Whatever Next

One of the many thoughts provoked by Don Paterson's thought-provoking book, The Poem, was that if we now understand so much about how poetry works perhaps we know too much.
While on the one hand, we don't believe in magic, on the other we don't always want light to be let in on magic if any such illusion is conjured. The Don has gone a long way to explaining away all the tricks, nuances and effects that poetry, whatever 'heightened form of language' it is proclaimed to be, has. Whatever brilliant line you thought you'd come up with out of your sublime inspiration, it turns out to be textbook zeugma, metonymy or else Prof. Paterson will have a phrase for it. All the poet can do is concatenate and assimilate all their niceties into a coherent unit.
By now we know too much. Keats was happy enough as long as he was swooning transcendentally; the Gawain poet, or classical poets, had appointments with sophisticated metre they couldn't afford to miss; some C20th after-the-fact adventurers delighted themselves by self-styling themselves against an orthodoxy they perceived for themselves and the likes of Housman, Hardy or Larkin just got on with it. Now, though, I could understand how, after reading The Poem, a poet could despair of what to do next. It doesn't bother me. I wasn't going to write any because I already didn't know what to do next.
Are the universities to blame, the industry full of academics and students all needing a point to make and paid to do so, ruining it by their more, or less, rigorous analyses and worthwhile, or passable, ideas. In order to achieve her degree in Pop Music Performance, the girl with who I'm so pleased to share a songwriting credit was encouraged to bottom out how pop songs worked. I'm not sure how much influence such courses have had on the product now offered to pop-pickers but it does appear, at least to old heads of my generation, that everything from Elvis Presley, through The Beatles, Motown, David Bowie, reggae, punk and all else has been incorporated into a homogeneous recipe that has resulted in a sterile, post-apocalyptic synthesis.
I regret having to produce quite that sort of banal sentence to describe it but what can you do.
It's probably a good thing it's all downloaded now because they'd need a lot of plastic to serve the demand for Ed Sheeran records and it's great that young people (if they are mostly young) have the same sort of mania for his music that we had for T. Rex. But it's a shame he is targetted by more than his fair share of copyright holders who think he's used their template. Also that the Marvin Gaye estate are quite so litigious.
And, of course, it isn't going to stop here. Even I will recover from The Poem. It was very enlightening and I'd run into a lacuna of my ownmaking anyway. I worry that eventually every possible chess game will have been played and, mathematically, there are only an immensely vast but not infinite number of viable 40, 50 or 60 move games that are possible. It is the same sort of neurosis that provides the material for thinking that every worthwhile poem will eventually be written. But we need to have faith in both the 64 squares and 32 pieces on the chess board, the much greater potential for variety offered by language and the fact that the time left to us is finite and there is nowhere near enough of it remaining to need to fret over using up those particular natural resources.
It must have seemed to every successive generation that they were the unfortunate inheritors of the end of the line. But soft, what light from yonder window breaks - some new kids on the block who are now going to all do it their way. Good for them. I'll leave them to it.