A POEM AND ITS PARODIES -- THIS IS JUST TO SAY...

RUTHERFORD, NJ — 1933 — Early in the Great Depression, a New Jersey doctor comes home to find a note on the “icebox.”

   “Dear Bill: I've made a couple of sandwiches for you.  In the ice-box you'll find blueberries--a cup of grapefruit, a glass of cold coffee. . . .” On the note went, ending:  “Love, Floss. Please switch off the telephone.”

   Your average doctor would have eaten the sandwiches and switched off the phone.  But this doctor was also a poet.  A decade had passed since his last collection, but he was working on a new one. Poetry, he insisted, should be living language.  Always listening to friends, family, his patients, he asked “how shall I be a mirror to this modernity?”

Sometime after finding the note, William Carlos Williams played with his wife’s message.

  Though it first appeared in a book of just 500 copies, “This is Just to Say” is now among America’s most beloved poems.  High school teachers love it because it tells stumped students that anything can be a poem.  College profs love it because they can tangle its simple structure in terminology such as “visual prosody” and “heavily enjambed.” And budding poets love it because it’s so easy to parody.

  Williams has been called a “cubist,” a modernist, but “This is Just to Say” made him poetry’s populist.  Reading Williams, one professor noted, “each reader is left free to construct a poem, and the reader becomes the owner of the resulting poem.”

  The parodies began in the 1960s with Kenneth Koch’s “Variations on William Carlos Williams.” This was just to say. . .

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next

     summer.

            I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do

            and its wooden beams were so inviting. . .

Oh, and this was just to say. . .

Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.

Forgive me. I was clumsy aynd

I want you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

  Koch also got his students in on the fun.  One sixth-grader wrote:

            This is Just to Say...

            Sorry I took your money and burned it,

             but it looked like the world falling apart 

            when it crackled and burned. 

            So I think it was worth it. 

            After all, you can't see the world fall apart every day.

   Williams’ note/poem has since become an Internet meme that seems to surface everywhere.  Hashtags in hand, the parodies go on and on and on.  So this is Just to Say. . .

I have closed

the tabs

that were in

the browser 

and which

you were probably

saving

to read

 Forgive me. . .

And this is just to say. . .

I have written a post

         About dreams and angst

And recovery from

Too much of everything 

Which you probably

Weren’t thinking about remotely…

  Can’t these poets find their own poems? On refrigerators?  Online? But Williams would have appreciated the mimicry.  Poetry, he said, pushes “the advancing edge of art: that’s the American tradition.”  And “This is Just to Say” freed all poets to find poetry wherever language is playful.  

  So dare to eat a peach.  Dare to steal a trope.  Dare to call anything you like a poem.  “The poem is our objective,” Williams wrote, “the secret at the heart of the matter.”

(Thanks again to my neighbor and WCW biographer Paul Mariani.)