I had big plans to write about Stacey Tran's poem, "Soap for the Dogs," which I love dearly, but I couldn't find it anywhere online. Then I wanted to write about Zbigniew Herbert's funny prose poems, but I couldn't find the ones I liked online either (I was thinking of "Fish" and "Bear"). I then stared out my window in desperation, and in so doing remembered that the Modernist poet and family doctor William Carlos Williams once did the same thing. His glance out the window, however, produced "XXII" from the book Spring and All, or, as the poem is better known, "The Red Wheelbarrow."

Williams's poem is a Rorschach. I've read Marxist, Feminist, Freudian, formalist, historical materialist, and biographical readings of the poem, and they're all equally fine. It's about there being no ideas but in things, it's a blueprint for the revolution, it's about the primacy of personal perception and careful detail, it's about surviving the storm and coming out clean. It has also inspired more poetic parodies and imitations than almost any other poem besides Williams's other famous poem, "This Is Just To Say." But my favorite of the Wheelbarrow parodies has to be the one published most recently by Mary Ruefle. It's called, "Red." I'm not sure where you can find it, but try her latest book, Dunce.

A few notes:

• In her version, Ruefle becomes the 2020 anger translator for Williams's famously meditative speaker. The title transforms the redness of the wheelbarrow into the emotional force driving her version of the poem.

• She also pokes fun at Williams's apparently disjunctive line breaks by breaking off her own lines in weird places, but I could also see an argument for her breaking her lines to highlight the speaker's emotional state, mimicking the hurried pace and broken rhythms of a ranting fit: "I fucking depended on you and / you left the fucking wheelbarrow /out..."

• Honestly I got nothing else. I just laugh every time I read the poem.