When Jeff Bezos defended major layoffs at The Washington Post last week, he reached for poetry. Pressed on why he would not simply subsidise the paper, he argued payment was a “signal” of relevance: “If people won’t pay for our product, we’re not doing, it’s not a good enough product […] It would be like poetry without rhyming. It’s too easy.”
The analogy was mocked almost immediately. A former Washington Post literary critic imagined Poetry magazine rejecting T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for insufficient rhyme. Others responded in the form the occasion seemed to invite:
