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The Red Wheelbarrow

This one-sentence poem by William Carlos Williams is an example of Imagist poetry, which is the kind of poetry that seeks to offer a precise depiction of . . . well, an image.

Archibald MacLeish said that an Imagist poem should not mean, but be. Forget about symbols and themes and deep meanings that cry out for close analysis.

Just give a poem like this room to breathe. Let it grab you by the hand and take you for a walk.

You might find that an Imagist poem, while it doesn’t “mean” anything that can be paraphrased or reduced to a soundbite, might nevertheless turn out to be quite a meaningful experience.

🙂 🙂 🙂

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Sonny’s Blues

Visualization and reading of an excerpt from James Baldwin’s 1957 short story, Sonny’s Blues.

The narrator, a black straight-laced algebra teacher in 1950s Harlem, listens to his younger brother – a blues pianist fresh out of prison and recovering from a heroin addiction – as he performs for the first time in a long time with a band in a Greenwich Village nightclub.

The older brother slowly comes to realize that it is through music that Sonny is able to turn his suffering into something worthwhile, although an ominous symbol at the end – a celebratory Scotch and milk sent up to the bandstand, described by the narrator as a “cup of trembling” (referencing the Lord’s wrath in Isaiah 51:17) – suggests that this moment of harmony is only temporary.

“And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.”

This short video highlights the narrator’s musings on the “awful relationship” between the musician and his instrument – who has to fill it, his instrument, “with the breath of life, his own.”

🙂 🙂 🙂