The New Thing: Towards A Cryptopoetics

Contemporary poetics is apparently in the throes of The New Thing. Thank fuck for that, because it's been like 4 hours since The Newer Pleonasm, a movement I so totally loved.

Luckily though, The Newer Metaphysicals has obtained some rare images for its readers of other recently discovered poetic group-anomalies :

The Newer Pleonasm

Post-Periphrastics

Neoteric Redundancy

Beautiful . . .

So beautiful . . .

Anyway, the next time you catch a new poetic movement from the depths of some imaginary historiographical Niflheim, could you please just do the decent thing :

Throw the fucker back.

How Many Poets Are There?

Over the last 12 years, I've been mapping a number of inductive statistical models which chart the growth of the world Poet-Population across a variety of contrasting demographics. This brief summary of my analysis is dedicated to Seth Abramson and Ron Silliman . . .

Research Outline

The term "Poet-Population" (PP) commonly refers to the total number of living poets on Earth at a given time. As of May 31, 2009, the Earth's Poet-Population is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be 6,792,467,727. The world Poet-Population has been growing continuously since the first circulation of Petrarch's Canzoniere in the 1330s. There were short-term falls however at other times due to lack of inspiration, for example in the mid 18th century. The fastest rates of world Poet-Population growth (above 1.8%) were seen briefly during the 1950s (see Projectivism) then for a longer period during the 1960s and 1970s. This can be seen on the following graph :



According to Poet-Population projections, the Poet-Population will continue to grow until around 2050. The 2008 rate of growth has almost halved since its peak of 2.2% per year, which was reached in 1963. World Poet-Births have levelled off at about 137-million-per-year, since their peak at 163-million in the late 1990s, and are expected to remain constant. However, Poet-Deaths are only around 56 million per year, and are expected to increase to 90 million by the year 2050. Since births outnumber deaths, the Poet-Population is expected to reach about 9 billion by the year 2040.

Different regions have different rates of Poet-Population growth. According to our statistical mapping, the growth in the Poet-Population of different regions from 2000 to 2005 was:

237.771 million in Asia

92.293 million in Africa

38.052 million in Latin America

16.241 million in Northern America

1.955 million in Oceania

-3.264 million in Europe

383.047 million in the whole world

In the 20th century, the world saw the biggest increase in its Poet-Population in human history due to a range of factors including grants, word processors, and the formation of poets into tightly cohesive groups. In 2000, the United Nations estimated that the world's Poet-Population was growing at the rate of 1.14% (or about 75 million poets) per year, down from a peak of 88 million per year in 1989. In the last few centuries, the number of poets living on Earth has increased many times over. By the year 2000, there were 10 times as many poets on Earth as there were 300 years ago. According to data from the CIA's 2005–2006 World Factbooks, the world Poet-Population increased by 203,800 every day. The CIA Factbook increased this to 211,090 poets every day in 2007, and again to 220,980 poets every day in 2009.

Statistical Models

Hoerner (1975) proposed the following formula for calculating the world Poet-Population :

where

• N is current number of poets
• T is the current year
• C = 2·10¹¹
• T₀ = 2025

The formula indicates hyperbolic growth of the Poet-Population.

According to Kapitza (1997), the Poet-Population grew between 67000 b.c. and 1965, and the world Poet-Population growth formula is:

where

• N is current Poet-Population
• T is the current year
• C = (1.86±0.01)·10¹¹
• T₀ = 2007±1
• τ = 42±1

The transition from hyperbolic growth of the Poet-Population to slower rates of growth is called demographic poetic transition.

Summary and Predictions

Globally, the Poet-Population growth rate has been steadily declining from its peak of 2.19% in 1963, but growth remains high in Latin America, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In some countries there is negative Poet-Population growth (i.e. net decrease in the Poet-Population over time), especially in Central and Eastern Europe and Southern Africa. Within the next decade, Japan and some countries in Western Europe are also expected to encounter negative Poet-Population growth.

The United Nations states that Poet-Population growth is rapidly declining, and is expected to peak at 9.2 billion in 2050.

Narrativity Is Part Of The Futility Of Language

I just spent half an hour giggling at work by The Postmodern Text Generator. I read a good ten of its enlightening essays, ranging in topics from Spinoza to the future of Libertarianism. My favourite phrases for this session were the following, which I intend on using to other people this week and attributing them to their "authors" with unswerving confidence:

- “Sexual identity", Marx claimed, "is the rubicon of language."
- The characteristic theme of la Fournier’s analysis of predialectic rationalism is not deappropriation, but postdeappropriation.
- If one examines the textual paradigm of context, one is faced with a choice: either reject postcapitalist theory or conclude that context is a product of communication.

