So Sweet and So Juicy: WCW Becomes Twitter Gen. Meme

We aren't sure how William Carlos Williams would feel about the Twitter generation, but, according to NY Mag's Annie Lowrey—it sure likes him! Lowrey drops it like it's hot, at New York Magazine:

This Is Just to Say

 

I have written

this story

on the internet

about a poetry meme

and here

you were probably

planning

to make this joke yourself at some point

Forgive me

it is delicious

so sweet

and so dumb

No really, do forgive me. If you are present on the internet — scrapbooking on Tumblr or, especially, tweeting on Twitter — you have probably seen this joke a lot lately, existing as it does in that snowballing space between “everyone making the same joke” and “full-on meme.” [...]

For those of us who have not spent much time with a Norton Anthology of late, the “high” part of that high-low comes from the pedigree of the source material. The poem is, of course, “This Is Just to Say” by the canonical modernist William Carlos Williams. The “low” part comes from, well, read for yourself.

These are just a handful of the newest versions of a joke nearly as old as the poem itself. “This has for years, maybe decades, been the most parodied poem in America,” said Stephen Burt of Harvard. Indeed, Williams himself put out a twist on it, a “found poem” by his wife, Flossie. And Kenneth Koch wrote his “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” in the 1960s, a series that culminates in this: “Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg. / Forgive me. I was clumsy, and / I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!” In the decades since then, thousands of versions have sprouted up — including some uncountable number on Twitter, which started allowing line breaks, and thus really let the joke take hold, in the spring of 2013.

It makes some sense. The poem is short, clocking in at just 149 characters in total, easily cut to under 140. It is iconic, quickly recognized if faintly remembered by anyone who took a high school English class. Its language is simple and striking. “It’s just an elegantly constructed piece of English syntax,” Burt said. “It’s very close to a lot of things we actually say in daily life, but off. It’s easy to make it funny. It’s easy to make it serious. There’s lots of breadth to it.” Moreover, he pointed out, unlike many other memorable poems, there is no meter and no rhyme, making it a touch easier to parody than, say, Wordsworth. “One of the things that Williams really wanted to do was to make poetic language that was just as memorable without meter and rhyme, as with meter and rhyme,” Burt said. “He thought of meter and rhyme as English, and he wanted to make his poetry American.” [...]

Learn more at New York Magazine, poem/tweets and all.