Adam Kirsch writes:
Over time, modern poetry had to become ever more subtle and surprising in order to defeat the reader’s expectations and open him or her up to the experience of transcendence.
Good point!
Old poetry is hard to read because it’s written using old-fashioned language. Yes, Shakespeare’s writing is beautiful, but it’s hard to read, at least for awhile until you read a bunch of it and get warmed up.
New poetry is hard to read because poetry is supposed to be tricky and obscure. I always wondered why this was. Even Philip Larkin, say, who’s arguably the most readable and accessible renowned literary poet of the past century (I’m excluding songwriters here), writes in that compressed way. In high school I had a friend who said that the reason Dickens went on and on is that he was paid by the word; it often seems that modern poets are paid by inverse proportion to the number of words they use.
So, I like Kirsch’s story: it gives me an explanation as to why modern poetry is so hard to read. Poets are always trying to capture the experience of transcendence, and one way to get there is to do something new and unexpected. Similarly with music.
With poetry as with music, sometimes innovation works. The Rite of Spring is new-sounding and, compared to some earlier music, hard to follow, but it sounds good in its own right. Some other modern music, though, just sounds . . . modern. I think there’s a lot of pressure on composers nowadays (actually, for the past hundred years or so) to either sound poppy or to sound innovative, “poetic” in the sense of conveying lots of information with very few tunes.
Prose writing is different, somehow. A novel can be new and still be readable and give that wonderful immersive experience that we associate with the best fiction. Movies and theater too. Although I will say that the non-revival musicals I’ve seen in the past several years have mostly been forgettable, musically speaking. Sondheim they ain’t. So maybe that’s harder.
Anyway, back to literature. Some prose is so innovative and experimental that it’s hard to follow, but mostly I’m happy with new books of prose fiction. Poetry is another story. Arguably this is because poetry is aiming for that elusive “experience of transcendence.”
Maybe there’s something similar going on with science fiction, a genre which seems progressive or sequential, unlike most other literature, and which is famously always trying to tap that “sense of wonder,” which seems to have some connection to the transcendence offered by poetry. What I mean is that with science-fiction there’s some expectation of novelty in plot and theme, and new writers in the field have seemed very aware of what’s come before. The result is that new science fiction is always leaving the comfort zone of readers, in a way that new non-sf literature does not necessarily do.
In any case, thanks, Adam Kirsch, for your insight.
P.S. This discussion reminds me of financial fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried’s justly mocked argument that William Shakespeare couldn’t be the goat of literature because, statistically speaking, there are so many more writers today than there were around 1600. A key flaw in Fried’s argument (if you can call it that) is that Shakespeare’s not just a good writer, he was also an innovator. It’s harder to be an innovator now.
While I don’t much like SBF, I don’t think that it’s actually a strike against his argument to point out that Shakespeare was a good writer *and* an innovator, and that it’s harder to be an innovator now. At the risk of being pedantic, the argument (as I read it) isn’t that Shakespeare’s writing was unlikely to be the best, but rather that he’s unlikely to be the best *writer*—which means ignoring “accidental” benefits like how easy it is to innovate in favor of pure “skill.” There are obviously other things to object to in the argument, but I feel like what you’ve pointed out is actually one of the only defensible things about it!
Doesn’t this just rehash the same issue of not agreeing what one means when one says the “greatest writer”?
SBF seemed to be making some statement like:
1) There exists some quantifiable skill we can call “writing”
2) Each person who attains this skill by learning to write draws a value W_i from some (stationary?) population distribution
3) It’s unlikely that max_i(W_i) occurs within the first X% of people where X is some small value.
Andrew’s pointed out flaw seems to be saying that’s not what people mean when people say when they say someone is a ‘great writer’ and that one must include other qualities, such as being an innovator. Seems like a reasonable critique to me.
Quote from the blog post: “New poetry is hard to read because poetry is supposed to be tricky and obscure.”
I’ve tried to get some of my poetry/lyrics published on an online poetry website because I like to share it. I’ve noticed that looking at many of the things they published, they all seem to use fancy words and I had trouble getting the meaning or story in the poem. I was reminded of that when reading the above sentence.
It also reminded me of scientific writing, in that just like with poetry I like scientific writing to be clear first and foremost. Looking at the poetry/lyrics I have written, the story is pretty clear, or at least someone can imagine what it’s about I reason. I also think I use simple words. If there is any “art” in the poetry/lyrics I think does not come from obscurity or fancy words, but it comes from the playing with words, and the image that I want to paint.
