Double exposure
Double exposure : more (2) on a time theme
(AD)
We present an issue in which the span between the poets by birth date covers five decades. The idea is to contrast and illuminate. We are not looking at a progress theory or at a way of delegitimating some style or other, nor at a kind of claim in which the future validates the power of the past. The concept is to publish an array of information which covers the widest possible range of styles and projects.
The process of change is likely to take place in the unconscious of art, an area of thousands of rules (or a mile-long printout of software) which is always there but always hard to focus on. For comparison, an expert in dating art in a genre which was produced over a long period would look at aspects of production and arrangement which are non-focal. The central features may be stable over a long period, or else be unique. The non-focal features can be arranged in a series, and, with luck, in a series which varies reliably over time. It is also possible to date poems – although the date is likely to reflect the moment when a poet’s style was formed. That poet is likely to stick to essential features over their creative life.
The process of change between, say, 1985 and 2025, is likely to be within this unconscious area and within a small subset of the full set of rules. It is hard to describe. That matters less because we recognise it at the unconscious level and so the knowledge is already there.
We are offering a double exposure – two editors with some 30 years’ difference in age looking at sectors of the poetic world which fascinate them, and where their fascination has led to expertise.
Faced with a title like Lana del Rey playing in a strip club, it helps if you know who Lana Del Rey is. The question is whether comprehension has broken up. It is not credible that the two editors would reach a shared view of the poetic scene. Necessarily, they will see two different pictures, and the differences may reveal a process. Conversation about poetry brings up dozens of poets by name – where a good proportion of these names is recognisable to the other persons, the conversation can continue. But that process is continually evolving away from comprehension. Where X does not recognise 50% of the examples which Y brings up, to illustrate a point, comprehension is growing ragged and heading out to the end of the line, to the inability to converse.
A simple example of change is in watching musicals. AD mentioned Meet me in St Louis in a review only to be countered with the admission that I don’t like musicals. This was the most popular film genre of the 1950s, the most loved, and is now something which young people don’t watch at all. They don’t know who Arthur Freed was and can’t tell Jeanne Crain from Ruby Keeler. I am not proposing a special issue on Jeanette MacDonald (and deny owning a copy of Naughty Marietta, 1935), just using a large-scale change in taste to point to a myriad small-scale ones. What was artificial comes to seem false, what was authentic moves into the zone of broken formula.
A cogent account of stylistic change over several hundred years is supplied in Alois Riegl's Die spätrȍmische Kunstindustrie, which covers the 4th to 6th centuries AD and takes us from classical to mediaeval. The abundant material comes from a Roman town in Austria, and since the Habsburgs drew much of their legitimacy from their support of the Roman church, the funding was related to a desire to promote Austria’s Roman and imperial past. Riegl pointed to the role of the background changing, while figures remain static; we have to consider whether things like the boundary between the self and the rest of the cognitive realm, and the role of attention and concentration as the “core” of the poetic act, might have changed over 40 years. He says of the Late Roman will to art that “Rather, it wanted to see three-dimensional, fully spatial, and self-continued form. This entailed a liberation of the individual form of the universal optical plane (the ground) and isolation of the form from this ground plane and of other individual forms. This liberated not only the forms, but also the intervals of ground between them. {This] led to the emancipation of the interval, indeed to the elevation of the hitherto neutral and formless ground to a self-contained aesthetic and formal potency.” The interval, that is empty space, that is space itself, can change its nature. The temporal process may be taking place within a zone we consciously do not look at.
We can surely put the modern poet in a figure:ground relationship. This relationship is unlikely to have remained constant over several decades.
Reading a modern poem can be seen as the unrolling of a set of competences. These exquisite abstract values are not visible until someone can see them. One maps symbolic structures and collects rewards. We develop our awareness, even if the advances acquired can be seen as involving a trap which doesn’t open the other way. Of course, the rules involved can be seen as belonging to the readers rather than to the poet. These competences are evidently not the same in 2025 as they were in 1985.
Your mind is a locked room and Naughty Marietta has quite forgotten where she put the key.
