Thursday, June 26, 2014

Jonathan Mayhew Wheelbarrow Poem


Wheelbarrow
 
20,000 wheelbarrows would fit inside your poem
20,000 red wheelbarrows, blue wheelbarrows, green wheelbarrows
 
But would your poem fit in a wheelbarrow?
How many of them would fit inside one green wheelbarrow? 
 
This is a parody of The William Carlos Williams (1883-19630) "The Red Wheelbarrow" poem--see it at http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/red-wheelbarrow  "Wheelbarrow" was written on the occasion of the book launch of Melange Block by Denise Low at the Raven Bookstore, June 26, 2014.
Jonathan Mayhew, PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford in 1988, has taught at the University of Kansas since 1996. He is the author of: Claudio Rodríguez and the Language of Poetic Vision (Bucknell, 1990), The Poetics of Self-Consciousness: Twentieth Century Spanish Poetry (Bucknell, 1994), Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch, (Chicago, 2009), and The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980-2000 (Liverpool, 2009). His blog Bemsha Swing comments upon the poetry scene. Mayhew is currently working on a book with the title What Lorca Knew: Fragments of a Late Modernity, and a volume of original poetry, Mayhew’s Mood.