I have shared some poetry/lyrics on there a few times. I am running out of stuff to share. I have some poetry/lyrics that I haven’t shared before but I am not sure they are appropriate here. It’s sort of a version of a country song by HARDY titled “Wait in the truck”, but those lyrics of that song didn’t make much sense to me. I wrote something about abuse, and revenge, but more in the style of Johnny Cash or Jerry Reed. I thought that a certain musician could sing it in a way that doesn’t sound too harsh or heavy, just like Johnny Cash’s song “One piece at a time” is about stealing automobile parts, but it doesn’t sound too harsh or heavy.
The difference between your poetry and literary poetry is the audience. In effect, what Andrew is pointing out, is that literary poetry has a very small audience with very specific expectations. IOW, there is a sort of code in literary poetry that’s shared between the writers and readers but nearly completely unknown among the general public, which in turn keeps the audience small.
If you’ve ever tried to do the NYT crossword on a regular basis you’ll see a similar thing on a smaller scale. There are certain ways to think about how clues are presented in a crossword. If you don’t do the crosswords all the time, these clues aren’t very useful. If you stick to it for a few months you start to understand how they work.
Quote from above: “In effect, what Andrew is pointing out, is that literary poetry has a very small audience with very specific expectations.”
I can’t access the Kirsch review of the book about modern poetry that views it as some sort of spiritual experience (if I am understanding things correctly here), but it sounds a lot like those people who use fancy words to describe wine, or who talk interpretative nonsense about a painting or art piece, or who go and watch an artist kick over some buckets of sand in them and call that art.
My guess is that they may become bored of this within 10 years or so, and than the return to some more sanity or a more solid base or some more concrete things. I think this because it seems quite possible that nonsensical art, or obscure poetry, might not have any real substance.
Perhaps to transcend, you have to keep your feet on the ground to a certain extent, if only to know what, and that, you are in fact transcending.
Side note: as a fellow “Anonymous” I always try and use a different name when participating in a thread with, or reply to, another “Anonymous” because it becomes very hard to follow otherwise in my view.
“Perhaps to transcend, you have to keep your feet on the ground to a certain extent, if only to know what, and that, you are in fact transcending.”
I’m not into poetic transcendence. I read history. It provides insight on the real world.
I just finished one on South American indigenous cultures up to contact. It’s now clear that some sites are older than 30K BCE. In my personal opinion, the bulk of the evidence is pointing to the end of the “Bearing Sea Land Bridge” hypothesis. It seems clear that humans reached South America first, then migrated north. Unfortunately right off hand I don’t know the genetic evidence for hte origin of peoples of South America. Presumably they are asian, not south pacific ilsanders. I’ll have to look that up.
Now I’m on an analysis of the Book of Genesis. Biblical history / archeology is super interesting. I learned during my undergrad that scholars view the first five books of the old testament as having been writen by four different authors (J, E, D, and P) and compiled into its approximate current form around 500BCE. The division into separate authors in part explains why there are multiple versions of various stories. What always struck me as odd about that explanation is: why did the 500BCE compiler keep two conflicting stories in the canon? However, the current author explains the history of that JEDP analysis more thoroughly than in my undergrad course. I had presumed that there was significant evidence behind the JEDP hypothesis but in fact was developed entirely by one person in the late 19th century just from reading the text. There is no supporting archeology and the time frames proposed for each author conflict with archeological data. Yet it’s still the standard interpretation. Just another topic in which the academic mileu seems to be more dogma than reality.
Anyway, the information is clearly presented by the author and actualy has something to do with reality. No need to wade through the secret codes of modern literary poetry to discover some fanciful belief.
Maybe writing schools and a general culture of deep analysis have to do with it. One pores over successful poetry of the past and creates a formula for one’s own language and structure. A formula does not allow for mishaps. One person’s formula or technique is so specific to them that it is easy to lose the connection with the average reader.
“New poetry is hard to read because poetry is supposed to be tricky and obscure.”
I think you mean that “new poetry is supposed to be tricky and obscure”, not that all poetry is supposed to be like that? There’s plenty of poetry (some of it great) that is neither tricky nor obscure.
What about Ogden Nash? A lot of his poems “defeat the reader’s expectations”, usually within the scope of a couple of lines. Not all of his verse is light jest, eg “Old Men” is very poignant. He remains one of the most readable and enjoyable 20th century poets, without being obscure.
Thanks for this. This is more in line with my style of writing poetry or lyrics I think, and is perhaps also in line with what I wrote about playing with words and painting a picture.
I looked up some poems by Nash as a result of your comment, and one of them seems to be titled “Grandpa Is Ashamed” and it seems to only have two lines:
“A child need not be very clever
To learn that “Later, dear” means “Never.”
