Compression, Part III--Linking Verbs

There is nothing wrong with ‘is’—or with any of its variants, ‘are,’ ‘am,’ ‘was,’ ‘were,’ ‘be,’ ‘being,’ ‘been’—or with other verbs designed primarily to simply connect a noun with another noun or an adverb—‘seems,’ ‘becomes,’ ‘appears.’

Nothing at all.

Such verbs have formed an integral part of English for well over a millennium, in several instances remaining almost unchanged in form and function. Since English vocabulary and grammar have discarded a large number of similar elements over the same thousand years while these have endured, they obviously fulfill crucial roles.

Yet the fact remains that such verbs contribute frequently to bulky, padded, flat, uninteresting, often pretentious, and only rarely active or image-forming lines. In essence, they abrogate the fundamental nature of verbs and, instead of connecting two ‘things’—two  nouns or noun substitutes—by detailing what one does to the other, they establish little more than an equation: A = B. An identity. A statement often bordering on the redundant. As with all such statements, whether mathematical or linguistic, the equation reverses easily: B = A. Logic demands that both statements identify the same truth, albeit in opposite order. Essentially, however, nothing happens or indeed can happen in such statements.

The trouble—for poetry at least—begins when such a verb links one or, more frequently, two abstractions: “The decision of the administration was the reduction of salaries.” Never mind that the statement defines an illogicality; a ‘decision’ cannot be a ‘reduction’ but rather ‘to reduce.’ Or that 60% of the statement forms essentially ‘blubber’—fat: ‘the,’ ‘of,’ and ‘was’ stringing together the highly abstract, non-visual, non-image-forming ‘decision,’ ‘administration,’ ‘reduction,’ and ‘salaries.’

Most poets might automatically avoid such an obviously pedestrian sentence, or at the least break it into lines to disguise its flatness. A more alert poet might recognize, however, that performing several compression techniques might transform even this into a line or lines capable of strength and power.

The process follows these general stages:

First, identify the action. Grammatically, action centers in verbs, which in this case makes ‘is’ the key word, yet it provides no sense of movement. Yet clearly something has happened here, with the word identifying what hidden in the text. A moment’s through provides the answer. Someone ‘decided’ something. Transferring the verbal action into an abstract noun preceding ‘is’ provides a valuable service for official spokespersons in our equally abstracted, distanced society: no one has to take credit—or, more crucially, blame—for an action. Instead, a “decision was made.”

Next, position the action word as the subject of the sentence. In this case, someone decided something.

Then, rearrange the remaining key words—the nouns—into subject and predicates, agents and acted upon: “The administration decided on a reduction of salaries.” Return to the first step and identify the new action that has just emerged: ‘reduction’ disguises a much stronger verb: ‘reduce.’

Again, rearrange the remaining key words: “The administration reduced salaries.” If nothing else, we have compressed the statement from ten words to four—a loss of a full 60% of the original, including most of the function words or structure words. And we have a clear sense of an action.

Almost.

The next stage often presents the most difficulties. Focus action on a person or persons. An administration does not determine salary levels; an administration runs a corporate entity, a business, a school. But ultimately only a small portion of that large group has the power to determine salaries. Identify as closely as possible where responsibility lies: “The president reduced salaries.”

Not a particularly poetic line, perhaps, but with additional concentration on specific, action-filled words, we might end up with: “The president cut salaries” or “The president slashed wages.”

See how far we have gone, from “The decision of the administration was the reduction of salaries” to “The president slashed wages.” Notice also that the new sentence communicates not only actor/acted-upon but does so with an obvious judgmental or evaluative tone.

How might this work in poetry?

The familiar opening lines of Eugene Fields’ “‘Little Boy Blue” depend heavily on forms of ‘is’:

         The little toy dog is covered with dust,
         But sturdy and staunch he stands;
        And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
        And his musket moulds in his hands.
        Time was when the little toy dog was new,
        And the soldier was passing fair;
        And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
        Kissed them and put them there.

Ten verbs support the statements: ‘is,’ ‘stands,’ ‘is,’ ‘moulds,’ ‘was,’ ‘was,’ ‘was,’ ‘was,’ ‘kissed,’ and ‘put’; only four define specific actions.

Now, being entirely unfair to Fields (who after all wrote for another time, to another audience, and from another poetics), what would happen if we revised the poem to emphasize action? The lines might now read:

          Dusty, the toy dog
          Stands, staunch and sturdy.
          Rusty, the musket
          Moulds in the toy soldier’s hands.

          Once—a new stuffed dog,
          Once—a soldier passing fair;
          Kissed … then placed
          On a child’s nursery shelf.

Thirty-six words as opposed to 61—just over half as many as in the original. Admittedly my revision has lost much of the poetry of Fields’ verse, particularly in rhythm, rhyme, and music. Yet I would nonetheless argue that removing ‘is’ and ‘was’ and highlighting ‘stands,’ ‘moulds,’ ‘kissed,’ and ‘placed’ gives the lines a more modern, more immediately accessible poetic experience.


The opening line of this discussion asserted that “There is nothing wrong with ‘is.’” The sentence and stanza considered above break no rules, fracture no grammatical convention. In fact, in many cases, ‘is’ or its variants may fill a useful purpose. Certain ideas fit more securely into poems as passive sentences. The following stanza,

                                                               That winter,
                  Snow began in January and fell for weeks.
                  The road to Burlington was graded once a day,
                  But we small pupils scuttled between iced
                  Prison walls that towered two feet
                  Over us as we threaded our long three miles
                  To the school,

emphasizes the snow, the road, the pupils struggling toward school. In this context, the identity of those who grade the road sinks to a low level of priority—particularly since the children would probably have no way of knowing who performed that crucial service; instead the fact of the grading surfaces .. in a legitimately passive structure that accommodates meaning and tone within the stanza.

Similarly, in the final lines of "The Lost Islander," a shaped poem written by one of my former students at Pepperdine,