Creative studio, Obvious State, has created orignal illustrations inspired by lines from famous literary works by T.S. Eliot, Philip K. Dick, Walt Whitman, Vonnegut, Cummings, Nabokov, Salinger and others. I want one several.
There is profound beauty in prose, so why not make it art?
I happened upon this old radio interview with William Carlos Williams today. About three minutes into the broadcast, William recites his famous “Red Wheelbarrow” poem, but he makes a small in size, large in implications mistake. Take a listen to the early portion of this video:
http://youtu.be/3mLzU3dF6gY
(Do take the time to listen to the whole interview. Though for our purposes today, we need not listen any further than five minutes in or so.)
Williams says:
so much depends upon the red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
But the poem is actually about “a red wheel barrow.” (Allow me to pause here to mention the word wheelbarrow has no hyphenation in the poem, a both frustrating and fascinating mistake or decision.)
So what is the difference between a red wheelbarrow and the red wheelbarrow? To some, I imagine there is no difference. The scene is so compact and discreet, it might as well be the red wheelbarrow because there are no others presented, no rival wheelbarrows.
However, I think the red wheelbarrow is different — if only in slight degrees. The red wheelbarrow implies there are multiple wheelbarrows. It implies there is something singular and specific about this certain red wheelbarrow, in this certain location. It in some ways turns our focus to the dew and chickens and the color red, the distinguishing elements of the wheelbarrow.
The word the in this instance carries a degree of undertones, a subtext of something peculiar or even sinister. By specifying the red wheelbarrow, it suggests there are other wheelbarrows. And since it would not be the working red wheelbarrow or something to imply it is the only usable wheelbarrow (as the original poem suggests) makes me wonder if perhaps there is something even more important than the wheelbarrow’s farm-related duties. Perhaps there is dried blood at the base of the wheelbarrow. Suddenly the pastoral, slice-of-farm-life poem contains a whiff of murder mystery.
Is that drawing a bit much from the difference of a single article? Yes, probably, maybe. It was the natural path my mind wandered when I first considered the difference between the two words, so maybe it is not so radical? Or maybe, if the poem had always been the, I would have never trod down that line of thought.
But we can at least suggest this: When a poet has only twelve words to convey a meaning or scene, so much depends upon the space between a and the.
In 1438 the dying were buried before they were dead, thirty seconds before their eyes closed. To look at the faces of the dead was thought to bring a lifetime of bad luck. The family of the soon-to-be deceased stood by the freshly dug grave, waited to catch their loved one’s last breath as it slipped through a crack in the casket. The youngest daughter was charged with catching the breath, which sounded like a sparrow sighing when squeezed in the palm of a hand. The heart of a willow tree was shaped into a container to hold the breath, its edges sealed with wax. Breath-catching continued for almost two centuries until it was abolished in the mid-1600s. One evening in late summer, all captive breaths were set free. A cacophony of sound split the sky’s curved dome. The night braced against trillions of dusty sighs.
============================================================================
Shivani Mehta was born in Mumbai and raised in Singapore. She moved to New York to attend Hamilton College and then earned a Juris Doctor from Syracuse University College of Law. Her prose poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Coachella Review, Cold Mountain Review, Fjord’s Review, The Normal School, Midwest Quarterly Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Shivani is the accomplished mother of toddler twins. Incredibly, they sleep long enough to allow her to write prose poems. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, children, dog, two cats, and several fish.
When my twin sister and I were young our mother was a dress-maker. Beautiful dresses were all around us, dresses we weren’t allowed to touch, dresses made of crepe, cambric, calamanco, faille. At night we wore nightgowns mother sewed us from sack-cloth and imagined how those other dresses might feel in our hands, against our bodies, wondered if lace skimming up a thigh might sound like the deliberate unhurried tearing of the thinnest parchment. On our eleventh birthday, mother gave us each a pair of patchwork wings, sewn from leftover scraps of fabric. With needle and thread she stitched the wings onto our backs. Our school uniforms had to be let out to accommodate the wings which, even when folded, brushed the backs of our ankles. I remember how my sister and I held hands as we stood on the ledge of the attic window, how we soared into the sky, how our wings knew what to do, how our mother’s voice calling for us to come back shrank to a tiny point, like the volume on a stereo turned down too fast.
============================================================================
Shivani Mehta was born in Mumbai and raised in Singapore. She moved to New York to attend Hamilton College and then earned a Juris Doctor from Syracuse University College of Law. Her prose poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Coachella Review, Cold Mountain Review, Fjord’s Review, The Normal School, Midwest Quarterly Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Shivani is the accomplished mother of toddler twins. Incredibly, they sleep long enough to allow her to write prose poems. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, children, dog, two cats, and several fish.
The Vogons, of course, are a particularly nasty race from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. “The series tells that, far back in prehistory, when the first primeval Vogons crawled out of the sea, the forces of evolution were so disgusted with them that they never allowed them to evolve again,” says Wikipedia. It makes sense then that these lowly forms favor poetry and use their particularly poor poetic skills (3rd worst in the universe) as torture. As such, the livejournal profile for the Vogon Poet’s Society reads as follows:
The Society is centred upon the desire to write Painful Poesy: Poems so horribly bad that they cause cancer in lab rats, crippling pain and terror, and publication in MLA poetry anthologies…Please do not post mediocre poetry. And please do not post light-hearted poetry. We only want the worst. The absolute bottom-of-the-barrel sludge of modern poetry. Scrape it up, chip it off, and throw it at this community.
The concept is laughable, and truly there are terrible poems. Here’s one entitled “Belgium!”
Ah! my smelly jelly! How fishy of you to have noticed Your quotas are teminally deficient It reminded me of summer I hated it/you/life...
And another, entitled “A Cold Vogon Heart.”
...My car starts up like a horse with TB and my glasses are so fogged I cannot see I ponder wearing grandpa wear So that I can scoot through the day without a care...