Sunday, June 29, 2008

This is just to say

From flagpole, an Athens weekly paper:
Park Hall Poesy: An Errant Red Hand Truck Achieves Immortality Through Poetry, Sort Of

When Mike Hendrick, the longtime, soon-to-retire (again) Assistant Head of the UGA English department needed Park Hall’s red hand truck, he couldn’t find it. Naturally, he put out an alert on the Park Hall listserv. Probably, his use of the word “errant” triggered the response, started by Lisa Reeves’ reply, which led to a flood of poetic knockoffs. Flagpole could not resist reprinting this corpus of mock homage to a variety of well known poets and to the now immortal red hand truck. Can you name all the poems spoofed here?
Here's my favorite:
This Is Just to Say

I have pinched
the hand truck
that I happened to run across in
a convenient location

and which
you were probably
saving
for your own future toils

Forgive me
it was so “dependable”
so red
and so obviously up for grabs

—Carl Rapp

Related: Mistakes Were Made, a This American Life episode in which regular contributors (including Sarah Vowell, whom I adore) created their own spoofs of William Carlos Williams. Good stuff.

1 comment:

Pseudonym said...

Lost hand truck
Is bad luck
But mimic
Is comic.