Chasing the Thrill, by Daniel Barbarisi book review

English literary critic William Empson gave the title “Seven Levels of Ambiguity” to his classic analysis of how poems differ from, say, toaster-oven instruction manuals. Fenn’s doggerel had seven times seven levels of ambiguity, enough to keep an estimated 100,000 fortune hunters poring over it for a decade. Unfortunately, some of them strayed into national parks, which, Barbarisi notes, “were suddenly overwhelmed, forced to create special announcements, rules, and cautions specifically for the brazen Fenn hunters as they tramped through protected wildlife zones and even dug up outhouses in search of Fenn’s ‘home of Brown.’ ”