Viral plums
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Ottilie Mitchell and Tiffanie Turnbull, "'Nowhere's safe': How an island of penguins ended up on Trump tariff list", BBC 4/4/2025:
Two tiny, remote Antarctic outposts populated by penguins and seals are among the obscure places targeted by the Trump administration's new tariffs.
Heard and McDonald Islands – a territory which sits 4,000km (2,485 miles) south-west of Australia – are only accessible via a seven-day boat trip from Perth, and haven't been visited by humans in almost a decade.
Australian trade minister Don Farrell told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the tariffs were "clearly a mistake".
"Poor old penguins, I don't know what they did to Trump, but, look, I think it's an indication, to be honest with you, that this was a rushed process."
There have been various other reactions to those tariffs' math and geography — but my favorite commentary was a poem:
I have tariffed
the penguins
that are on
Heard Islandand which
you were probably
assuming
did not export goodsforgive me
they were taking advantage of us
so cunning
and so cold— Janel Comeau (@verybadllama.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 3:45 PM
…which of course is an echo of William Carlos Williams' 1934 poem "This is just to say":
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
The poem's Wikipedia page links to two articles about its viral uptake: "This is just to say we have explained the plum jokes in your Twitter feed" (2017) and "This is just to say… : The parodies of that ‘plums’ poem just keep coming" (2018). And I've seen another recent pastiche about SignalGate, not to mention an example that I posted last year about RFK Jr's dead bear ("This is just to say", 8/6/2024).
PennSound has many readings by Williams, five of which include this poem. Here's a version recorded in Rutherford NJ, June 1950:
And another version, also recorded in Rutherford, from August 1950:
A recording from Harvard in December of 1951 has two readings and some relevant commentary:
In Van Nuys CA, November 1950, Williams also brings up possible psychiatric implications:
My guess is that the rhetorical virality of this poem has not been dependent on its Freudian overtones, but I'm open to discussion of the issue.
See also:
"Syllable-scale wheelbarrow spectrogram", 5/28/2019
"Accidental art", 5/30/2019
A comment by Rubrick on "Poetic sound and silence", 2/12/2016
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
April 4, 2025 @ 6:28 am
Am I alone in observing that I don't "get" the "Plums" poem at all, or is there an Emperor's New Clothes thing going on? Somebody ate someone else's plums; I mean, it's not Rilke or anything…
Olaf Zimmermann said,
April 4, 2025 @ 6:57 am
@B.E.O.: some German required (re:"Pflaume" – yes, it's rather vul[g|v]ar)
Chips Mackinolty said,
April 4, 2025 @ 7:04 am
This really is the gift that keeps giving. I have imaginings of Trump, in his old age, trying to extract tariffs from penguins and seals …
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
April 4, 2025 @ 7:15 am
And the "Best Deployment of Brackets Award" goes to Olaf Zimmermann für:
Still, I'm sure Bocaccio made a few "fig" jokes, but it doesn't make for great poetry, does it?
Raphael said,
April 4, 2025 @ 8:07 am
Benjamin E. Orsatti: Well, all art is subjective, I guess. It seems to have been part of a general trend for poems in that style around that time.
Olaf Zimmermann said,
April 4, 2025 @ 8:16 am
@B.E.O.: You might say that, but I couldn't possibly comment ;-)
David Marjanović said,
April 4, 2025 @ 8:46 am
News to me as a native speaker. Which region are you talking about?
Olaf Zimmermann said,
April 4, 2025 @ 9:18 am
@D.M. A quick google search gives me the following sinnernyms ;-) : Pflaume Fut Muschi Möse (I can make it longer if you like the style …) Frequency may vary by topolect. Plaume, Möse, seem to be more from above the river Main – a major language barrier. But we can't blame it all on the Romans, can we?
Olaf Zimmermann said,
April 4, 2025 @ 9:22 am
@Raphael – ever read any Chaucer? or worse, Rabelais?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
April 4, 2025 @ 10:11 am
Olaf,
Interesting. I'd imagine if one were to do a study on cross-cultural scatological versification, you'd see a lot of bodily functions among the English (Chaucer's "let[ting] flee a fart like a thonderdent!"); disgusting things done with food by the French (Rabelais), and (often blasphemous) sexual activity among the Italians (Boccacio; but see that prude Dante).
