I’ll let you in on a secret. My mother has always hated William Carlos Williams’ poem “This is just to say…” She always thought the speaker in it did something terribly annoying (eating someone else’s treat) and wasn’t truly sorry.

So, when you encounter a classic poem you dislike, what can you do? Write a parody of it! For a great example, read Kenneth Koch’s answer to “This is just to say…” entitled Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams. So, how does Kenneth Koch make this poem so funny? He finds a game in what WCW is doing and escalates it to an absurd level! In WCW’s poem and Koch’s poem, the game is a pattern—the speaker is apologizing for doing something annoying to the person to which the poem is addressed. Koch escalates by making each instance more offensive. He also throws in details about the original poem and the author of the poem which adds to the absurdity, for example, the “the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold,” alluding to the plums in the original poem. Also note the crowning laugh in the parody, that the speaker is so cruel that he would injure the other person in order that he would have a patient (WCW was a doctor as well as a poet).

For another example of a parody, take a look at Billy Collins’ poem Workshop. This one is a bit more complex of a parody, and not of one poem in particular, but it is also a lot of fun.

So for this prompt, I encourage you to take a classic poem in which you notice an interesting pattern (you don’t have to dislike it, really), and try to escalate that pattern in a new poem humorously. Try to carry out that pattern at least in three different instances to heighten the effect. Make sure to make your parody obvious, so someone who has read the original poem will recognize the allusions you are making to the original. Have fun with it!