Compression and the Elegant Little Mechanisms of Meaning Known as Poems

Compression is often mentioned among the essential characteristics of poetry. Pressed, promoters of compression note that poems are short, but that seems either ingenuous or disingenuous and may be a little misleading. Poems are short, compared to other literary forms, but a shorter poem is not necessarily a better poem. In general, a poem should be exactly as long as the poem requires, not a word more, and that requirement allows for poems of lines from one to a million or more. Compression is not word count.

I am no engineer, but my substantially limited understanding of gasoline internal combustion engines includes the notion that compression is essential in converting energy from one form to another. Inside the cylinder, air is compressed with fuel, a spark is initiated, and the resulting explosion powers the engine. Let’s not take this too far, but if a poem is a mechanism of meaning, the compression we want in poetry is the kind of density in expression that allows a spark of attention to generate power and drive in other minds. Compression, in fact, is an essential step in combustion, and my new favorite piece of found poetry is this line from the Department of Energy: “Combustion, also known as burning, is the basic chemical process of releasing energy from a fuel and air mixture.” Fuel? Experience. Air? Breath. Burning? You bet. Energy? I spell that M-E-A-N-I-N-G. Okay, maybe that is too far.

One effective way to apply compression to poetry is short sentences: no surprise. Another strategy is selecting words with more octane (the explosive hydrocarbon in gasoline—yes, the engine metaphor again), and by that, I mean words higher in potential energy. Choosing words of greater meaning, more connotations and connections, heightens the impact of each so fewer words are necessary. One simply picks words that mean more. We are told by Plato, Shakespeare, Emerson, and more that poets are "namers." Since names are nouns, we will use all the nouns we can, the more exact, the better, but verbs are more effectively employed as sources of compression. Words like stride, stagger, strut, stumble, saunter, sashay, or stroll beat walk every time. Or maybe they don’t, but the point remains: verbs with power aid in the compression of poetry.

But the best strategy is using context effectively. Compression of context is fundamental to poetry. Robert Frost noted that poetry is what’s lost in translation. But saying that poetry is lost requires that we ask what exactly Frost means. My guess is context. More than any other art, poetry is the art of context. Context is the shared understanding of knowledge, history, and culture, the scaffolding upon which a writer of poems works. Context is the ground where poems stand, with an environment and ecology as definitive as in any place one can stand and as often overlooked as the planet beneath our feet and considerations. Poems do require that ground, a foundation, a place from which to work. In essence, readers become the scaffolding a poem requires, and the scaffolding is our presence and participation in the nearly unacknowledged information, language, literature, and knowledge we share.

Knowing well and skillfully using linguistic context is what makes a writer of poems a poet. A sensitivity to what writer and audience share is the common sense, the local knowledge, that writers can rely on, the sure grasp on which words have the proper associations for intended meanings and which words must be avoided, what images and ideas are available, accessible, and familiar, and the respective weights, mass, and value.

When planning a trip to a familiar place or a new one, the local knows the best route immediately. The same is true of a poet, a traveller in a literary and a cultural context. Knowing context allows compression because the good writer knows the best and most efficient route to get there when a poem is to be created and presented to speakers of a language and participants in the ongoing conversation of literature.

Poetry is communication, and communication results from a path blazed or discovered through shared territory, language, experience, culture. The territory is no longer shared when translation occurs. I’ve been told that translation means “a carrying across,” but if you carry something across, you are taking it away from its native place, where it is familiar to fellow native things, from the relationships within which it evolved. Flora and fauna that make sense in the place they originate often become incomprehensible in another place. Anyone who has seen a turtle in a river, swamp, or sea will not consider the animal slow. Those confused by Frost declaring the woods bright in winter have forgotten what deciduous means. And when I finally lived on a coast, I think I finally understood what the translator meant by “wine-dark sea,” an ocean, not whose hue, but whose richness of color is that of wine. No matter what, words removed from their native place begin to lose reference to actual things. That means that the context is not accessible, and that means some of the poetry is lost.

One of my teachers once noted, maybe he was quoting, that as beautiful and useful as they are, all translations are magnificent failures. I think what he meant was that “carrying across” the entire meaning, the words, their roots, and the soil nurturing and sustaining the work, was not possible. And I think that’s what Frost meant, too.

Context is what is above, below, around, and within the precise details selected by the writer to convey whatever the poem means to convey, and compression means increasing the pressure by choosing the best and fewest words for the lines to reach the ignition point. Context is where we can do our best work on compression. The writer of poems must say or write all that is necessary to be clear in statement and suggestive of the further deeper, broader, and wider meanings that exist within minds, language, literature, and culture, but no more. If the poem plays on shared context, then readers will spark this elegant little mechanism of meaning to do the work poems are designed to do.