The Poetry of Google Analytics

When Walter Bargen was named Missouri’s first-ever poet laureate in January 2008, Mizzou Wire posted a profile of the prolific poet/senior coordinator of MU’s Assessment Resource Center.

Looking through Google Analytics recently, I discovered that “walter bargen” was the third-most-used keyword in Mizzou Wire searches. I e-mailed him with the news.

His response:

Scantily Clad Poet

An editor of an online university magazine tells the poet

That she examined their “Google Analytics,”

And the poet thinks a new geometry of attention that eluded Euclid:

The axiom quantifying visits to the website,

The hypotenuse of where these visitors live,

The theorem of what stories are read,

Down to sequencing readers’ keystrokes and genome.

She has discovered that the poet is the third most popular

Keyword used to search the website after the football team

And before the “Golden Girls” (not the TV sitcom).

In other words, the poet is less popular than football

But more popular than scantily clad dancing college girls.

Who says poetry is dead? Later she clarifies her earlier

Analysis in order to curb the poet’s enthusiasm. The poet

Is not the most viewed/read story; that position belongs

to a student named by Glamour magazine

as one of the top-ten college women of the year,

but the poet is the most searched for. Epistemologically,

ontologically profound implications, but for others

a poster on the post office bulletin boards will do.

Then she suggests the rankings might have been different,

If the poet had been shot jumping up and down in a cute red dress.

Now the poet is hurt; red is his favorite color.

Then the poet wonders what she meant by shot.

Walter Bargen’s 13th book of poetry, Theban Traffic, was released in May.