So, following Ange Mlinko’s suggestion in the comments section of my last post, here’s all I’m talking about regarding the difference between Truth and Clarity. (They sound like allergy medicines, don’t they?) Truth (to me) might go something like “Socialist democracy is the best form of government.” And I’m always delighted to read good poems by people who hold that opinion (Anne Winters?) but most poems that merely want to tell me that Truth aren’t usually good poems. There are much better ways than poems to make arguments or deliver messages.

Clarity, meanwhile, is more like caffeine. Or a pair of glasses. (I rely on both.) See better, see with more energy, become awake. What does Truth have to do with a poem like (to pick one everybody knows) “The Red Wheelbarrow”? What do we talk about when we talk about this poem?

When you teach “Wheelbarrow,” I think you’re supposed to get people talking about what it is that depends upon the wheelbarrow. But it’s much more important to understanding the poem to realize that we can’t answer—are not supposed to answer—that question.

Maybe we talk about the fact that the poem aspires and also fails to be a snapshot or painting. The poem’s scenery seems perfectly clear. And yet: If you were looking at a picture of this scene, you’d get it all at once: Chickens, weather and wheelbarrow, simultaneously. In the poem, each stanza, each line, revises what came before it; it happens over time, not all at once. A poem can revise itself. A picture can’t. A picture is immediate. A poem is not.

Or maybe we talk about the fact that the image itself seems to be devoid of human presence—until we realize that the word “glazed” is a metaphor, and that metaphors are only possible with a human present—so that the poem is at least partly about human perception of objects, not just about objects by themselves.

Etc.

We may have multiple realizations (epiphanies?) reading and thinking about this poem, but in what sense does it contain a relatable Truth? If it does contain a Truth, than what does it make False outside the poem?

Nothing, of course. The poem is an actuality made of words, which, no matter how many times I read it, makes me feel like I’ve just gotten a huge infusion of oxygen.

As William Carlos Williams wrote, “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there-”