Since Tim has gotten Greg Williamson to commit to a Poet Lariat appearance next month, I thought I would post this essay on Greg's work. There is no market for criticism of young authors, and I have been unable to place this piece anywhere, though it's easy enough to publish on a big-name poet. At least this will give 'Sphereans an opportunity to assess our guest before he arrives.
Pulling Out All the Stops
the poetry of Greg Williamson
Did the Formalist Revival really begin one night in 1981, as three literati grumbled in a Greenwich Village bar? So Dick Allen asserts in a 1997 letter to The Hudson Review. But history is rarely so simple. Many younger poets in many places were feeling impatient with free verse in the early 1980’s. Over the next decade these diverse individuals found each other and launched an artistic revolt, but they have never agreed on the purpose of their movement, or even a name for it. Allen would like to write large his personal rejection of the lyric mode by perpetuating the coinage “Expansive Poetry,” a term which “makes it clear that New Formalism and New Narrative are sub-genres of a larger movement and intent.” But what movement, what intent? “To expand contemporary American poetry’s range and concerns?”
There’s more at stake here than how many rebel angels can dance on the head of a pin. Poets never were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but they have a reasonable claim to be the custodians of language, and they are doing a poor job these days. If the most passionate wordsmiths are careless with nomenclature, the language is really in trouble. And the term “new narrative” seems quite carelessly conceived to me. The word “new” has long been debased by abuse in advertising, while “narrative” is a favorite of multiculturalists who conflate tribal storytellers with Dante and Shakespeare. Whatever else formalists may be doing, it seems to me that the defining trait of their movement is the love of language for its own sake.
Nearly twenty years have passed since Dick Allen’s expansive evening, and younger poets are now emerging for whom formalism is neither an ideology nor a vehicle for youthful revolt. Instead form comes naturally to them, through the restored continuity of teaching and tradition. One such poet is Greg Williamson, whose first book, <u>The Silent Partner</u>, won the Roerich Prize from Story Line Press in 1995. His second collection, <u>Errors in the Script</u>, has just appeared from The Overlook Press through the Sewanee Writers’ Series. In these two volumes the apprentice revels in his heritage and pays homage to past masters. While this youthful work displays some unevenness, Williamson at his best devises exotic forms while charging his colloquial style with rare and precise words. Already a standout in his generation, he seems likely to set a standard for the next.
Whatever chronological or conceptual principle dictates the sequence of poems in <u>The Silent Partner</u>, it seems appropriate for a young man’s first collection to begin with a tribute to a teacher, and Williamson obliges with “Drawing Hands.” As a grammarian, Mrs. Duke must have been a formidable figure, but her student avenges himself by proving he can bend her rules and get away with it. In the last stanza, his recollection done, he switches from past tense to present and third person to first:
That boy lived my life ago, and whether
I leave him soloing at his desk today
Under the unbroken rules of Mrs. Duke
Or walking home through the mystifying day,
He finds his winding way back here somehow,
Where I sit high in the head of the house,
Writing and rewriting him, and watching the rain,
Which is what I came in out of for.
Roughness is only the mask of a clever youth. While playing with a phrase of Richard Wilbur’s “in the head of the house,” Williamson knows perfectly well that he is writing anapests and violating the metrical norm. He also toys wryly with secondary meanings of the words “high” and “head.” The final line stopped me cold on first reading. I had seen this sort of thing done unintentionally too often for me to appreciate its humor or its meter the first time around. But when I spoke the line as a headless pentameter, it left me grinning.
The next poem, “Figures of Speech,” prefigures Williamson’s principal concern as a poet--the relationship between perception and language. It also anticipates his formal daring with its unusual variation on terza rima. I quote it here in full.
Under a tree across the grassy reach
Sat men and women signing each to each.
Their passionate hands maneuvered like wild birds,
Embellishing the air with figured speech
Whose meanings I could not put into words,
As if their flying fingers spoke in tongues.
Where breezes in a tree are never heard
And the songs of birds are silently unsung,
The language must be foreign as the land.
Perhaps as painters hear the waves among
The grass with aural eyes, they understand
The frequencies of light and shade and stone
In idioms they’ve written out by hand
Conversing with the world by picturephone.