Now, I am not sure what this is about of course, but given the title in combination with those sentences it isn’t hard to come up with an idea of what this might be about. This in turn, might even cause the reader to think about certain things, like the possible importance of spending time with and/or listening to one’s grandchildren.
This kind of poetry can evoke images and thoughts that I personally think are much more interesting and perhaps even “artful” compared to obscure poetry that uses vague sentences and fancy words that seem to not amount to anything substantial.
Today’s blog began with this :
“Old poetry is hard to read because it’s written using old-fashioned language.”
Coincidentally, in today’s Washington Post, this appeared regarding an old-fashioned language which depends on May 20, 1875:
“Trump, in his speech to Congress last month, also claimed that people as old as 150 years had been getting benefits. But The Washington Post had reported in February that this is largely a coding issue. The Social Security Administration (SSA) maintains its databases using COBOL, a nearly 70-year-old computer programming language that doesn’t have a standardized way to store and work with dates. Often a default date is chosen, most commonly May 20, 1875, if no birth date is known.”
With that in mind and the fact that May 20 is conveniently just around the corner, we should declare it National Default Day.
What does any of this have to do with statistical modeling?
A great deal of poetry addresses the fact that the mind is a poor Bayesian. Does that answer your question?
Anon:
The title of the blog is Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. This post has to do with social science.
nobody loses all the time
i had an uncle named
Sol who was a born failure and
nearly everybody said he should have gone
into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could
sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which
may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle
Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable
of all to use a highfalootin phrase
luxuries that is or to
wit farming and be
it needlessly
added
my Uncle Sol’s farm
failed because the chickens
ate the vegetables so
my Uncle Sol had a
chicken farm till the
skunks ate the chickens when
my Uncle Sol
had a skunk farm but
the skunks caught cold and
died and so
my Uncle Sol imitated the
skunks in a subtle manner
or by drowning himself in the watertank
but somebody who’d given my Uncle Sol a Victor
Victrola and records while he lived presented to
him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a
scruptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with
tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and
i remember we all cried like the Missouri
when my Uncle Sol’s coffin lurched because
somebody pressed a button
(and down went
my Uncle
Sol
and started a worm farm)
Sol lucet omnibus ;-)
From the above:
“Adam Kirsch writes:
Over time, modern poetry had to become ever more subtle and surprising in order to defeat the reader’s expectations and open him or her up to the experience of transcendence.”
And often to save the author’s neck, as far as I can tell.
I haven’t been able to read Kirsch’s full article (it’s paywalled) but the first five paragraphs alone are so riddled with errors that I’m not altogether sure about what his “reading” of CharlesTaylor, whose books take up some of my shelf space (which doesn’t mean that I’m a fan of his) might be. Having reached the age where my gums are competing with my hairline as to which one is receding faster – it seems that my gums are winning (smoking doesn’t help) – I’ll excuse Kirsch on the grounds of his relative youthfulness and probably being a victim of the educational reforms which began in the early 1970s. We’re now truly in what Adorno once labelled the age of ‘semi-erudition’.
Andrew, on the other hand, does make a few very good points, re: poetry and music. E.g.The Rite of Spring may, to the listener, appear incongruous noise (which I thought when I was 11) – unless you are fortunate enough to experience it as a ballet performance (which I had when I was 12).
When it comes to prose, keep re-reading the novels that impressed once every ten years or so, being mindful of you initial reader response.
Trying to read a Shakespeare play is pretty much pointless – watch the play first, then read the script for all the bits you might have missed in all the excitement (he didn’t write closet dramas).
Also, The Waste Land (the only poem with footnotes I’m aware of) was published a few years before Dorothy Parker’s Résumé (she was born the same year as my father) – which brings me to my main point:
Modern (I’ll assume 20th century++ is meant) poetry is not hard to read – it has to seen in its context, just like not so modern poetry – it deepens like a coastal shelf. Compare Kipling’s If (pre-WW1) with Yeates’ Second Coming (post-WW1). Where ‘old stuff’ (i.e. anything before the Romantics) still appears easily accessible, it merely reveals the banality of human existence (i.e. some things will never change). The main job of poets is to find means of representing what others find difficult to express, thereby expanding the language of their time.The same goes for music (which Stockhausen and his ilk merged with performing arts) and the visual arts.
But is it really harder to be an innovator now? I think it is more to do with Clive James’ observation that the the talent pool is finite – and that too many people wish to be famous 15 minutes …
Quote from above: “The main job of poets is to find means of representing what others find difficult to express (…)”
I like that view!
