The black Densuke watermelon is grown only on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is known for its sweetness and rarity. An early crop might number as few as 65, fetching a price of $6,100 each.
In gaming theory there is La Macheide: "The perfection of an endeavor destroys it."
The "Densuke problem" would seem a wonderful one to have. Suppose you wrote the ultimate contemporary poem, one that towered over lesser products as the Densuke does. If people were to read it they would immediately want to memorize it, making it the first iconic verse since that 1961 limerick about a man from Nantucket. It could, conceivably, revive a dead mode of speech. (For now, we'll ignore song lyrics.)
So what do you do with this work?
"Publish it! In the biggest poetry magazine around!"
Suppose this publication paid you for the rights to publish it but never did so, effectively killing it. Would you be surprised?
"I'd be shocked! Why would they do that?"
Suppose they published it. What would be everyone's first thought?
"It would be: 'Wow! This is excellent!'"
Okay. What would the public's second thought be?
"What do you mean?"
Upon realizing that you've discovered a unicorn, what do you wonder?
[Pause for thought.]
"'Are there other unicorns? A mommy and daddy unicorn...?'"
And if not?
"'...and if not, why not?'"
Exactly! Why can't more poems be this good? Or, at least, close?
"Because poems this good are rare?"
Precisely. To grok what is going on we need to understand Gresham's Law:
"Bad money drives out good."
Suppose you go to an auction with cash backed up by a gold standard. Everyone else outbids you with crypto-coin "dollars", inflating prices in the process. Knowing your money is being grossly undervalued you withdraw immediately.
Now suppose you've written a generational masterpiece. Look around at what publishers are putting out these days. What few readers these enjoy are those trying to discern what type of prose with linebreaks the editor likes (e.g. cryptocrap? Shaggy dog stories? Long-winded aphorisms? Rants? Heart farts?). Do you want your work to be associated with this doggeral and lineated prose? Do you trust the aesthetic judgment of editors cranking this stuff out? Not surprisingly, the best poets of this century don't bother with print publishing. Bad poetry drives out good.
Even when poetry was at its height, canonical poems averaged about one per year [other than the Shakespeare blip]. Since the death of poetry that may be less then one per decade. There is a paucity of originality and a grotesque disregard for technique.
Enter you, with your unicorn/Densuke poem. The editor has to fill pages and your effort is going to make all others look bad by comparison. Even if this editor were a technician--which none of the major ones are--the instinct might be to not publish it.
It follows logically that if we want to reanimate this dead mode of speech we'll need to do so by performing it.
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