Then, by degrees, across the silent lawn,
In tree trunk bass and gravel baritone
And the shook maraca of the sunlit frond,
I thought I saw the day begin to speak,
Though what it had to say I can’t repeat.
Though awkward in places, with its erratic mixture of slant and full rhyme, and its sentences strung through the stanzas, this poem generally lives up to its opening invocation of Eliot. Iteration and meaning have obsessed many other poets, most notably Stevens, to whom Williamson alludes elsewhere. Often such notions become an intellectual flytrap where a poet buzzes until exhaustion sets in. In <u>The Silent Partner</u>, Williamson is sustained by his robust love of the real and the particular. Only the most vital eye could see, the most vibrant mind describe “the shook maraca of the sunlit frond.” After this, the final couplet is too humble by half. Williamson has repeated the day as few poets could. Mermaids might not have spoken to dreary Prufrock, but I doubt they could resist this young man and his maraca.
In subsequent poems Williamson elaborates his theme through a myopic character peering at an eye chart, a diamond phonograph needle worn dull as it interprets “coded grooves,” and a crop of photographs in which “the kernel of half-truth could be discerned.” Each artifact--the chart, the phonograph record, the photograph--affords the poet a new angle on the question of perception. Radios, automobiles, and airplanes also bear Williamson’s imagination off to probe the ineffable. But the camera is his most characteristic device--a metaphor and more. For Williamson, the photographer is a poet whose mechanical eye frames the world to print out images which are both seductive and deceptive. A camera lens can focus and fix one scene with great precision, while everything else remains beyond its reach, distinguished only by its absence. Yet Williamson is more than a snapshot poet. He never describes anything simply to please himself with a pretty picture. In his signature work every detail illuminates a character or advances a metaphor.
Like any young poet Williamson sometimes overreaches. Drawn by number and symmetry, he has the instincts of a composer, but he does not always harmonize theme and form. “Walter Parmer” is a terza rima narrative in six sections of six stanzas each. Anthologized in the widely-reviewed sampler of recent formal poetry, <u>Rebel Angels</u> (Story Line Press, 1996), “Walter Parmer” memorializes a school building abandoned and later burned. Here we see formalism at its weakest as elaborate structure overwhelms a relatively slight story. Had the poem been shorter, and composed in a less obtrusive form, it might have turned out better.
Some reviewers of <u>Rebel Angels</u> found more to praise than to damn in “Walter Parmer;” but they were contrasting it with even shakier examples of “new narrative” elsewhere in the anthology, such as Marilyn Hacker’s self-indulgent “Cancer Winter” or Frederick Feirstein’s maundering “Mark Stern.” These expansivist poems resemble verse memoirs. At least Williamson knows how to drop into the background, as in “Walter Parmer,” where the author only reveals his presence obliquely. In this slant-rhymed tercet from the poem’s first section, for example, he interrupts his description of schoolchildren with a mildly redundant phrasing (“guarded citadels”) of his broader concerns: “Here first they faced the guarded citadels / Of otherness, and faced the windowpane / With all it had to show them of themselves.”
Windows and mirrors reappear with almost iconic frequency in Williamson’s poetry. Like the camera, they are openings into a larger realm, yet they can also distort and deceive. The poets I like best often have such quirky and obsessive personal views of the world. This is not to say they are confessional. Instead they show me a new way of looking at things. Of course this is precisely what some detractors of formalism claim it cannot do. Form, we are told, is an obstacle to spontaneous expression; it deforms and suppresses the Self. Leaving aside the fact that most free verse poets still use grammar and syntax, which are also forms, we should reflect that the level playing field of versification actually provides the best arena for self-display. Any compulsive rhymer could pen a Chant Royal; it takes Williamson to devise one about “a flat-roofed building / Silhouetted against the setting sun.” If self-expression is a virtue, it takes more chutzpah to confront tradition by using its forms than it does to indent prose and call it poetry. As for spontaneity--only poets who work with form appreciate how many moments of genuine inspiration are required to produce a felicitous result. Yet the more successful a poet is, the more all that painstaking labor and inspiration effaces itself, a paradox Williamson explores in “The Counterfeiter.”
