Submitted by: Unknown
I’m really glad that I never got any tattoos when I was in college, because WHO KNOWS what kind of pretentious tomfoolery I might have come up with back then? I could be walking around with an “Alexander Pope is Dope!” tattoo if it weren’t for all those hours of Beverly Hills 90210 reruns that mercifully kept me occupied.
Okay, I’ll be honest. My tattoo would have said “Donna Martin Graduates,” but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m better off without it.
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Copy & paste this:
The Red Wheelbarrow
By: William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
I remember having to make up 5 pages of crap to write about this poem. As soon as I saw this tattoo I had PTSD flash backs.
Thanks for letting me know what this tattoo was about. Now for the poem.
…i have just eaten the plums that were in the icebox.
i thought the tattoo referred to a large amount of adult diapers.
Haha thanks for the info, Stoneage. Hope those flashbacks don’t last too long.
Ok, so where are the Chickens???
Ask Crackers.
speaking of obscure references.
That is officially the worst poem I have ever read, and that includes the ones I’ve written myself. That’s saying a lot.
Orrrrrrrrrr, you don’t get it. Either one is fine with me…
Anyone can say that someone doesn’t “get it” when that someone doesn’t agree with them, especially concerning modernist poetry. Imagism just isn’t that great.
It is an absurd poem…and that even goes for some of us who “get it”.
It’s easy to say a poem is “worst” or “absurd”.
Easy and empty.
Maybe you’d like to explain your understanding of it?
As I understand it, WCW submitted an anthology of poems for publication, but it was a poem too short, so he jotted this down on the last page of the manuscript to buy himself time to write another poem, but his editor liked it.
And yet WCW is a famous poet, and you aren’t…connection?
I think that’s just because you don’t understand the poem….
I had to analyze this poem too. Stupid piece of crap. I did have some fun with it though. I had to give a speech about the damn thing and ended up with more and more absurd analyses, completely deadpan, until I concluded the chickens were space aliens and the wheelbarrow was their mothership. Luckily, the teacher was amused by the whole thing
Oh. I thought the cart was to carry home his supply of Depends from Walmart.
Yeah, that’s where I was going too. Maybe he was being prescient, not poetic.
Why WOULDN’T you want to comemorate (sp?) the works of someone with a name like William William?↲
↲If he’s a college student, he’s certainly a very mature one, judging by the m00bs and old man grey beard.
i have heard of a peter peters and know a steven stephen… i don’t know what some parents are thinking.
*Williams
This is stirring up 12th grade English memories…. gonna let that settle and happily forget about them again.
I thought it meant that he goes through a lot of diapers.
By the wheel barrow load!
I really need to start reading all the way down before posting. My apologies for posting about Depends further up. I did not purposefully usurp you.
USURPER!!!!! USURPER!!!!!
This is actually the poem Williams is famous for….
I thought the one about the number 5 on the side of the fire engine, “The Great Figure”, commemorated (there ya go, PallorMortis) in paint (by Charles Demuth) and music (by Frank Zappa) was better-known, but then again I am not a high-school English instructor.
As I just demonstrated by leaving out a comma. Dammit.
Ahhh not so much. Try Patterson.
If that is William Carlos Williams with that tattoo, I’m good with this. Anyone else, not so much.
I thought adult diapers immediately too. Ambiguous tattoos that hint at incontinence should probably be avoided. Also, that poem is terrible. Of all the things to get memorialized on your body, you choose that rubbish?
He was gonna go with a PBR neck tattoo, but he has too much class for something that stupid.
This comment actually made me laugh out loud; not the usual fake LOL either. Thank you! I am thinking he should place a Shakspearean (Shakespearian?) Sonnet on the other side. Classy.
I love that poem. The tattoo…meh, not really. It doesn’t capture the idyllic image that make the poem great.
I get the image of a discarded toy (and adult diapers, but that’s not the poet’s fault.) Not sure how that’s sipposed to be idyllic.
It’s not really supposed to be idyllic. Williams Carlos Williams was a doctor as well as a poet. Apocryphally, this poem is a list of objects he saw outside the bedroom window of a dying child he was attending to. It’s his most famous, but it’s also easy to not like. He has much better poems, “To Elsie” is one of my favorites.
Is that a Yard King?
Man, that is a quality barrow.
William Carlos? I always thought Billy Dee wrote that poem.
Oh, but a William Burroughs sleeve would be full of AWESOME.
maybe it is easier to appreciate the poem if you are not forced to “appreciate” it in a classroom. The post title is chortle worthy
The placement and spacing is off on the “Depends”.
Ya know, this could’ve been a really interesting and creative tattoo… >cries<.
[...] (Via). [...]
but why is the ink in ALL CAPS? FAIL.
Taught poetry in New Jersey, WCW’s home state. As a doctor, Williams would use his prescription pad to write notes to himself while making rural house calls. I used this to teach the concept of structure.
Here’s the irony: I once lived across from the Demuth house in Lancaster. I ALWAYS saw the number 5 in gold.
Well the Wheel Borrow explains a lot… cause we can all guess its carrying a lot of stupid shit this person does.
It’s Bill Carlos Bill to his friends.
Obvious- he buys depends by the wheelbarrow load…
In da ‘hood, we call him “Willy-C-Willy”.
They see his ‘barrow… They hatin’.
More about the chicks, later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Wheelbarrow
I love how this poem is usually described as being so profound & deep and the guy who has this tattoo is wearing a trashy white tanktop XD
Proving…?
Poetry is only for “clean” people?