williams and shiki

there are few poems i dislike more than w c williams' 'the red wheelbarrow.' this mind-numbing american affirmation of the everyday is one of the early poetic instances of the current intellectual and artistic fashion of praising everyday life as it is, everyday language as everyone speaks it, everyday things and everyday jobs, repetitive labor like bricklaying, repetitive music like john adams. as if everything ought to be adored merely by virtue of its commonness, which conceals its absolute uniqueness: every crack in the sidewalk is as unique as a snowflake...

there has been some debate about the value of one of shiki's most famous poems,

cockscombs . . .
must be 14,
or 15

which seems on the surface to be much like williams' poem. but in this case the poem is normally read with the poet's life in mind: he was dying in a hospital as he wrote it. thus the flourishing beauty of the flowers is seen against the background of the decay that comes to all entities, what might be called the subtractive tendency of time.