“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,” notes Chris Wilson on Slate. “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.”

Wilson decided to test his suspicion by downloading “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.” He let poems using terms found “in a non-poetry-writing context” slide, but he still found “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.”