RON SMITH  |  Red Guitar

Introduction

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

                          —Wallace Stevens

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

                          —William Carlos Williams

The first idea was to call this new column “Blue Guitar.”

Wallace Stevens said that “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.” Or rather his guitar-playing shearsman did. Imagination changes reality, art adds significance, poetry daubs the drab with dazzle. Blue for the imagination, for the spirit.

Stevens is one of my favorites. But there will be times when this column and its chosen subjects will be more like Williams’s red wheelbarrow. An aesthetic object in itself, OK, but at the same time a barnyard tool, a simple conveyance for the outrageously ordinary. A way to feed, as well as to contrast chromatically with, the chickens. Red for the carnal, for the gaudily physical.

One of my central beliefs is that mimesis is a given in art. A given and a problem. Does art transform or capture reality? Does the best poetry give us the world or create a world?

Both.

But how can I, in the twenty-first century, even believe in “things as they are”? Well, I do.

What, then, do I want from a poem? Do I want to swoon over the changes wrought by the poet’s trembling lines? Sometimes. Do I simply want things as they are to be given back to me with a new clarity? Sometimes.

Sometimes I want my eyes opened. Sometimes I want them closed.

Like you?

Herein please find “Red Guitar: Beyond Irony.” My aim is to present poetry, to examine it but mainly to celebrate it. I suspect that “Beyond Irony ” will turn out to be the longest of these columns, although it focuses on a mere three lines of verse.  

—Ron Smith