Compression: Judy Kronenfeld
“Why compression? Because there’s a kind of poem that is an arrow to the heart; it pierces the reader almost before s/he has had a chance to see it coming. Sometimes it’s a matter of letting all the dross slip off a poem I’ve been working on, as with ‘Now,’ dropping the lead-up, the less pure tonalities—even if that language might work elsewhere—and revealing the naked body of the poem. A matter of letting the strongest language stand. Anything other than the thing itself, with this subject in particular, floundered.” — Judy Kronenfeld
