I have read and written poetry for a long time now, but it always confounds me when someone asks, "What is poetry? Why read it? What do you get out of [insert author's name here]?" I guess I have always been thin on theory, and it is difficult to explain just what I get out of what I think of as more difficult or experimental writers in particular. I have no idea what is going on in a Philip Whalen or Robert Creeley poem most of the time. And they are the easy ones. Being raised on poetry as formal statements in need of some sort of debriefing, I am continually challenged by those poems that do not mean but be, as MacLeish put it. What does the poem mean? Exactly what it says. Why bother reading it in the first place? Because I suppose poetry is the revelation, through language, of what is essential. The "through language" part is what is of real import here. Language is the tool, and sometimes we just stop and examine our tools, to see how they have worn, if they are shiny or in need of sharpening. This is where the poem turns back in on itself, and can at times become merely self-referential and nothing more. It is the poems that balance themselves on that tipping point that I admire. "Red Wheelbarrow" comes to mind immediately; it has content, yet the statement is intimately welded to the way of saying. No ideas but in things, content is an extension (or revelation, per Levertov) of form.

Some of the foregoing ideas are at the heart of why I continue to value WC Williams and poems like "Red Wheelbarrow." Before I knew that Language Poetry was supposed to be capitalized, before I realized that it was a movement that critiqued said language from the outside, and in terms political and social instead of merely linguistic, I thought of Williams as a language poet. How to get what must be said seemed his concern. Perhaps even moreso than "Red Wheelbarrow," the poem that comes to mind in this context is "An Old-Fashioned German Christmas Card":

Armed with
a bass-violin
horn

clarinet and
fiddle
go four

poor musicians
trudging
the snow

between
villages in
the cold

What gets me here is the way he breaks up the phrases in such a way as to make us confront the speech rhythms we would normally use. For example, in the last three lines, I would contend that most of us see "between villages" and "in the snow" as natural groupings, since they are complete prepositional phrases. By breaking them up, Williams focuses our attention on how the language works, how we often put things together without thinking about it. Here, with no punctuation and broken phrases, we have to think about how things go together, thus trudging through the poem the way the musicians soldier on to the next village.