For me, poetry isn’t a rational thing. The responses it triggers are emotional, not logical. If a poem doesn’t touch me, I move on. If it does, I listen and wonder about what the response means.

Today, I re-read William Carlos Williams’ poem ‘This is just to say’ and found that it left a bad taste in my mouth. Here is the poem:

I was raised in England, so I didn’t study William Carlos Williams at school. I became interested in his poetry after I watched the movie ‘Paterson’. I know his work is highly regarded but most of it just slips by me like rain on cobblestones. I cannot get excited about the what it is that depends on a red wheelbarrow.

‘This is just to say’ didn’t slide past me. The imagery is simple but powerful and the structure is honed so that the words slide into the imagination like a stiletto. Initially, I got a little lost in the pleasure taken by the note writer.

Then I started to wonder about how I would have reacted to finding that note, left by someone who was breakfasting before me in my house and my reaction to the poem changed.

I read it again and decided I really didn’t like this person who not only eat my plumbs but took the time to compose such a smug, self-serving and annoyingly beautiful note.

To me, the note read not as a light-hearted apology but as a smirk.

So I decided to try to decode it, strip it of its smirk and present the emotion it triggered in me. Here’s what I came up with: