Friday, April 4 – Stories everywhere if I slow down a little
William Carlos Williams, a practicing MD who studied at my alma mater U Penn, died in 1963 at 79. I don’t know who said that he “worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician, but excelled at both.” No matter; it’s a good line.
Perhaps his most quoted poem, “XXII” opens a place that evokes the smell of chickens and spring rain.. No action here; the rain has already fallen, no one tends the chickens, no one uses the wheelbarrow. Action distracts, the poet seems to say. “Stand still. Look”. Wheelbarrow does its work much like American contemporary Charles Sheeler’s still-life photos and massive factory-scapes of The Rouge. Like “Wheelbarrow” these freeze a moment. “There are stories here; wait for them. But while you wait, stand still.”
I had not thought of the Red Wheelbarrow in a while but the mist this morning got me thinking about William Carlos Williams. A blessing for early Spring.
We are rounding the bend toward the end of the term, lots of stories lived since January by our students and our selves, lots of stories waiting to happen.
Have a good weekend.
john sj
XXII
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
[“The Red Wheelbarrow”] sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall. He had been a fisherman, caught porgies off Gloucester. He used to tell me how he had to work in the cold in freezing weather, standing ankle deep in cracked ice packing down the fish. He said he didn’t feel cold. He never felt cold in his life until just recently. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by the white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing.[4]