Then of course the most wonderful thing about The Postmodern Text Generator are those occasions it produces a sentence which you attempt for 5 minutes to try to "understand". You feel there is something there. This must be a semanteme. My favourite of this category during this session being :

“Narrativity is part of the futility of language,” says Lacan.

- Um, hey Robot-Academic.
- Greetings . . . MANNING.
- Listen RA, I'm just going down to the bar with Greg and co. for a few hours, do you think you could finish that section on Pessoa in the techne chapter and then just tidy up that stuff on Perelman and The New Rhetoric? That'd be great.
- Analytic or Continental.
- Err, let's go with Analytic today. But could you put in some equations, you know like Badiou.
- Confirmed.
- Sweet. Oh and could you go easy on the sollipsistic paradoxes this time: we're not playing Žižuku. BYE!

Why It Is Harder Being Young Today Than It Ever Used To Be

You know it's true.

Following several conversation with close friends, was moved to write this after having read Matt Cozart's note of a few days ago:

I'm so fucking angry right now, or whenever I think about career stuff. Why are there never any articles that DON'T assume you've already had years of experience in a high level professional job? Why can't there be articles that tell people like me what to do? People with no skills or experience or even a slight sense of what the hell they want to do with their life??? I just don't know what to do anymore. It would be one thing if I knew what I wanted to do but simply couldn't find a job. That wouldn't be as bad. My problem is that I have never seriously considered any particular career in anything, and now I feel completely lost and defeated. How did I end up this way? I'm a college graduate, I've always done what I'm told, I don't get into trouble. I've done everything right!!!! And I still can't seem to figure out how to be an "adult", which seems to come completely naturally to everyone else. What is going on?????

What indeed, dear Matt, is going on . . . I'm sure I may get comments from people saying, more or less, "Man, you should have seen how we lived in Brooklyn in the 70s (slash 40s slash 80s)!" So I'll state in advance: I really don't care for this kind of comment. It's irrelevant to my general hypothesis, namely that the fetishistic "professionalization" of Western society means that we are forced to choose very early our "path", and the fact that this is then set in stone as a deterministic element of individuals' identities almost entirely precludes any free and considered choice of what one may indeed "want to do". I cannot tell you the number of times for instance that I've heard, over the last several years, this exchange:

- It's just too late for me now to be an architect/doctor/chef/artist. . .

- Oh, how old are you?

- 28.

- I see.

The whole "career mobility" line, specific to our contemporary Weltanschauung, is a sham. (Note, for instance, how the "Sauder Career Success Cycle" is hilariously just one big hermetically sealed self-perpetuating self-referential loop leading nowhere . . .)


See Matt, you should be able to walk into a plethora of fulfilling positions. Why is it so difficult?

This is why:

1. The ridiculous need in our society for an endlessly self-perpetuating number of degrees, certificates, diplomas, qualifications, CV references, to obtain the most junior position, anywhere, in any field. "Education" has turned pornographic. Not everyone needs to attend a university, and above all, not everyone should feel they have the obligation to do this in order to "get ahead". What happened to respect for people who had primarily technical knowledge, acquired over a short period of time, and then perfected over a practical duration? If this is respected, then individuals are also respected according not to what they "have done", but what they may do or are capable of doing. Respect for what individuals are inherently capable of doing, through their intrinsic capacities, has been buried under this infatuation for mythical epistemic accreditation. There is techne. Not all is episteme.

2. The massive extension in time now required to even enter into adult working life. 7 year med degrees, 7 year law degrees, 7 year grad programs. My undergraduate professors, who completed their studies in the sixties, used to talk of how they went into good-paying, full-time jobs after having obtained their Masters degrees.

Their Masters degrees.

Are we clear?

This means, in many cases, that today, young people under 30, if they're working at the same time, can spend upwards of 10 years in shitty, part-time poorly-paid scraping together enough shit to live on lives. (Oh and by the way, education used to free . . .) Of course, you're indeed a very lucky S.O.B (my case) if your parents are in a position to help you out financially and socially over this "formative" period. For many, or perhaps the majority, this is of course not possible.

I was reflecting on all this the other day, and was shocked to realize that, if I'm not mistaken, my parents were in the process of building their first house together when they were my age.

Currently, nothing seems further from the realms of the possible for me, and for the majority of other young people I know.

I am thus preparing myself, for the next two months, to put on minimal cologne and pack an extra pair of pantyhose (see below).

