A poem:
is generally short and compact, and therefore complex. If I were a poem, I wouldn’t be talking much — but everything I say would or should be meaningful and precise. Like much of modern poetry there’ll be a certain raggedness and restlessness about me, but don’t be fooled, because all that’s a pose; everything — from the cut of my hair to the color of my socks — will be absolutely deliberate and will accept no substitute.
Now, the connection between short/compact and complex is far from clear to me. One might say, as he does, that a poem which is short must touch directly on its meanings in a short space, and so represent only a portion of what the poem is about--that would be its depth, and its complexity comes in reassembling each part in all its resonances. I had a conversation a few weeks ago about an Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet which was conducted, primarily, around what the metaphors were supposed to mean and why, exactly, they were all connected. And perhaps this is a phenomenon that happens whenever poetry is discussed or reflected on, though I'd suggest it's rather the logical result of a close-text reading. Anyone who has spent time pulling apart the use of a word in a text knows something of this process. (and, one should note, that the poem in mind is a contemporary form of poem--there are lots of poems that are neither short nor compact)
A novel, by way of contrast:
But where I am and how I am — too late for Oxford and for fevered, furtive clutches beneath the blankets of strangers — I might resign myself to the novel’s slow shuffle to often predictable endings, delighting now in recognizing the familiar more than in heart-stopping surprises. Novels are much more prone yet also kinder to mistakes; they can survive bad chapters, immemorable characters, narrative dead ends, and silly dialogue. Like life.
The comparison is unfair because he is comparing (so far as I can tell: he names no novels) good or excellent poems to any old run-of-the-mill novel. Now, there's some truth to what he says: I like Lost Illusions in spite of the hundreds of pages that explain printing techniques in the 19th century, not because of it (though some of these distinctions are of critical importance to the plot), but a good novel is rich--it contains a lot, more than one can possibly get in one reading, and so rewards patience over time, and also changes with the reader, who notices new connections, and can invest things with an emotional significance they may have missed earlier. As an example, I got around to reading David Copperfield over the summer last year. The scene that was most striking to me, that retains the most vividness, is the one in which David finally sees about his wife what the narrator has been suggesting about her all along (or what the reader is plainly meant to see)--that she retains a crucial immaturity that will prevent her from ever quite being what he wants. In a modern novel, this would be the point of David's life crisis, where he leaves her and tries to figure out how to be happy. But that's not what he does: he loves her anyway. Now I know that they give this book to children to read sometimes, and I can't imagine what on earth they do with that part (probably nothing), because it relies so heavily for its effect on having some idea of what marriage is or can be like (I feel the same way about Huck Finn, among other books). There are poems that can do this, too, but I take this to be an argument that the gap between the two is not so wide as it's here made out to be.
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