The New Yorker: Poems on Poetry

Note: I stumbled across this Browbeat blog post from Slate.com that ponders how The New Yorker has a particular poetry pattern.  I remember another article from a few years ago (possibly from Slate.com, too) that pointed out The New Yorker frequently published poems from the same writers.

About 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." Click here to read the rest on Slate.com