A review by pocketcoffee
The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

 Once again, this is a book of poems rather than a specific teaching poem recommendation. This book has a pretty wide variety of poems and complexities, some of which are appropriate for intermediate students and some which are not. That’s the nature of this recommendation list. 

The poem itself is a pleasantly simple one. It’s the kind of poem that I would almost like to include in the review because it’s only a few lines! I have been flip flopping since last night as to whether it is a good teaching poem, but regardless it is a poem I enjoyed. 

It’s a poem that encourages you to use your imagination, which I enjoy. It’s not a New Zealand text, but I think it works well here where you can be fairly sure every student has encountered a family house with chickens and a wheelbarrow with a crucial job. It is not hard to conjure up an important job for a wheelbarrow, but also the picture paints itself without needing many words. This could even be a drawing exercise - how many details can we see in 12 words? 

“Watching the movie,” as my year thirteen English teacher called it, is a teachable skill. According to that same teacher. I don’t know if I fully believe it, everyone loves talking now about how some of us don’t create pictures at all. That said, brains are not rigid, and surely encouraging the skill of creating an image young will help students to develop the skill of ‘seeing’ text. I also think it is true that people who can make the movie probably enjoy reading more - certainly in my experience people who don’t do that have largely stopped reading for fun by my age. Anyway, giving a very simple description and asking them to fill in the blanks seems like a good way of practicing this skill, right? 

I see this image in my teenage backyard. We never had chickens, and I never met a group of pure white chickens, but it’s easy enough to pretend we had a coop tucked in next to the wall, between my and my brother's bedroom windows. How it would have a sloped roof with a hatch for collecting eggs, and a small chicken sized door out the side. And maybe a fenced in section - not to keep them in so much as to keep the cat out. Buffy never cared much about the neighbours chickens though so maybe it would be fine. 

That red wheelbarrow glossed with Auckland late summer rain fits right in, almost. We never had a metal wheelbarrow - I imagine it is metal because it is glossy and because it is a bright colour. We only ever had plastic black ones. I would have loved a bright red wheelbarrow - I love colours, I love brightness. It would have stood out beautifully against the colours of the garden. And, oh, that retro kind of feeling that I love. And red was my brothers favourite colour, it would have felt like a little piece of him whenever I saw it. Perhaps that would have annoyed me as a young teenager, but it makes me feel warm now. 

The part I have notably not mentioned yet is, “So much depends upon” the wheelbarrow. What depends upon it? Another good imagination practice. In my reading it is about moving the wood dad’s spent all week chopping outside my window to the woodshed, a short journey but one done over and over and over for a weekend. Hard labour, at least I thought so, but something that would make sure we were warm all winter. Something I can only appreciate in hindsight. Something my children will do. 

I worried at first that the text was too simple for a good analysis with children. I think as an English teacher you have to worry a bit about the ‘the curtains are blue’ joke you see teenagers talking about. If my children already don’t like text analysis I don’t want them to feel it’s stupid because they are unconvinced by the outcome. I think, instead, I just have to understand this as something to develop those pre-analysis skills by practicing imagination and personal interpretation. I liked this poem much more after ‘analysing’ it.