September 29, 2006: Poetry Document Management?

JP Rangaswami's latest venture into social software seems to involve his love of poetry. Here is how he puts it:

What matters is whether we can use the power of many and group selection and wisdom of crowds and collaborative filtering to come up with something like this. if you liked poems A and B then you are likely to like poem C.

My initial reaction was to approach the problem through social networking. I proposed that the path to recognizing both categories of and links between “creative artifacts” (such as poems) leads through an understanding of the social networks of the creative artists themselves. Randall Collins has already pursued this line of thought in the domain of philosophy in his wonderful book, The Sociology of Philosophies. I figured one could apply the same reasoning to poets.

Very few creative minds work in isolation. (Ezra Pound has a wonderful canto about what it was like living with Yeats when Yeats was composing a poem.) I know of only two “isolationist” examples, neither of whom is a poet: Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Faulkner. (Faulkner’s dismal stint within the Hollywood system only reinforced his need for such isolation.) My guess is that the social networks of poets are not that different from the social networks of philosophers that Collins analyzed, except, perhaps, that they may not be limited to a single domain, such as poetry. Consider, for example, the social network that formed around Serge Diaghilev at the beginning of the twentieth century, which included composers, painters, and poets, as well as the choreographers and dancers of the Ballets Russes.

Then I realized (with some help from Cornelius Puschmann) that I was falling into a trap. I was thinking about JP's problem as if it were a problem in document management; and, at the end of the day, poems are not documents! The essence of (almost?) every poem lies in performance; the text is little more than an attempt to represent that performance in a static form. (The same is true of music. The music is in the performance, not in the printed notation the performer may be using.) This premise makes JP’s problem even harder, if not impossible. Having worked as a performing arts critic, I have some vague intuitions about both categories of and links between performances; but, because performances are dynamic processes, I am not sure I can articulate those intuitions very well. Once again I have found myself confront the problem of the inadequacy of applying noun-based thinking to verb-based situations!