FROM C TO SHINING C

by Andrew Williams

Poetry, a semanticist would say, is one of the oldest forms of signal

(i.e., data) compression. Most of the earliest religious texts--the Bible,

the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita--used the poetic form. The earliest

stories--Beowulf, Gilgamesh, The Odyssesy, The Man Who Was Tired Of

Life--also used that form. The troubadors who spread news and current

events to villages throughout the British countryside used that form: more

specifically, they used the lyric form. This had two advantages:

compressing information into the smallest number of words (bits) and

delivering it into a form that was memorable (the rhyme scheme).

Every artist will tell you that it's easier to memorize rhymed and/or

rhythmic text than prose. The rhythm is more natural, more flowing. This

is why poetry has survived the ages and, even now, refuses to die. In

fact, the computer age has reminded us of poetry's immediacy and its

ability to say in a line or stanza what would otherwise take a paragraph

or an entire essay.

There will always be circumstances where essays, stories, novels and other

"long forms" are better at carrying signal load than poetry. And poetry

itself is not immune to length: the epic poem still has its exponents, as

witness the popularity of Seamus Heaney's new translation of *Beowulf* and

Vikram Seth's modern epic *A Suitable Boy.* Poetry's main function is the

same as a telegram's: to communicate the most data with the least amount

of words, but also "brightly, brightly and with beauty." (That's a quote

from Heinlein, taken slightly out of context.)The difference and distance

between the novel and the haiku can be best seen in the mind-croggling

data loads of *Ulysses* and Iggy Pop's lyrics for the first Stooges album,

which he described as "like something you would get if you crossed a Zen

haiku with a Telex message."

When a man writes a love letter to his beloved, and closes with a poem,

the poem is a compressed restatement of the letter. So why write it at

all? Or the letter? Why not one or the other? The easy, cheap and sexist

answer is that "women are suckers for poetry," especially love poems. This

is not entirely untrue, just a patronizing understatement. When a man

writes a love poem, he is letting his feminine side out for a stroll.

Women are not attracted to men solely for their machismo. If this were so,

there would be a dearth of artists and computer programmers and systems

analysts. Women require that men show their softer side, whether by giving

flowers, remembering dates, singing songs, or writing poems. These

feminine displays show a woman that a man is not a two-dimensional denizen

of Flatland subsisting entirely on porn, sports, pizza and beer.

Poetry will never be as popular as mysteries, romances and other forms and

escapist fiction. It will receive its 15 minutes of fame and not a second

more. It won't turn the Earth into a Garden of Eden. But it can bring soft

rains. It can bring a smile to a child's troubled face, surcease to a

woman's troubled heart. Like any art form, it has its season and its

power, which do not wane. And it will survive every ill thought and wish

sent its way.