HERE. More on this poem tomorrow! |
Yesterday I posted William Carlos Williams’ poem about the red wheelbarrow and the quote that “poetry made so much more sense when I realized that it's just sentences that go hard” – and also that poetry is “language from which we have no defense.”
So what is poetry?
Emily Dickinson said, ““If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
Back to WCW’s poem about the red wheelbarrow. That reminded me of a poem called “Remember” – shown at the right – attributed here to a dude named “Dave.” Dave’s poem is certainly akin to William Carlos Williams’ poem, no? On the one hand, could one argue that the purpose behind WCW’s poem is in some way relatable to R. Mutt’s (i.e. Marcel Duchamp’s) now-classic sculpture “Fountain”? (I just saw this artwork at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) |
In for on R. Mutt's "Fountain" is HERE. Here’s some food for thought – the link found HERE is to SparkNotes’ analysis of WCW's poem. What do you think? Do you agree with that summation – or do you have other thoughts on the poem? Is it “language that goes hard”? Does it make you feel as if the top of your head were taken off! |