“’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
A Well-Rounded Curriculum
“I have a girl brain but in a boy body. This is called transgender. I was born this way!” The Los Angeles Times reports on an elementary-school teacher reading I Am Jazz, written by transgender teenager Jazz Jennings, with her class; encouragingly, not that many parents freak out. Pair with writer T.K. Dalton reflecting on how to traverse the terrain of books, children, and gender.
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Dating Woody
Diane Keaton writes in her upcoming memoir, Then Again, that “Going out with Woody Allen was like being in a Woody Allen movie.”
Class Notes
This week, the Ransom Center at UT-Austin opened up its archives of the works of J.M. Coetzee. Because the Nobel Prize winner is an alumnus, he says it’s “a privilege to have graduated from being a teaching assistant at The University of Texas to being one of the authors whose papers are conserved here.” (Fun fact: his starting salary was $2,300 a year.)
The Cool Kids
Hidden Treasures
What if a treasure hunt in a book crossed over into the real world? Author Kit Williams buried a prize and left clues to its location in his novel, Masquerade. The search drove England crazy. Our own Hannah Gersen maps the imaginary in her essay about how authors organize their manuscripts.
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This is a nice surprise.
The latest installment of #LitBeat is up! Jerry Stahl, Tom Bissell, Krys Lee, and (Millions staff picked) Lauren Groff went head-to-head for the glory of being crowned the victor last Friday in a very special made-for-TV version of Literary Death Match in L.A.