Compression remains a strong mechanism
A lyric has time, breath and meter pressure. That pressure favors noun piles, proper names, hard images, slogans, clipped threats, aphorisms and rhyme chains already visible in the prose. LTAP is the cleanest record-scale example: comparatively few words can establish clocks, neon, altars, dawn parties, cameras, fashion, weather and social exhaustion.
But the arrows go both directions
The larger corpus now makes a one-way “prose → lyric” model untenable. Lyric Lineages documents exact prose-to-song migrations, song-to-later-prose returns, title migrations, publication witnesses and one major song-to-song reincarnation.
Reincarnation: Throwaway Lines
The clearest correction is “Throwaway Lines.” A substantial lyric from Peak Arousal survives inside Let the Alpine Play. The language is not merely quoted as historical memorabilia; it is rebuilt inside a different musical body.
Expansion can create worlds
A compact song unit may later become fiction, theory, visual apparatus or a named place. The intertextual atlas shows LP/DS “Mesmer” embedded as a San Lucero sketch and “Set/Setting” sharing an exact passage with a 26-part prose work.
The more useful model
verbal object → temporary container → reuse. The container matters enormously, but it does not exhaust the language.