Cody Walker emailed me to say that while April 27, 2016 might have seemed uneventful, “it’ll be remembered as the date of the greatest blog comment in the history of the Internet.” He pasted in a link to “Iambic Pentameter Has Nothing to Do with Your Heart,” an essay on the Kenyon Review’s web site in which Derek Mong disputes the claim that English verse goes boom-BOOM because the human heart does, too.
The piece generated a variety of comments, both yea and nay, but Cody was clearly referring to a long post by Richard Kenney, who argues persuasively that the heartbeat’s relationship to the iamb is neither causal nor coincidental. Impressively, he manages to do this without equivocating or simply splitting the difference. What makes it the greatest blog comment ever, though, is that it’s both the most extravagantly learned and the least smug. Kenney’s interest in the subject is absolute; his interest in scoring points is non-existent.
The editors of Poetry Northwest were so impressed that they reprinted the comment as its own essay. If you’d like to read it in its natural habitat (i.e. surrounded by other, less-temperate comments), scroll down from the original Kenyon Review post. The entire discussion is inside baseball, but I recommend it. It’s happening at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy, and it also contains an invaluable lesson in how to offer a lesson. Sometimes, when I’m about to post something online — some carefully fashioned bon mots or 400-word tantrum — I’ll pause and ask myself what Mr. Rogers would think of it. April 27, 2016 was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
the poet in topeka 