Anyone who has ever taken a class or workshop has at least read the red wheelbarrow poem, take some time today to read other works by Williams.
He is a master of the concrete detail. His poems are stripped of all the crap and just have the meat and bones of good imagry. They trust and depend upon their reader. I love the one about the plums.
So you think I can 
who did the parody of that poem about the plums? i just read it again recently when I was leafing through my old anthologies.
great choice today, by the way. i do love going back and reading the classic modern poets!
Emily, check out this link for a number of plum parodies:
http://scribalterror.blogs.com/scribal_terror/2005/04/this_is_just_to.html
No accident that most of the parodists are women. WCW is such a guy.
I’ve never understood why that wheelbarrow poem is so famous. Yes, it presents a nice image, like a calendar photo or a postcard in words, but that’s hardly grounds for it’s reknown.
Give me Langston Hughes, any day.
That should be “its”. Oops.
the Wheelbarrow poem is not just famous as a near perfect image, it is also great because, unlike other poems, that force the reader into a specific reading of an image, it trusts the reader to read the image.
It is also famous because of the philosophical point it makes, that everything is, indeed, important.
I agree about Langston Hughes being great. I love the landlady poems in particular, but I also finr it interesting that most of us think that liking one poet or poem leaves less room to like another.
Thanks for stopping by. Maybe check out the wheelbarrow again.