Get it? (5.29.21)

We all grew up educated that poetry is a specialized language, or at least, a specialized use of language.  When asked to describe that species, aficionados will say something like, "It's all about compression.  That's what makes poetry different from other forms of writing and discourse."

And we agree.  We think we know what that means and we assume everybody thinks the same meaning about the idea of "compression."  But have you, has anyone in your experience, ever really dug into that idea, tried to define it, even to explain it in poems, what it looks or sounds like?  Here are some stabs at definition that I've heard over the years:

• Compression is intensity of expression.
• Compression is language stressed beyond its normal limits or uses.
• Compression is what you find in Imagist poetry.
• Compression is the right word in the right place, every time.  I.e., exactness.
• Compression is economy, that is, saying more with less.
• Compression is concreteness, that is, the opposite of abstractness, generality.

The list could be endless.  But one thing you'll note in the above "descriptions" of the idea is that they are no clearer or more definitive than the word "compression."  What is "intensity of expression," really?  Yelling?  And what is the compressed element in Imagist poetry?  Petals on a wet, black bough?  And what, exactly, is concreteness (as if this idea hasn't been debated since Philip Sydney!)?

Among less experienced writers, if compression is a goal, "being poetic" is to cut out words at every opportunity.  Thus, you get "poems" like this . . .

Sun-smeared window

on crisp fall day,

red-crested bird on high branch

hidden in yellow leaves 

. . . with all the articles, conjunctions, relative pronouns and subordinating clauses removed, and an adjective for every noun.  Ergo: intensity of expression!  Economy!  More said with less!

So what really is compression in a poem?  The best way to think of it, for a practicing writer, is in terms of:

• metaphor
• allusion
• caesura
• ellipsis
• enjambment
• ambiguity
• word juxtaposition
• jump-cutting
• lexical and semantic splicing
• pun
• misdirection

Not a single one of these figures involves cutting out parts of speech, as the so-called "poem" does above.  None have that much to do with "economy" of expression, or needn't have much to do with it.  Even the lengthiest passages in "Song of Myself" provide some of the most highly charged--"compressed""--language you're likely to find in American poetry.  But most of the items listed here rely on shared knowledge, on the reader's ability to "get it" ("it" being a usage, a word-pairing, a splicing together of familiar expressions in unfamiliar ways, a linking of unlike elements, etc.), if not at first, then over time and multiple readings.  Jokes work the same way, by compression . . . those who "get" them successfully unpack the material.

This last thought is crucial to me, because I don't always get the joke . . . and I don't always get the poem.  It's possible to over-compress the language and the imagery of a poem to the point that it's just obscure.  Its allusions are too distant, its metaphors too far-fetched, its syntax too idiosyncratic, and the "it" of the poem too uninteresting to make "getting it" worth the effort.  But it's also possible that I haven't brought enough acumen, sensitivity, literary smarts or other tools to the reading--in which case, I may learn something, enhance my literary sensibility.

Well, we just finished a project on compression at Wednesdays@One, and I'm here to tell you that a fair number of the writers in that group understand the concept.  They know how to apply it in a poem.  Their poems are a joy to read and reread.