[Jeanne]

Compression is often mentioned in these forums, and I usually think of it as (1) focusing on the particular, plus
(2) omitting extraneous language. But, then, I am among the
ranks of the untutored! I was wondering what the more experienced (and perhaps, more tutored )here think defines compression, what are compression's essential elements, and, most importantly, what does it do for a poem with respect to its impact on a reader? Finally, is compressing something you do as you write the first draft of a poem, or is it more of a result of editing down the line? A few examples would be appreciated.

Jeanne

[Tim Murphy]

Four Sorrows

Seed carelessly planted,
fair counsel rejected,
love taken for granted
and Sappho uncollected.

Here's compression taken to extreme lengths (or shortnesses?) Mr. Sullivan has proposed the poem be lengthened and retitled Five Sorrows. His fifth line is "images disconnected." Here's Hardy's compression.

The Wound

I climbed to the crest
Fog-festooned
Where the sun lay west
Like a crimson wound--

Like that wound of mine
Of which none knew,
For I'd given no sign
It had pierced me through.

[Alder Ellis]

Interesting topic. One thing I've observed in critiques hereabouts is an implicit minimalist aesthetic which is perhaps not always applied judiciously. It is true that novice poets often try to be "poetical" by loading their language with modifiers, and pruning is good advice for them. But here's an example where I think such advice is misconceived. Peter K.'s "Siren of Narcussus", posted on one of the free verse boards several days ago, begins:

>> She startles the lull of silence
with the eloquence of a laugh
that rattles these windows

in their ancient stone frames. <<

Claudia Grinnell posted a comment in which she said she thought the poem was "overwritten" and provided this example of a more streamlined opening:

>> She startles the silence
with a laugh that rattles
these windows in their frames. <<

This might be an effective rewrite, but it seems rather like Hemingway rewriting Henry James. Yes, it might work, but doesn't it miss the point or flavor of the original? Elaborate, adjective- and subordinate clause- laden language is not always necessarily in need of pruning.

In the process of revising, one finds various types of "crudities" that need to be refined. One very common type is the extraneous, and that needs to be got rid of. You need to cut out everything that's just window-dressing, that has no vital connection with what it is you have to say (assuming you have something to say, of course). But another, equally common type of crudity is the inarticulate, the insufficiently expressed, that which bears more of a potential than fully realized meaning. Revising involves both cutting back and building up. Certain sensibilities tend to favor or thrive on one or the other. When Hemingway revised, it got shorter and shorter; when Henry James revised, it got longer and longer. But they both knew what they were doing.

"compression" in the sense of mere terseness has no intrinsic value, poetical or otherwise. Poetry tries to achieve intensity of language, which is a function of context. Language goes dead in the automatized usage of everyday life. Poetry tries to stop the automatism and remember our real situation, and in so doing bring the language back to life, which is to say, back to context. Good poetry bristles with awareness of significant context.

Here's Dana Gioia on this:

"If poetry represents, as Ezra Pound maintains, 'the most concentrated form of verbal expression,' it achieves its characteristic concision and intensity by acknowledging how words have been used before. Poems do not exist in isolation but share and exploit the history and literature of the language in which they are written. Although each new poem seeks to create a kind of temporary perfection in and of itself, it accomplishes this goal by recognizing the reader's lifelong experience with words, images, symbols, stories, sounds, and ideas outside of its own text. By successfully employing the word or image that triggers a particular set of associations, a poem can condense immense amounts of intellectual, sensual, and emotional meaning into a single line or phrase." ["The Poet in an Age of Prose"]

But this only describes, as it were, the horizontal ("intertextual") axis of awareness. There is also a vertical axis which is indispensable to poetry.

[Jeanne]

How about leaping as a way of achieving compression?
When you leap to a new association, you leave out the
logical explanation that tells how you got to the association and you just go straight to the association
which is a kind of compression by ommission, isn't it?

Jeanne

[Alan Sullivan]

You have to be careful of those leaps, Jeanne. That's when you get the "images disconnected."

I prefer the word "concision," an attribute that would not require Peter K to cut worthwhile modifiers.

Alan Sullivan