I studied Comparative Lit and Creative Writing (fiction, thanks for asking) in college. I had soured on poetry in high school (too much prolix purple prose will do it to even the best of us,) and subsequently did my damnedest to avoid poetry classes at all cost while attending Famous Midwestern University. But, because I was in Comp Lit, there was no way to avoid dreaded verse completely, and I subsequently ended up taking an intro level poetry class during the last semester of my senior year (aside: I was teaching at a local high school at the same time, and some of my students were actually older than my poetry classmates-- and it really showed, too. Creepy.) I ended up learning a lot in that class, and feel like sort of a heel for having been so obstinate about poetry.
One of the things that the class focused on was that "poetry is language made efficient" (either Pound or Eliot said that, can't recall which.) Which is to say that it is "packed" language. Thus, any proper paraphrase of a poem (that is, a paraphrase which covers all the bases clearly without drifting into critique, interpretation or summarization) will, of necessity, be longer than the poem it is paraphrasing. Correlative: If you produce a paraphrase which is shorter than the poem it's paraphrasing, then, by definition, that paraphrase is itself also a poem (and, for that matter, probably superior to the poem it paraphrases.)
So, a few months ago, I was cleaning up a pearl script for a friend to use. She wasn't very familiar with Perl (hell, I'm not that familiar with Perl, not compared to most other monks) and so I was adding detailed remarks to the code in order to clarify what was doing what to which and whom. I was plowing through, head down, teasing apart in excruciating detail what opens which, why it does it and why it does it just then. I sat back from my labors and realized that I'd more than doubled the size of my file; the blocks of remark-text now loomed around the code itself like Stonehenge around dandelions.
And I had a sudden moment of epiphany. I was looking at empirical evidence of the very real similarity between poetry and Perl: my annotations to the code dwarfed what they sought to describe and the only way for it too have been otherwise would be for the explanation to be in Perl.
Splash!
I was awed.
(Side)-effect: Ever since, my coding has been much more fluid, graceful and compact.
Basho tells it like it is:
When the old pond gets a new frog it's a new pond.
In reply to proof that perl is poetry (?) by mcwee
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