When he was starting out, still green,
He used to make a signature mistake
So that his hidden talent could be seen,
Reversing the flag above the White House roof.
It made him feel ingenious and aloof
To signify his forgeries as fake.
He always liked his jokes, but they are private.
Sometimes, when pressed about his trade,
He answers with a shrug, “I draw a profit”
Or “I trust in God.” Nobody ever laughs.
In the den, above two ebony giraffes,
Hangs the first dollar that he ever made.
But making money is an enterprise
Of tedious, grave concerns. To reproduce
These symboled reproductions, his hands and eyes
Must settle on what others merely see,
The couples, columns and the Model T,
And all the framework, intricate, abstruse,
And difficult to copy by design,
With fine acanthuses and cycloid nets.
He must account for every tiny line
To duplicate the sad and distant stare
Beneath the breaking waves of Jackson’s hair,
If he would tender these to pay his debts.
He has invested his adult career
In being perfect when he goes to press,
An artistry both humble and severe.
Down at the basement desk, long hours pass
With a burin and a magnifying glass.
No one suspects his notable success.
He profits by his anonymity,
But deep regret competes with honest pride:
To labor toward complete obscurity
And treasure a craft that will efface his will,
Render his name unknown and all his skill
Unrecognized, long after he has died.
Here Williamson has chosen an obstreperous and peculiar rhyme scheme, yet he makes it march. He cracks his authorial whip, and the pentameter jumps through hoops. At the same time he clowns tirelessly. The puns come so thick and fast that a reader can scarcely keep track of them: “still green,” “signature mistake,” “signify his forgeries as fake,” “pressed about his trade,” and so forth. However clever, the puns are merely surface distractions, like the lights on a marquee. I discern at least two deeper themes. Certainly the poem depicts the plight of the artist at a time when the currency of art is debased. Does an artistic vocation require a vow of poverty and anonymity? Also Williamson is pondering the problem of originality in art. How far should an artist go, imitating the work of others as he seeks his own style? Are all artworks ultimately just counterfeits of the past? All this passes in a seemingly effortless flow of words, as inevitable as a waterfall.
I mention water because its surface is part mirror, part window, and entirely fascinating to Williamson, whose “Waterfall” also appears in <u>Rebel Angels</u>. Here Williamson proves he can devise and sustain a complex nonce stanza as brilliantly as Richard Wilbur, whom he is obviously imitating, both in form and theme. This gift of mimesis is one which Wilbur himself possesses and employs from time to time even in his maturity. While the practice may alarm those who value “voice” above all, it is actually voice-enhancing. A mimetic poet, adopting the voice of another, tries on a different self, which paradoxically may be an excellent way to find one’s own self. A poet’s mimetic choices declare affinities more powerfully than mere literary references. Wilbur has written lines which sound like vintage Frost, while this middle stanza of Williamson’s “Waterfall” is a near-perfect counterfeit of Wilbur:
What makes these rapids, this little waterfall,
Cascading like a chandelier
Of frosted glass or like a willow tree,
Is not the water only nor the fall
But some complicity
Of both, so that these similes appear
Inaccurate and limited
Neglecting that the bed will steer
The water as the water steers the bed.
What makes these lines so utterly Wilburesque? Behind the obvious similarities of stanza, subject and diction, there is a profound likeness of sensibility, a will to discern and affirm mysteries which lie beyond the phenomenal world. Having heard Wilbur say his own poems many times, I can easily imagine his voice speaking these lines as well. It is no wonder that in his review of <u>Rebel Angels</u> for the 1997 issue of the magazine Sparrow, Robert McPhillips observes: “Williamson presents the best evidence we have that meter, rhyme and fixed forms, over the past twenty years, have been smoothly, successfully, and seemingly permanently reintegrated into the available techniques of mainstream American poetry.”
