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Playing On the Edge

Back in the day, a poet named William Carlos Williams penned the following postmodern masterpiece:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

After a quick glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything special here. There are four stanzas, eight lines and something about a wet wheelbarrow next to some chickens. Yet folks in the literary world fall all over themselves praising the mastery of this seemingly simple work, and that is because while this poem seems simple, there are a remarkable amount of poetic devices intertwining with one another to create a vivid description of a moment in time.