This is Just to be Meta

Inspiration

As far as I can tell, I wrote This is Just to be Meta on a whim, rather than for any prompt. Anyway, the idea was to create a pastiche of William Carlos Williams's classic imagist poem "This is Just to Say", with the added twist that it's also a comment on how many bloody poets pastiche that particular poem and think they're the first to do so. I'm a big fan of having my cake and eating it at every available opportunity, incidentally.

Publications

This is Just to be Meta was published by The Pygmy Giant on December 29th, 2012.

Notes

Some time before this, I'd also submitted a somewhat weak zombie parody of William Carlos Williams's poem to the 2009 Vicious Verse and Reanimated Rhymes anthology. This is what it looked like:

William Carlos Williams is a Zombie

This is just to say

I have eaten
the body parts
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so tender
and bloody

I rather think the editor made the right decision when he turned it down, although he did accept Zombie Bride instead.