This is why it is harder being young today than it ever used to be. But feel free to berate. The Newer Metaphysicals is always up for a good inter-generational flame-war . . .

Minimal Cologne (Or How to Dress for Job Interviews)

Flawless Pantyhose (Or How to Dress for Job Interviews)

The Following Critics Have Taste

I've been neglectful of late in getting around to listing those fine aesthetes who have recently demonstrated that they have taste. So . . .

The decidedly perspicacious Grady Harp finds Novaless "breathtakingly beautiful" in the new Oranges & Sardines, and observes that :

Reading Nicholas Manning’s symphonic Novaless once is not enough: reading each cluster of words, each line – once – is not enough. It is only when the reader steps into his nebulous space of intellectual and spiritual possibilities that the beauty of this single poem/story/thought/need/joy/pain can be embraced for the magical work that it is. This is the Medawar world of the poetscientist and the philosopher-scientist, but more important - this is the world of a creative artist exploring the possibilities from the peak of the mountaintop.

Yeah people, get up onto the mountain !


Grady Harp has taste.

Meanwhile, the obviously intelligent Tim Wright reviews Novaless in Cordite and observes that :

Asterisks are the most obvious typographical anomaly, buttonholed between words rather than the more conventional placement between sections of a poem to mark an extended pause. These stars seem to register a kind of aporia, or to gesture towards a range of feeling beyond the limitations of the alphabet. (Nabokov in ‘Time and Ebb’: “and then nothing but a lone star remained in the sky, like an asterisk leading to an undiscoverable footnote”). A move like this might not work for many reasons, or if it did the possibility would be that overuse would render the symbol decorative, an empty material effect. But after reading three or four poems in this book, I began to get the hang of these stars and to see how they become part of, and extend, the grammar and music of the poems. I read these marks at different times as breaths, as pauses which bring my attention to – energise – the gap between two words, or, as a kind of expostulation on mute. The asterisks also suggest that the poems – or Manning’s head – are in the stars. The poems are definitely more cosmic than earthy.

Yes, I will perhaps never choose the earth over the cosmos.

Tim Wright has taste.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this self-promotion clean from my hand? No, this my hand will etc.

I feel dirty.

The Book of Hours

Lack of feeling and general emptiness, commonly termed the "flattening effect". Perhaps part of "getting older". Planned response to the next time this question is asked: "So what do you do?" I wait for life to get better. Nobody observes the Pentecost, yet everything is closed. "It is better to be a foreigner in a foreign country than in one's own. That is why we leave." Pray always to things you don't like quite as much as you should, like Alain Bashung. Make lists of things to do and do not do them. Formulate ideas for a book on the subject of how our emotional lives have become theatrical progressions of successive emotional hysterias. Get high in the parc de la villette. Wonder why the majority of contemporary art contains horizontal red beams. Be tired of exhibitions and finally accept it is not worth going. Decide to return to books. Realize you have not read a book entirely in almost a year. Snails. Cover napkins with notes. Laugh a bit and cry a bit and feel almost the same doing so. Don't go to the doctors because there are no doctors: it is Pentecost. J'attends que la vie s'ameliore. Neglect accents. Be afraid of telephones. Decide to read the key texts of Western philosophy in a seaside town. Realize you may never be interested in Eastern philosophy. Leer at people. Read about the robbery of a jewelery store place vendome and fantasize about robbing a jewelery store. Forget how to spell words in your own language. Decide emotional pain is preferable to physical pain. Turn over in your mind with a sort of bitter irony the phrase: "a service to literature". Be compared to Heine and don't know what to say. Do something stupid (cf. parc de la villette). Think about said stupid thing done for about 3 days. Decide to respond to letters. Leave letters unresponded, watch videos of obscure British bands. Decide to return for the winter to the mountains of your "homeland". Decide this is impossible. Threaten to destroy your telephone. Imagine destroying your telephone. Vow to be an egotist. Play the game entitled "Worst Year Since . . . " Hope they find the missing plane. Think of people on the missing plane. Hide hundreds of euros in a book. Wonder how anything in the future could become just a "funny story". Feel you are in one of those sitcoms which is so out of ideas that now "everyone is getting with everyone else". It is now season 5 and you have been replaced by a different actor everyone likes less. Decide you are bored by cats. Insist on saying manifesti and not manifestos. Be laughed at. Hear in a cafe that it is better to be in the mausoleum of Europe than in the casinos of the Saxons. Leave a cafe. Lean against the door of a closed bank. Casini. Laugh at the word "homeland". Buy martini and some candles.

Wait for life.