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 travel.
One way of answering the question is to brandish this list and say “these three hundred things happened”. That is a true answer, for once, and, in any case, we need the dots because the test of any emergent curve is that it should pass through the dots and so not give a visibly false account of the underlying data.
A better question may be “what 300 things just happened?”
Another true fact is that the last classic survey anthology was ‘Dear World’, back in 2012. That was a classic work, presumably still is. We are owed a survey anthology. Obviously, if you have 200 significant new poets, it is logistically difficult to anthologise them.
We can say that the volume of output is increasing. Fairly complete figures indicate that the number of titles, by individual poets, rose by roughly 33% between 2000 and 2019.
The PBS list is a proxy indicator for significant events in poetry in that year. Improving on it would ask for a witness with relevant knowledge. With more information, that person might say that many of these titles are not significant, or that many titles not included on the list are significant.
A step towards finding valid patterns might be to divide the whole set into subsets which have more coherence and continuity. Internal coherence, continuity over time. If you could identify 50 cells which individual books would fit tidily inside, you could describe a particular cell in 2000 and then see what it looked like in 2020.
One view would be that all 300 titles are original and embody a unique artistic sensibility. That seems a little over-optimistic. (But, all the 74 poets in Dear World probably are original. They aren’t repeating ideas, or, if they are, it is at some inconspicuous level of organisation. In an odd way, the book describes "a generation of dissimilarity" rather than a raft of shared feelings.)
If you pick up a book published in the 1950s, an original I mean, there is a certain Fifties atmosphere which it gives off. This is evocative, if you are a nostalgic person. Certainly if you were alive in the Fifties, or soon after. We can say that there are seven or eight different “airs of the time” for the present decade. That is a step forward, I suppose.
Placing works of art as dots on a board presupposes that they can be classified. That is already a problem. Anyone who finds a poem unoriginal is making an act of classification. And everyone can do this. This is quite a complex act of memory. It is also intuitive, and turning it into an articulate, shareable, statement is demanding. Classification can only be valid if it matches those intuitive perceptions. We have to go through the stage of verbal classification in order to share any reaction with each other. And the desire to repeat pleasurable sensations tells us to find what is similar to what we have just enjoyed.
(This is a start point. The issue doesn't exist yet, but the idea is clearly going to be about Time.)
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 travel.
One way of answering the question is to brandish this list and say “these three hundred things happened”. That is a true answer, for once, and, in any case, we need the dots because the test of any emergent curve is that it should pass through the dots and so not give a visibly false account of the underlying data.
A better question may be “what 300 things just happened?”
Another true fact is that the last classic survey anthology was ‘Dear World’, back in 2012. That was a classic work, presumably still is. We are owed a survey anthology. Obviously, if you have 200 significant new poets, it is logistically difficult to anthologise them.
We can say that the volume of output is increasing. Fairly complete figures indicate that the number of titles, by individual poets, rose by roughly 33% between 2000 and 2019.
The PBS list is a proxy indicator for significant events in poetry in that year. Improving on it would ask for a witness with relevant knowledge. With more information, that person might say that many of these titles are not significant, or that many titles not included on the list are significant.
A step towards finding valid patterns might be to divide the whole set into subsets which have more coherence and continuity. Internal coherence, continuity over time. If you could identify 50 cells which individual books would fit tidily inside, you could describe a particular cell in 2000 and then see what it looked like in 2020.
One view would be that all 300 titles are original and embody a unique artistic sensibility. That seems a little over-optimistic. (But, all the 74 poets in Dear World probably are original. They aren’t repeating ideas, or, if they are, it is at some inconspicuous level of organisation. In an odd way, the book describes "a generation of dissimilarity" rather than a raft of shared feelings.)
If you pick up a book published in the 1950s, an original I mean, there is a certain Fifties atmosphere which it gives off. This is evocative, if you are a nostalgic person. Certainly if you were alive in the Fifties, or soon after. We can say that there are seven or eight different “airs of the time” for the present decade. That is a step forward, I suppose.
Placing works of art as dots on a board presupposes that they can be classified. That is already a problem. Anyone who finds a poem unoriginal is making an act of classification. And everyone can do this. This is quite a complex act of memory. It is also intuitive, and turning it into an articulate, shareable, statement is demanding. Classification can only be valid if it matches those intuitive perceptions. We have to go through the stage of verbal classification in order to share any reaction with each other. And the desire to repeat pleasurable sensations tells us to find what is similar to what we have just enjoyed.
(This is a start point. The issue doesn't exist yet, but the idea is clearly going to be about Time.)
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