(AD)
We present an issue in which the span between the poets by birth date covers five decades. The idea is to contrast and illuminate. We are not looking at a progress theory or at a way of delegitimating some style or other, nor at a kind of claim in which the future validates the power of the past. The concept is to publish an array of information which covers the widest possible range of styles and projects.
The process of change is likely to take place in the unconscious of art, an area of thousands of rules (or a mile-long printout of software) which is always there but always hard to focus on. For comparison, an expert in dating art in a genre which was produced over a long period would look at aspects of production and arrangement which are non-focal. The central features may be stable over a long period, or else be unique. The non-focal features can be arranged in a series, and, with luck, in a series which varies reliably over time. It is also possible to date poems – although the date is likely to reflect the moment when a poet’s style was formed. That poet is likely to stick to essential features over their creative life.
The process of change between, say, 1985 and 2025, is likely to be within this unconscious area and within a small subset of the full set of rules. It is hard to describe. That matters less because we recognise it at the unconscious level and so the knowledge is already there.
We are offering a double exposure – two editors with some 30 years’ difference in age looking at sectors of the poetic world which fascinate them, and where their fascination has led to expertise.
Faced with a title like Lana del Rey playing in a strip club, it helps if you know who Lana Del Rey is. The question is whether comprehension has broken up. It is not credible that the two editors would reach a shared view of the poetic scene. Necessarily, they will see two different pictures, and the differences may reveal a process. Conversation about poetry brings up dozens of poets by name – where a good proportion of these names is recognisable to the other persons, the conversation can continue. But that process is continually evolving away from comprehension. Where X does not recognise 50% of the examples which Y brings up, to illustrate a point, comprehension is growing ragged and heading out to the end of the line, to the inability to converse.
A simple example of change is in watching musicals. AD mentioned Meet me in St Louis in a review only to be countered with the admission that I don’t like musicals. This was the most popular film genre of the 1950s, the most loved, and is now something which young people don’t watch at all. They don’t know who Arthur Freed was and can’t tell Jeanne Crain from Ruby Keeler. I am not proposing a special issue on Jeanette MacDonald (and deny owning a copy of Naughty Marietta, 1935), just using a large-scale change in taste to point to a myriad small-scale ones. What was artificial comes to seem false, what was authentic moves into the zone of broken formula.
A cogent account of stylistic change over several hundred years is supplied in Alois Riegl's Die spätrȍmische Kunstindustrie, which covers the 4th to 6th centuries AD and takes us from classical to mediaeval. The abundant material comes from a Roman town in Austria, and since the Habsburgs drew much of their legitimacy from their support of the Roman church, the funding was related to a desire to promote Austria’s Roman and imperial past. Riegl pointed to the role of the background changing, while figures remain static; we have to consider whether things like the boundary between the self and the rest of the cognitive realm, and the role of attention and concentration as the “core” of the poetic act, might have changed over 40 years. He says of the Late Roman will to art that “Rather, it wanted to see three-dimensional, fully spatial, and self-continued form. This entailed a liberation of the individual form of the universal optical plane (the ground) and isolation of the form from this ground plane and of other individual forms. This liberated not only the forms, but also the intervals of ground between them. {This] led to the emancipation of the interval, indeed to the elevation of the hitherto neutral and formless ground to a self-contained aesthetic and formal potency.” The interval, that is empty space, that is space itself, can change its nature. The temporal process may be taking place within a zone we consciously do not look at.
We can surely put the modern poet in a figure:ground relationship. This relationship is unlikely to have remained constant over several decades.
Reading a modern poem can be seen as the unrolling of a set of competences. These exquisite abstract values are not visible until someone can see them. One maps symbolic structures and collects rewards. We develop our awareness, even if the advances acquired can be seen as involving a trap which doesn’t open the other way. Of course, the rules involved can be seen as belonging to the readers rather than to the poet. These competences are evidently not the same in 2025 as they were in 1985.
Your mind is a locked room and Naughty Marietta has quite forgotten where she put the key.
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