Perhaps this also is in line with my personal taste concerning lyrics or poetry, in that I like it when simple words are used to paint a picture that evokes something (in contrast to obscure poetry with fancy words and vague meaning). Perhaps the “artfulness” or “quality” of poetry can be seen through that lens, or from that perspective, as well. More specifically, if the poetry resonates with relatively more “others” it can perhaps be seen as being in line with the main job of poets and in turn their poetry. Or, if certain words are used that evoke more images and emotions that are difficult to recognize or express by others that can perhaps also be seen as being in line with “artful” or “high quality” poetry.
My opinion is that the environmental conditions to create another Shakespeare just don’t exist today as they did in Elizabethan England, at least not in the English-speaking world.
I agree that comparing literature from different eras is subjective and maybe even impossible in the sense that you’re no longer comparing the same art form. However, conditions matter more than population size even for objective measurements. For example, Norway dominates the Winter Olympic medal count despite being a small country because they have a culture of cross country skiing that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.
Thinking about this problem got me interested in understanding the expectation of the maximum for independent samples drawn from normal distributions with different means. I tried to understand some math stack exchange articles and did a little simulation in R. It seems that expectation of the maximum increases more or less logarithmically, so that differences in population sizes matter less for sufficiently large populations.
It may be of interest to consider the arguments put forward by Anna Kornbluh in her recent book ‘Immediacy’, which addresses changes in length, perspective, and publishing as factors contributing to the stylistic changes noted in this post!
Jcs:
I picked up Immediacy and tried to read it, but I found it absolutely unreadable. I think there are some interesting ideas in there somewhere, but they’re buried in mountains of jargon.
Fair enough; I wouldn’t expect a non-statistician to get much out of Bayesian Data Analysis either. Maybe Kornbluh could do the outsiders like me a favor and write a plain-English summary?
I went to the website for the book and saw this blurb from Mark McGurl:
McGurl’s blurb is written in a similar style to Kornbluh’s book, so if you enjoy reading that blurb, you might like the book too.
The website also links to a review by Omid Bagherli which begins:
and continues with bits like this:
This is just a language that I do not speak. And usually I enjoy literary criticism. I guess I’m not part of the intended audience. Again, as the author of technical tomes such as Bayesian Data Analysis, I can hardly complain. I can just say that I got nothing out of Immediacy except a sense that Kornbluh has some interesting ideas that I might like to read about in my native language.
I’m baffled by people’s responses to the “shakespeare” question. We should not think of Shakespeare as an innovator. He was a discoverer. He discovered most of the elements, many of the properties of those elements, and the rational structure or scaffolding in which they function – the periodic table – of literature. What he left for others are a few elements of minor importance, some of their properties and some aspects of the structure.
Shakespeare discovered the fundamentals of the universe of literature. Everyone else inventing new combinations of those elements – new solar systems and planets – but not the elements themselves.
And Shakespeare was a serious innovator too, given Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus
And in this context CP Cavafy was pretty good in the more or less last century
Sometimes it feels that many poets lost their poetry, and have little to say….
This would be news to everyone who came before him, I think.
I am not sure that the difficulty of modern poetry is such a new thing. Poets have always produced work that is deliberately difficult. 2500 years ago, Pindar was writing lines like, “the destined son met and killed Laius, and fulfilled the oracle of Pytho, spoken long before” (2nd Olympian ode, 476 BCE), relying on the listener or reader to know the story and identify the hero. Pindar says in the same ode that the purpose of the difficulty is to flatter the audience who get it: “I have many swift arrows in the quiver under my arm, arrows that speak to the initiated. But the masses need interpreters.”
The hyper-allusive style reached its apogee in the “Alexandra” of pseudo-Lycophron, which consists entirely of passages like, “I mourn for thee, my country, and for the grave of Atlas’ daughter’s diver son, who of old in a stitched vessel, like an Istrian fish-creel with four legs, sheathed his body in a leathern sack and, all alone, swam like a petrel of Rheithymnia, leaving Zerynthos, cave of the goddess to whom dogs are slain, even Saos, the strong foundation of the Cyrbantes, what time the plashing rain of Zeus laid waste with deluge all the earth.” That this kind of poetry is readable at all, is due to the diligent footnoting of scholars over millennia, something which modern poetry necessarily lacks. William Empson noted that “Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes” (‘Obscurity and Annotation’, 1930)
When the world is too big
When it’s too much and too loud
You don’t have to say a word
You don’t have to whisper nor shout
I don’t need to hear a sound
I can tell what it is that you need
I just have to listen
to those things I can see and read