Keep It Simply Difficult

Stuart Greenhouse asked a question Friday which I realized after reading is exactly the answer to what I like so much in great poetry, say, for example, Robert Frost or John Ashbery. And what I would like so much to duplicate in my own poetry, despite my constant failings. "If one has a poem about the difficulty of true simplicity, should that poem be difficult or simple?" And the answer as I see it would be: both.

There should be a surface simplicity that we all see in the world, that simplicity that makes life livable, that allows us to get through the day without the existential concerns of theology and physics stopping us at every turn with their infinitesimal concerns. Yet, there should be that true difficulty, I would call it complexity, beneath that surface.

And this is the ingredient that makes the poem, the yeast that makes the whole thing rise above the ground and approach the heavens. Of course the truly great poet will write his verse so that the passing stranger could read it as one walks down the street on a sunny day without a care in the world appreciating the simplicity of thought there. But, if that stranger should stop and look at the ground beneath him, its tectonic detail and quantum complexity, and then look up at the astronomical skies and their theological vastness, he or she could find reflection in the poem itself.

And that is the simplicity of true difficulty.