As one who maintains that the multiple-choice exam retains its potency for the poet who favors unusual or ad hoc forms, I have created the Freud Quiz, a series that continues and now numbers some thirty entries. But as a sort of aphoristic aphrodisiac, this versatile form begs to be applied to other subjects. Let's start with hell. Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and make our visit.
Hell is
(1) "Other people" (Sartre)
(2) The title of the first section of Dante's Divine Comedy
(3) Cowering in a trench in Flanders beside the dead bodies of two fallen comrades
(4) Having to listen to the music Sasha Frere Jones praises in The New Yorker
(5) "Myself" (Milton)
(6) A book of poetry consisting entirely of unedited traffic reports
(7) A substantive formed from the Anglo-Saxon helan or behelian, cognate to "hole" (cavern) and "hollow."
(8) The edifice at the end of the road paved with good intentions
(9) An empty place populated by devils (Shakespeare)
(10) "What You Make It" (Breathe Carolina, 2011)
So what does Van Gogh's "Kartoffelessers" ("Potato Eaters"), the image above, have to do with it? Well. . .
