Thursday, July 03, 2008

William Carlos Williams with a Handtruck

From my niece Rachel comes this inspired bit of silliness: an English professor couldn't find the departmental handtruck, so he put out a request on the local listserv. In response, he got 12 odes to the missing handtruck, done in the style of William Carlos Williams, John Donne, and other famous poets. I particularly like this one, by Carl Rapp.

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

Can't you just hear Garrison Keillor reciting it?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would be interested in your thoughts on this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html

Jeffrey Shallit said...

Sounds like fodder for another blog post, anonymous!

Pseudonym said...

Lost hand truck
Is bad luck
But mimic
Is comic.

Sorry, best I could do at short notice.

paul01 said...

It stood alone
A peak in search space
Amid the lone and level sands

It was no accident

Mine all mine

dot said...

Jeff: sounds akin to the prose of Ken Salem's beer-zonker's mailing list ;)

Anonymous: nice link, even if long winded. I am curious about the statement “I started looking at history, and I wondered why no society ever survived more than three generations without a religious foundation as its raison d’ĂȘtre (...)” (page 3) though: I wonder how you define scientifically la "raison d'etre" of a society to be religious or no without getting trivial results (all or none).