Can New Yorker Poets Write About Anything Besides Poetry?
By Eric Hill • Feb 11th, 2010 • Category: Editor's Picks, PoetryAbout a year ago, a friend and I noticed a theme running through many New Yorker poems: With astounding frequency, they were about writing poetry. We would read them aloud up until some explicit mention of writing, words, grammar, typewriters, or anything else in the poet’s arsenal. It felt like we got to the end of maybe half of them.
Take, for example, the poem “Only So Much” by Rachel Hadas in the Jan. 4, 2010, issue. “I bend to the open notebook,” Hadas begins. (Here we would normally stop reading, according the game’s rules.) Later the narrator gets distracted by some ants, “I shut the notebook and open it from the back, to write.”
“Only So Much” got me wondering whether there was a more scientific way to gauge The New Yorker’s fondness for meta-poetry. I downloaded every poem on The New Yorker’s Web site—which came out to 316 specimens dating back to January 2008—and conducted a simple computerized search for the words poetry, poem, writing, reading, words, lines, or verse. I granted clemency in cases where words or lines were clearly used in a non-poetry-writing context.
Read rest of this article at Slate.com
Eric Hill is the editor of branta.
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