Probably My Greatest Invention Yet
Egg Salad Sandwich
with capers and bacon
On Being Ten
Thank you
For showing me
Your pet tarantula
In its glass case.
It was sublime.
Today in my American Literature class, we studied a collection of poems by William Carlos Williams. The professor for this course is an old hippie and it was a warm day, so we eschewed the sterile chair-desks and chipped linoleum of the classroom and sat in a semi-circle on the grass outside Old Main (all university campuses have a building called “Old Main”, I’ve come to realize).
Any poem longer than half a page is too long. But pithy aphorisms ensconced in heroic couplets are the domain of the English. Succinct and unadorned is what I like (or at least today that’s how I feel). Here was my favorite:
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens-William Carlos Williams
1923
We’ve covered a good deal of Robert Frost as well. What I’ve learn about Modern American poetry, in poem form:
Poems
All poems
are
about Spring
You can not disagree with me. My reason and opinions are unimpeachable.
