Fact-checking poetry

According to an article in the Observer, the New Yorker fact-checks its poetry just as it would any other article. (!). There's a brief account of a Richard Wilbur poem being rejected because Wilbur would not change the poem to be more "accurate." For example:

Of recent conundrums, Mr. Canby recalled a vexing poem by Philip Schultz, "At the Manhattan Social Security Office," published last October. The narrator is reading The New York Review of Books. Initially, Mr. Schultz included the phrase, "Afghanistan, what could be done," as a kind of scattered thought. The checkers caught the reference to a NYRB article headlined, "Afghanistan: What Could Work." Complicating matters, The New Yorker was planning on running a profile of the article's author, Rory Stewart, the following week. The fact-checkers pushed to include the proper title of the article, and Mr. Schultz ceded the line.

But they did publish a recent poem by Michael Robbins, which, on the surface at least, contains a whole bunch of incorrect info:

In the end, The New Yorker printed the dubious lines. "The reason we left that one is because the whole quality is absurdist," said Peter Canby, head of The New Yorker's fact-checking department. "There's a suggestion that the narrator is a meth user with scattered thoughts, which is one reason why a narrator would get a fact wrong." Indeed, meth addicts are famous for inciting editors' retractions. (In real life, Mr. Robbins' sole vice is tobacco.)

Yes, because the only way a poem could be composed of "scattered" thoughts is for the "narrator" to have a drug or psychological problem which forgives the poem's form.