‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is the first poem that Miss Stretchberry introduces to her sceptical class in Sharon Creech’s novel, Love That Dog.
So much depends ….
JACK
Room 105 – Miss Stretchberry
September 13
I don’t want to
because boys
don’t write poetry.
Girls do.
…
September 27
I don’t understand
the poem about
the red wheelbarrow
and the white chickens
and why so much
depends upon
them.
If that is a poem
about the red wheelbarrow
and the white chickens
then any words
an be a poem.
You’ve just got to
make
short
lines.
Sharon Creech (2001) Love That Dog. London: Bloomsbury.
The ending of Creech’s book gets me every time. And now I am thinking about it, the last time I read it was the very week that the first lockdown was announced. I was reading with a group of Year 5 children and they had suggested we read all the poems (they are gathered at the end of the book) before we started on the story itself. It was an inspired idea for that group. We spent a giddily joyous hour reading and re-reading the poems and talking about them. Trying out different ways of saying them and noticing how they worked.
Who knows whether they finished reading the novel? I didn’t see them again, face to face, for more than a year. But we did continue writing and, as is routine with that class, we always begin with a list of words. And every time we do, we are reminded of their pleasures. In particular, we enjoy the naming of things. Specialist vocabulary: bit, bridle, breeching, tail comb, crupper. Proper nouns, familiar places, brand names: The Pightle, Lidl, Eye, Colman’s, Mitsubishi, Finbow’s Yard. Words that come directly from our daily lives: mug, bicycle, travel card, flat white, Whatsapp, drains.
And just recently I came across this really delicious four minutes forty-seven seconds of video: No ideas but in things.
You can watch it over and over again to hear a fistful of poets talking about Williams’ poems, teaching us about poems: the breath of them, the line breaks, their mindfulness; Alan Ginsberg on the look and placing of them on the page, Kenneth Koch, enjoying ‘this cluttery, clanking sound’. I don’t do it justice. It is just very good to hear them speak. ‘Why don’t you write about something nice, Dr Williams?’ and the good doctor himself: “I am a radical. I write modern poetry, baby. I’m an awful person.’
No ideas but in things, William Carlos Williams said. He noticed everyday things and put them in poems: the wheelbarrow, broken glass between buildings, chicken wire, barrel-staves. No one, he says, at the end of Pastoral, will believe this/ of vast import to the nation. But it is. It wakes us up, makes us alert. Makes us pause. It values our everyday experience, the things that take up most of our time. It moves beyond the individual to shared understandings. It loves language. Miss Creech/ Stretchberry knows a thing or two. You could do worse than introduce her selection of poems to a class starting out with poetry.