The White Chickens

It’s poetry week in a class designed for first-year education students. I share one of my favourite poems by William Carlos Williams: I’ve shared it every year I’ve taught this course.

There are not many students in the classroom – maybe 10 or 11 people out of 35 enrolments. Tutorials are optional since the pandemic and many young educators choose self-paced instruction. In front of me are the few that have overcome the expense of parking/petrol/time/food/anxiety/energy to be here. I feel pressure to make it worth their while.

I put up this slide, with the poem formatted to appear in the centre of the page:

THE RED WHEELBARROW

By William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Typically, I resist asking students questions about what a poem means and how it makes them feel; I’ve learned they’ll tell me what they think I want to hear. Instead, I invite students to share what they notice.

One student observes the three words in each ‘stanza’: then one, three then one, three then one, three then one. It reminds her of water dripping down a page (or maybe down the side of a wheelbarrow). 

Another is interested in the colours. He wants to get into the symbolism: the ‘purity’ of the white and the intensity of the red. He makes references to modernism and to intentional observation.

Others say that the placement of words makes them read very slowly. For some, the unconventional layout signifies that this is poetry. However, when prompted, most are not sure this is poetry at all. 

Then I ask: why does so much depend on this wheelbarrow?

Many students are literal in ways that interest me. They say that the poet must have been on a farm, that “so much depends” on the wheelbarrow because it contains sustenance for the chickens. 

Students want to know what I think: ergo, they want to know the answer. However, I know if I relent and tell them my interpretation they’ll disregard their own. With difficulty, I hold off.

Too soon, a student pulls out her phone and my reflexes ignite. I squawk, “Don’t you fucking ask Claude why the wheelbarrow matters! Claude doesn’t know! Only you can know!”

(Reader: I did not say fucking in this first-year classroom. The rest is true).

I’m not quick enough. The student asks Microsoft Copilot, a tool that’s free to use within the Microsoft 365 suite. Our university has a subscription, and so it comes to pass that the student reads the following out to everyone:

“Why the wheelbarrow matters

1. It is an ordinary object that becomes extraordinary through attention.

2. “Depends” has a wonderfully practical meaning.

3. But the mysterious “so much” makes the claim much larger.

4. The poem's form makes us look rather than merely read.

So what does “so much depends” mean? So much depends upon the wheelbarrow because the poem is testing whether we can recognise significance before someone explains the significance to us. Williams places an ordinary object before us, strips away explanation and narrative, and says, in effect: Look again.”

Here's the part where I lament the rise of GenAI chatbots.  I do lament their rise, I do. LLMs are completely fucking useless for creating and reading poetry. The irony of a machine telling a student a poem is about looking again when this advice probably stopped her from looking at the poem ever again, forever - I lament it all.  LLMs allow observational powers to grow flabby: they remove the unbearable heaviness of being wrong, of not having the right answer, of not knowing what is wanted and needed.

It's not the students’ fault. Slack-jawed, I look at them, but I’m laughing, too. What has been done to these young people? What have we done? The students want to know the answer but they only want to know the right one, because they have to pass this class. They’re so scared of being incorrect they assume that authority always lies elsewhere, never with them.

As if High Distinctions will be awarded to those who figure out exactly why so much depends on a wheelbarrow. As if wheelbarrows and chickens can matter if this will never be assessed at all.

The class is still insisting on hearing what I think. In retrospect, I think I should’ve continued to refuse, but it didn’t seem fair to present an activity and completely withhold its purpose (and to be honest I'd been dying to give them my view). This is what I tell the students:

One early morning, a hundred years ago and thousands of kilometres away, a man was walking down a road. Perhaps he was on his way somewhere – who knows? He walked past an ordinary scene, lovely in its ordinariness. On witnessing this scene, this poet was transported, but he also felt an urge to transcend the fleetingness of his experience. He felt glad to be alive: perhaps he felt a little awe. 

I imagine this man going back to his home and playing with words like a Valencia Instagram filter: tuning, enhancing just a little, then preserving the image forever.  In my mind’s eye, the wheelbarrow is ruby red. It glistens - the contrast with the white chickens is startling, and pleasing. 

If the chatbot actually held an opinion, I'd agree with the chatbot. I think so much depends on this red wheelbarrow because Williams gave his readers the opportunity to look again, to share his experience over great expanses of time and space. I can see those white chickens this very instant, because Williams took the time to record it. It’s a small, unexpected gift from someone and somewhere that would otherwise have completely ceased to exist.

Today, two hours ago, I decided to write down my thoughts about teaching ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. The morning just happened to be glazed with last night’s rain and its own twenty-first century beauty (no white chickens though). The spring blossoms arrived too early, but bogong moths have returned after years of apparent extinction: the hum of insects and the colours in the garden bring me complicated joy.

I'd woken up thinking about systems collapse: I often do. In thirty years of teaching, I’ve nearly always felt the dark cloud at my back, a dull insistent buzzing in my brain: 

We’re living at the beginning of the end of this world and this way of being, and on some level everybody knows it. We all know but usually, we don’t say it out loud. We don’t talk about it because then we won’t be able to go on, and because we don’t yet know how, and when and where. 

Yet, we do know what will happen, because it’s already happening – sometimes to ‘us’ and sometimes to millions of others, who are also ‘us’.  It happens slowly, unevenly – inequitably - and then sometimes fast and unilaterally, in the form of a heatwave or pandemic. 

Knowing and unknowing all of this, I’m often unsure why I teach literature. I don’t know why I’m still teaching most things that I teach. I’ve continually gathered my best responses to these questions: some are articulate, but most are stumbling, angry, uncertain. All are inadequate. Just for this morning, I’m thinking about how white chickens matter and red wheelbarrows matter. For now this will have to do.