From “Water Images of The New Yorker,” by Charles Bernstein. Bernstein’s study was distributed to participants at a poetry seminar held in June at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver.

Maybe you’ve heard it before: “Did you ever notice that every poem in The New Yorker has a water image? Whadda they do, print only wet poems?”

While slightly less interesting than looking for the hidden “Ninas” in Al Hirschfeld’s cartoons in the New York Times, this water-on-the-brain syndrome exerts a certain fascination.

So, when The New Yorker‘s poetry editor, Howard Moss, died last year, I wondered if…