Too much baldly straightforward creates its own kind of noise at all that is being left out. A lot going on allows more to come from the page and less from the reader? What is going on in the process of processing? Given more data, the organic patterns can lift out of the subset chosen by the author. Given too little data, the reader has to only receive.
When I read poetry, I want it torqued a little. I hear better when there’s a high density to absorb. That’s selfishness on my part of wanting the information flow to come to my speed rather than slowing down to the pace of who I’m listening to.
I know I like high-compression of poetry. S. likes clarity, simplicity, not a wasted word. I respect that. Our pacing ideals are different. If each poem is a gesture, his is a smooth sweep and mine are uneven fluttery darts. If poems were teaching styles, he would by silence command attention while I tried to grab audience thru animation. The resulting energy is different than what I would build on the same subject with the same words.
If I keep in game mind, I can toy with words to one point. To be clear cut in this way is the part of the point of the 40 Word Year exercise. I want to focus on one core idea there. The constraint of length, truth, and not repeating people force me to winnow down and keep to the K.I.S.S. principle. But I don’t count those as poems, only tributes, meditations, thoughts.
I don’t avoid the aha juxtaposition in haiku, but in other poetry, am I in what Steele called a Faustian pact with radical novelty, leaning too far towards superficial random? Language is a nice thing to be in. Is it sufficient in itself? Story is also gratifying. I aim away from any superstitious, irrational as a rule. Absurd and nonsense are good but language leaning towards provoking emotional response worries me. I’d rather be circumspect and break my own verse’s momentum.
Call that giving mixed signals, muddy, or oblique, or fear of commitment or fear of propagandizing one thing. I’d rather hold multiple points of view, each subverted by the acknowledgement of other point. I’m self-conscious of what it would Mean to give one pat view. But if I give dispersed views, each had embedded assumptions. By making a complex picture, I don’t avoid having a sub-text, only avoid the primacy inside the frame of one poem. What could that gain? Once there’s more than one utterance made in life, there is automatically a loss of one primary message, unless one is being extraordinary repetitive.
One thrust — even inside the confines of let’s pretend for the duration of the poem, for isolation of one factor looked at singly and linearly that only it exists — and I feel that I’m not serving observation correctly because the data stream is cluttered and contradictory. Things that acknowledge things that don’t fit delight me, gets around my defenses.
We each have different pros and cons to our take on what is poetics and what is a good fit. We do what we must in the way we must. We can shift style and our sense of worthwhile content that must be said, but there’s a sense of being hooked on saying something.