The Complexity of the Simple…

My favorite poet, hands down, is Williams Carlos Williams.  A part of the Imagist movement of poetry, William Carlos Williams’ poetry was pure and simple.  The subject matter was often everyday items in everyday settings. 

Take for example his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”.  Each word is so simple that a any child of pre-school age understands the words with little or no explanation.  The poem itself is a single sentence long, so short that if you read it like a sentence or speaks it like you would state any fact, you would miss its magic. 

Yet hidden within the simple words, there seems to be a complex message framed lovingly in the broken line and the separation stanzas.  I have no idea what that message is.  I believe it is found in the words “so much depends upon.”  There is desperation in those words, a sense of urgency, which belies the following words, the rustic idyllic image he paints thereafter.

Similarly, Kazimir Malevich painted the painting to the left, an image that leaves most proclaiming, “I could have done that.”  It is is simple.  Yet, within that simplicity, Malevich sought to express an complex idea.  Hidden within the four corners is the destruction of the history and tradition of art that preceded its creation.  It was the creation of a new way of talking about art and how to walk your way around it.  Like “The Red Wheelbarrow”, it was a way to infuse the simple with a beautifully complex message.

I remember during my student teaching days, I was teaching a class of high school seniors.  One of my students was a teenage boy who had recently transferred from a private school.  My sponsor teacher informed me ahead of time, imparting to me that it was a real struggle for the student’s father to go to public school.  Therefore, it was with trepidation that I told the student that he needed to tone down his vocabulary, i.e., try to convey his message simply instead of seeking antiquated and intelligent sounding words.

He responded by writing me a poem in which he used even more intellectual words to convey a message that was “lost in translation.”  What I tried to convey to him is what Williams and Malevich have conveyed so well without even trying, that if done right, simplicity holds a universe of complexity and that before attempting to build more and more complex things, we might return to look back to the simple things and look within them for depth and meaning.

I would leave you with one last image, simple, and, yet, in its simplicity, infinitely complex, it is from the play the Cherry Orchid written by Aton Chekhov.  There is a part in the play when the audience hears the breaking of string off in the distance.  The string totally out of place, simple, echoes a complexity that perhaps makes the whole play.  It is in that breaking of the string, we understand more about the characters and the surrounds in which they are placed.  You can download a copy of the play here.

Below is a clip from the 1962 film version starring Judi Dench, which I think echoes the sentiment of the Imagists, the simplicity of the image, i.e., the description of the cherry orchid, the holder of a complex image.

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