“’This Is Just To Say’ is magical because of this personal, endless quality to it,” writes Jezebel’s Kate Dries in her exploration of the poem’s prevalence among Twitter comedians. Meanwhile Andrew Epstein remarks in a supplementary blog post, “I guess this is just to say that the Jezebel piece reminded me that Kenneth Koch was remixing and spoofing [William Carlos] Williams almost 50 years before anyone ever dreamt of Twitter.”
This Is Just To Say
The Twelfth What?
Who knew? Here's a handy infographic from Electric Literature that highlights seventeen films you probably didn't know were based off of books.
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Meet Miss Simone
Meet Eunice Waymon, who Nina Simone was before she became Nina Simone. John Lahr reviews What Happened, Miss Simone? by Alan Light. Pair with Bill Morris’s piece on the Hollywood biopic.
La Piñata
"The only way to avenge all the things white people did to you was to get your kid into Harvard. You bided your time. You worked your ass off, day after day, year after year." Our own Marie Myung-Ok Lee has a new short story in Joyland called "La Piñata" (and of course you can also read her in these pages, too).
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Clickbait Lit
Literary Street Art
Emily Smith discusses the place of zines in contemporary American politics, over at Ploughshares. As she puts it, “Zines, like street art, are allowed critical power through anonymity—a function newsstand periodicals simply can’t perform for the sake of reputation or the sacrifice of advertisers. In this way, zines are small-scale democracies.”
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