Presumably when the cautious McPhillips refers to “available techniques” and “mainstream,” he means the pseudo-formal or downright formless, fragmentary and utterly unmemorable “lyrics” that currently tumble in record numbers from university presses. I sympathize with Allen and others who think the way out of this morass lies in rejection of the lyric impulse and the restoration of story-telling to a central place in poetry. As long ago as 1979, the Australian poet A. D. Hope observed: “Today the unhappy demise of all the great forms of literature in poetry has not only left us with what I once called a ‘desert ecology’ of small lyrics and private reflections, but literary fashions spread so fast and so readily from country to country that a sort of universal and deadly uniformity is setting in.” (<u>The New Cratylus</u>, 153.) Hope goes on to lament the loss of the particular and the provincial, which once enriched poetry, and to blame this impoverishment of imagination on the global reach of the English language and the loss of “metaphysical intent.”
Williamson is certainly a provincial poet, in this positive sense. The particulars of place and time mean as much to him as the literary heritage he so often invokes. Though not primarily concerned with narrative, he is also a metaphysician who continues to test the boundaries of the unseen and the unspoken. Sometimes he finds a story to suit his purpose, as he does in the lengthy final poem of <u>The Silent Partner</u>. “Three Manuals” is a three-part, three-character reflection on the firing of a gifted church organist who resists playing the simple tunes his congregation wants to hear.
Like the forger, the organist is a surrogate for the poet, as gravure and music are surrogates for verse. Williamson sees all these arts as potential conduits to the ineffable. He underscores his theme with a curious form, an implicit Hegelian antithesis and synthesis. The first section, “The Solo Organ,” is spoken in strictly metered and rhymed stanzas by thorough-going formalist Mr. Archer, who is, of course, aiming too high. The second, “The Choir Organ,” is spoken in free verse by a congregant banker (a nice touch of irony). But the third part, “The Great Organ,” is the blank verse testimony of a woman elder who knows organist and congregation equally well. Above all she understands music. Here Williamson is “pulling out all the stops” as his character relates her tale in the stately rhythm of Milton and Shakespeare.
For many urban intellectuals, churches are as remote as waterfalls. Williamson and some of the other poets anthologized in <u>Rebel Angels</u> seem rural and retrograde to them. “Where is the city?” complains reviewer John Lucas in issue 5 of the Scottish-American poetry journal, The Dark Horse. Yet Williamson is neither rural nor urban; he has spent most of his life in suburban settings. Raised in Tennessee, later a resident of Virginia, now moved to the outskirts of Atlanta, Williamson is a weekend carpenter and lover of trees. Why should anyone expect him to write about slums or mills? The mall is his city, and he has written about that. The formalist movement is rooted in our suburban autopia, which is also America’s principal contribution to world culture, like it or not.
Speaking of the so-called New Formalists, Lucas also remarks that “these poets came of age when television was the most powerful medium.” But neither television nor cinema influences Williamson’s poetry. Other young poets, and some older ones like R. S. Gwynn, often allude to popular culture. In his first book Williamson prefers alluding to Stevens, Auden and Wilbur. This precocious work, written in the 1980’s, surely reads better without Laverne and Shirley, or Madonna and Midler. If a poet seeks to cheat time, then the evanescence of celebrity is a greater peril than its vapidity.
Nevertheless Williamson knows the value of novelty, and he has not neglected Pound’s dictum to “make it new.” In his second collection, <u>Errors in the Script</u>, Williamson accents his modernity by employing contemporary usage, perhaps reckoning that the language evolves more slowly than the icons of the moment, and that he will therefore preserve the present a bit longer in his poetic formaldehyde. He has learned to deploy colloquial speech with exceptional skill, fitting it to his chosen verse forms, interspersing it with difficult terms from linguistics or philosophy, dazzling the reader with verbal acrobatics in every line. I quote in full the opening poem of the new book, “Origami:”
The kids are good at this. Their nimble fingers
Double and fold and double fold the pages,
Making mimetic icons for all ages.
The floor of the school is littered with dead ringers:
Songbirds that really flap their wings, rare cranes,
Bleached bonsai trees, pale ghouls, two kinds of hats,
Dwarf stars, white roses, Persian copycats,
Small packet boats, whole fleets of flyable planes.
Some of the girls, some of the older ones
Make effigies of boys and … “Goodness sakes!”
They ask what I can make. “I make mistakes.”
“No really, Mr. Greg!” They don’t like puns.
I tear out a page and say, “I’ve made a bed.”