Philip Taylor said,
April 4, 2025 @ 12:20 pm
Reluctant tho’ normally I would be to cite Wikipedia in any context, the following may be of interest to David Marjanović —
And as to Benjamin’s/Chaucer’s "let[ting] flee a fart like a thonderdent!", if were it not for the fact that I admire the original so much, I might be tempted to parody Henry Reed’s Naming of parts as Naming of farts …
Y said,
April 4, 2025 @ 2:20 pm
This brilliant soul:
https://bsky.app/profile/logopetria.bsky.social/post/3lfctvchuck2u
blended Williams and Shelley and Not-Hemingway into one poem, set to the tune of the Wallace and Gromit theme.
Lukas Daniel Klausner said,
April 4, 2025 @ 2:45 pm
@David: Speaking as a fellow Austrian – AFAIK, it's quite common in Germany.
Yves Rehbein said,
April 4, 2025 @ 3:13 pm
Given nom de plume, "pen name", plume "feather", I guess that the connotation of Pflaume is not "plum". A cognate would be Pflaum, Flaum "fluff, down", so-called peach fuzz.
I had a priori assumed that nom de plume was a bloomy name, because those names are creative: durch die Blume, verblümt, verhüllend, "indirectly, oblique, allusive" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/durch_die_Blume just as Blei corresponds to plumbum "lead" (lead as in Bleiletter "black letter" with black as in blacksmith). If you want to go the whole hog to bulba, you have to put in more work.
Meanwhile, plum cannot possibly come from Latin prunum (contra Wiktionary).
Philip Taylor said,
April 4, 2025 @ 3:35 pm
The OED has a great deal of interest to say on the etymology of "plum", but rather more than I would feel justified in quoting in full. See, if you are able, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/plum_n?tab=etymology
Julian said,
April 4, 2025 @ 6:49 pm
@Benjamin E Orsatti
"Somebody ate someone else's plums; I mean, it's not Rilke or anything…"
No offence meant; each to their own; there's a lot of admired art and literature that I don't get either (maybe different from your list)….
But …
You remind me of the famous, possibly apocryphal review of Moby Dick: "It's a story about whaling."
HS said,
April 4, 2025 @ 7:31 pm
I have always loved Williams's* poem and I have never considered it to have Freudian overtones. In fact, the possibility had never occurred to me – this is not a double entendre Blues or anything like that. I have always just considered it to be a kind of slice of life (or imagist), good-humouredly teasing, casually intimate love poem, where the final line perhaps throws a slightly ambiguous air on the nature of the relationship.
Regarding Heard Island, for anybody interested in the history of exploration and mountaineering there is a superb documentary film called The Great White Whale about the first expedition to climb Big Ben, the huge volcano on the island (and the highest peak in Australia, if you interpret "Australia" broadly enough). It's told by some of the survivors of the expedition in old age, has nice quirky humour, and even has some poetry (well, some humorous sea shanties anyway). Thoroughly recommended.
New Zealand also has some sub-Antarctic islands but I have not heard anything about Trump slapping tariffs on them yet. But I would have thought that Bounty Island in particular might catch his eye – with a name like that, why it's just got to have lots of exports….!
* As a linguistic aside, why do Americans write things like "Williams' " rather than "Williams's"? Do they pronounce it that way? And is this spelling universal in America? I know this has been covered by Language Log in the past but I can't be bothered searching for it!
C Baker said,
April 4, 2025 @ 7:42 pm
* As a linguistic aside, why do Americans write things like "Williams' " rather than "Williams's"? Do they pronounce it that way? And is this spelling universal in America? I know this has been covered by Language Log in the past but I can't be bothered searching for it!
Some of us – but by no means all of us – are explicitly taught in school that when the word ends in an s, the possessive is spelled that way.
Some of us are told that only applies to certain words.
I would say that we pronounce it the same no matter how we spell it, but on Dora the Explorer they keep referring to Boots' things as Boots instead of Bootses, so who even knows?