Compression: On Saying Much with Little
[This essay is the first part of a series designed as adjuncts to my workship at Winklings dealing with compression in poetry.]
PART I: Prepositions
Characteristically, poems tend toward compression. One hallmark of great poetry is that it communicates much more than the total of its words. Diction, image, metaphor, symbol—all combine to give poetry the sense of a flower unfolding, revealing more and more meaning the deeper we examine it. For that reason, for example, it usually takes far more words in prose to express the meaning of a poem than the poem itself used, and frequently, even after our best attempts, the poem still evades absolute explication.
Compression—the art of saying much with little—is fundamental to effective poetry. From haiku, which consciously avoid unnecessary words and concentrate on every sound and syllable, to longer, more expansive pieces, poetry struggles to expand beyond mere word count. And one of the most common difficulties a poem encounters is the sense on the reader’s part that it is wordy, bulky, flabby.
As a matter of practical application, there are two large divisions of words in English: structure words and lexical words. Structure words function primarily as adjuncts of syntax and grammar. They do not carry significant meaning in themselves but instead provide important signals as to how other words relate to each other and to meaning. They are notoriously difficult to define specifically; most often, definitions tend toward the abstract. The simple preposition for, for example, can mean “with the object or purpose of,” “intended to belong to or used in conjunction with,” “in place of,” “to the amount of or extent of,” and literally dozens of other possibilities; its specific meaning in a given phrase depends entirely on the meanings of the words that surround it. In general, structure words include prepositions, articles, and the copular verbs is, seems, becomes, etc.
Lexical words, on the other hand, can be defined. They relate to specific things, actions, movements, qualities. Their meanings usually refer to image-making constructs: walk, run, touch, tree, fence, boulder. In most cases, these words are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
[CAVEAT: At this point it is important to emphasize that there is nothing inherently wrong with structure words, or with using them within poetry; nor does the presence of lexical words automatically make for tight, lean, effective lines. Structure words do, however, frequently occur unnecessarily and add bulk, a sense of the prosaic, and a rhythmical flatness when not used carefully/consciously, just as lexical words can create a sense of vividness, imagery, action, and specificity.]
Let’s begin by looking at the most notorious of the structure words: prepositions.
One on-line dictionary defines preposition as “any member of a class of words found in many languages that are used before nouns, pronouns, or other substantives to form phrases functioning as modifiers of verbs, nouns, or adjectives, and that typically express a spatial, temporal, or other relationship, as in, on, by, to, since.” The definition is long, abstract, and cumbersome, particularly since the words being categorized tend to be remarkably short and direct. For practical purposes, however, perhaps the best definition of a preposition is “anything a rabbit can do to a hill”: in the hill, on the hill, by the hill, around the hill, through the hill. Only a limited number of words function as prepositions in English, yet at the same time they are among the most difficult class of words to use idiomatically and ‘correctly’. Yet in spite of all this, they are essential creating meaning in English.
In terms of compression, however, prepositions almost always add words, often unnecessary words. By definition, a pre-position comes before something; therefore prepositions, when functioning as such, always have objects, words that function as nouns. These, in turn, are frequently prefaced by articles (a, an, the) which in essence simply announce “Watch out! Noun coming.”
At least three words. Only one carrying meaning.
Let’s look at an example from one of my earliest poems, an elegy to my uncle:
For in the soothing sounds of waters' whisperings
As they turn a moss-encrusted wheel,
He is present.
Ignoring other problems for the moment, look at the first two lines. Fifteen words—three prepositions (for, in, of), two articles (the, a), a vague pronoun (they), and a wasted adverb (as). Nearly half of the total devoted to telling readers how words—substantive, meaningful words—fit together or relate to each other. And the poor reader has to make it to the fourth word before anything is actually said. An overly long, bulk, uninteresting set of lines.
To revise for compression and energy, let's first look for a verb. The sentence has one, of course: is, the weakest verb in English (more about that in Part III). In addition, it comes so late in the lines that the reader has to perform a juggling act just to keep all of the intervening part straight.
If we look for an active verb—or a word that could become an active verb—a couple of things emerge. First, words such as soothe, sound, whisperings and turn could easily become verbs. And second, the sentence as it stands makes no sense; stripped of verbiage, the opening clause actually reads, “sounds turn a wheel”—not at all what I was trying for. Wordiness, precipitated by the incessant prepositions, gets in the way of meaning.
So…in that opening clause, where is our true verb? Probably the most likely is the noun whisperings—rather artificially nominal, since if we remove the noun-making endings, we get a strong verb: whisper. What whispers? water. Where? through a moss-encrusted wheel. And we have a sentence: “Water whispers through a moss-encrusted wheel.”
But we have more than that. What happened to “sounds?” In its noun form, whisper is a sound; the earlier, more abstract, more general (how many kinds of sound are there?) word is redundant. What about “soothing”? Don’t whispers usually soothe unless otherwise described, especially in an elegy? And if water whispers through a waterwheel, doesn’t it turn the wheel?
In essence “Water whispers through a moss-encrusted wheel” says everything implicit in the first two lines, using seven words instead of fifteen, one preposition instead of three, and eliminating "they" and “the.”
What, then, to do with line three, which asserts bluntly the point of the image: “he is present.” Again, is, the weakest of verbs, followed by present—vague, abstract, generalized, non-imagistic, boring. The only word truly working here is he, which in the context points specifically to an individual: my uncle. Three more words (bringing the total to eighteen); only one carries significance for the lines.
This brings us back to an earlier problem: what do these lines want to say? When I wrote them, I was standing beside a waterwheel my uncle had built perhaps forty years earlier, moss-encrusted as the line says, still functioning. Just seeing it, hearing it, brought him forcibly back to memory. So what should the subject of these lines be? Water, which seems at this point tangential; or he? Let’s go with the latter. If we move water to a different place in the line, and replace a with his, we get:
He whispers through his moss-encrusted waterwheel.
More imagistic, metaphorical, possibly symbolic, certainly more interesting—in seven words, fewer than half of the original count but saying more clearly what I intended.
Are we finished? Perhaps. A judicious break might transform the line into creditable free verse:
He whispers through
His moss-encrusted waterwheel.
Or we could keep going, transforming and re-structuring:
His moss-encrusted waterwheel whispers…him.
Possibly simply:
His moss-encrusted waterwheel whispers….
Or transform it into a haiku-like sequence:
moss-encrusted
waterwheel—
his ghost whispers
Or any number of other possibilities, none readily apparent in the first version.
Of all the parts of speech, then, prepositions (and their accompanying nominal phrases) most often work against tightness, compression, and clarity in poetry. Lines needn’t be stripped down as far as I have taken this one, but on almost every level, particularly in early drafts, finding prepositions and prepositional phrases, identifying the underlying verb, defining the actor performing that action, and restructuring accordingly may at least present new alternatives for expression.
Adding your comment:
Thankyou for this informative column. Bookmarking. 
Ok now I have gone back and found the first essay, very nice and packed with information.
This is a skill I really want to acquire! Thanks for your willingness to prepare and share.
