Beat the Dots
Time issues: one, Beat the dots The Poetry Book Society lists suggested new books on their website, and an analysis of their list for four quarters of 2023 yields a little over 300 British titles. (If you include anthologies and foreign poets, the figure is over 400.) The reader will forgive us for not actually listing these books. Anyway, this gives us 320 things that literally happened during 2023. Analysis of these data points could allow them to be mapped on a whiteboard as a scatter pattern. We could then draw ones that would group the dots into things like trend lines and clusters of higher density. Comparison with an earlier date, say the year 2000, would then give us a first-stage model of change through time. That is an optimistic account, and, however much the concerned audience would like to hear an answer to the question “what just happened?”, it does not seem that we can either reduce 300 books to a single graph or find a clear curve that sums up the direction of trave...