“Genius… is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.”
Ezra Pound
I read Ezra by the pound. More would be too heavy for a single-serve consumption, less would be a snack weighing heavily on boredom. The quote from Pound is a little light on words but heavy on insight just the same. The art of seeing multiplicity in apparent singularity, that is the talent necessary for a rich human life. In his famous line: “May God us keep from Single vision and Newton’s sleep,” William Blake wants to rescue us from Isaac Newton’s unpoetic world where everything is only what it is and nothing less or more. The death of the metaphor.
Picasso could see ten things in one and gave us Cubism – the multiple perspective, the three and sometimes four-way mirror. Or more. A single view from several angles giving us several views of a single object.
Poetry can do that. The poet chooses a word for its denotation, its direct and obvious meaning. A cat is a cat. But the poet also knows each word has connotations, the indirect and secondary meanings, the shades and nuances. A person can be a cool cat, and sometimes catty. The poet writes to give the word its full play, the rumbling echoing angles of its many facets. The poet works E Pluribus Unum in reverse, E Unum Pluribus – out of one, many. A poet can land many jabs with a single punch if the words are working.