Writing About Poems That Are About Writing Poetry

Slate ‘s Chris Wilson noticed a theme running through many of the poems published in The New Yorker : “With astounding frequency, they were about writing 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.

By this measure, 84 poems—27 percent of the whole lot—mentioned poetry, including 32 that used the P word explicitly and 15 that mentioned writing in the title.

There’s nothing wrong with a little meta-poetry now and again. William Carlos Williams penned a bit of it and Keats fretted in verse about dying too young to complete his intended oeuvre. In the spirit of the old workshop injunction against “writing about writers writing,” however, 27 percent feels a tad steep.