Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium :
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Friday, March 5, 2004

Might be the lack of sleep, but a mention on the BufPo list of Darwinian interactions between poets got me thinking—I'm trying not to let the smoke out. The literary world is littered with half-assed attempts to enlist poorly understood scientific theory to explain or justify one's own practice or understanding, so don't take this too seriously. I don't.

Selection depends on there being inheritable characteristics which contribute to differential fitness and on consequences for being less fit than other things in your niche—in biological systems, the more fit have, on the average, more descendants than the less fit. Now sonnets can't have little sonnets to compete against other little sonnets or against L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poems or against Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but you could argue that the sonnet meme has been pretty successful for 500 years or so, because throughout that time readers got so excited about reading sonnets that they became poets in order to make more of the things. Sonnet as virus, hijacking something about how way we're made interacts with the world we experience in order to make more sonnets.

Things can change for the sonnet. We can change through evolution to be less susceptible to its charms (not likely in 20 generations without some pretty oddly directed selective pressure) or the environment can change—and boy howdy has it ever. Buffy's here, or she was. The conventional wisdom is that no kind of poetry is likely to ever have the kind of popularity once enjoyed by Sonnets from the Portuguese. I'd like to see some numbers, though, not for Elizabeth Barrett Browning's rank on the best seller lists of the time, but for what percentage of the people bought books and magazines of any kind. I'd bet that percentage is higher now.

But readers don't buy poems now; they did then. Are poems really competing against the WB? Or are they competing against (and losing to) legal thrillers and historical romances? If the latter, poets have done something wrong, because there have been historical romances for a very long time. Some of them were even in verse.

One more bit of pseudo-scientific musing, about island ecosystems and poetry. Every now and then some organism finds itself in an isolated and nearly empty ecosystem where its descendants have the opportunity to diversify and fill niches which, in the place it came from, were filled by already extremely well-adapted competitors. As long as the ecosystem stays isolated and resources last, that organism's progeny will do very well indeed. But when the isolation ends or resources are used up, the party's over.

Now, here comes the real speculation. When poets first abandoned meter and narrative and the stance of a person speaking to other people, it was like discovering an empty island, and all kinds of possibilities were suddenly open. But it turned out to be a small island, with few resources, and no one to write for except the other pioneers, who, as they diversified, lost contact even with each other.


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