They frown at me. I’ll have to lie on it.
“See, it’s a sheet.” But they’re not buying it
And seem to imply (“you crazy!”) it’s all in my head.
I head for home, where even more white lies
Take shape. The page is a window filled with frost,
An unformed thought, a thought I had, but lost.
The page is the sclera of someone rolling his eyes
As it becomes (you’ll recognize the trick)
Tomorrow morning, laundry on the line,
The South Pole, circa 1929,
The mainsail of the Pequod, Moby Dick,
The desert sand, the shore, the arctic waste
Of untold tales, where hero and author together
Must turn, out of the silence, into the whether-
Or-not-they-find-the-grail. Not to your taste?
The page is a flag of surrender. I surrender¾
To the rustle of programs before a serious talk,
The sound of seashells, seas, the taste of chalk,
The ghost of snow, the ghost of the sky in December,
And frozen surfaces of ponds, which hide
Some frigid stirring something. (What have I done?)
It’s a napkin at a table set for one,
The shade drawn in a room where someone died.
The pages keep on turning. They assume
More shapes than I can put my finger on,
A wall of silence, curtains, doors, false dawn,
The stared-at ceiling of my rented room.
“You crazy, Mr. Greg.” The voices call.
The sheet on the unmade bed is gone awry.
I sit at my little desk in mid-July
Throwing snowballs at the Sheetrock wall.
Again Williamson has found an art through which to contemplate the problems of poetry. Origami uses, as its starting material, the same blank paper that a poet might employ; and an origami artist teases the paper itself into signification. With the phrase “icons for all ages,” Williamson puns on his own vain intent--and I mean the word “vain” in both senses. In his second stanza we find the words “bleached,” “pale,” and “white.” Thereafter the theme of whiteness twines through the poem, a template for word-play and coy literary references. Who but Williamson would force a reader to ponder the similitude of “a window filled with frost” and a page full of Frost? You crazy like a fox, Mr. Greg. An Arctic fox, in this instance.
<u>Errors in the Script</u> is organized into three sections, with two shorter groups of poems bracketing a single major work called “Double Exposures.” For the moment I shall defer discussion of the book’s centerpiece. The flanking poems are a mixed lot, ranging from brilliant (“Kites at the Washington Monument,” “The Muse Addresses the Poet”) to flimsy (“New Year’s: A Short Pantoum,” “Answer Sheet”). Always a formal innovator, Williamson devises tricky rhyme schemes and multiple meters for his nonce stanzas. Sonnet and French forms, overused by other formalists, have little attraction for him. He is given to epigraphs, and the quoted authors reveal his range of reading. Shakespeare, Snodgrass, Heaney, and Auden adorn the first section. In the third section we get James Merrill and the cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote.
The third section also displays a risky drift toward an academic style. We find a riddle-list, a multiple choice exam, even a faux book format. “[from] In Search of the Forgotten Woman” deploys a typical Williamson conceit. His text, footnoted as “Book VII and the few lines that conclude Book VI and begin Book VIII,” is billed as “the only extant fragments of this Romantic Epic.” The lines of the poem are as chockablock with brand-names as the Woody Allen film, “Scenes from a Mall.” The left hand margin of the text is lined with Nineteenth-Century-style glosses such as The Poet-Quester goeth to a fantastical land and a supernatural sentience watches from beyond. Numbered footnotes mock scholarly affectation, suggesting the speculative nature of supposedly informed commentary. For example, an automobile model is explained as follows, in tiny print: “ ‘Pacer’ is probably an intentional archaism, since the appellation was obsolete by the time of composition. Convention often posits the horse as symbolic of a poetic vehicle, but that is unlikely here...”
Merely to quote this wicked by-play makes me uncomfortable with the whole premise of writing an essay. Yet there is something juvenile about such satire, and Williamson often sounds too much like a clever boy showing off. Approaching middle age, he spends his days in schools and scholarship, trapped in the academic echo-chamber. The theme of doubling returns again and again, most notably with the poem “Binocular Diplopia,” which recalls in more elaborate guise the title poem of Williamson’s earlier volume, <u>The Silent Partner</u>. Here the quirkiness of the author seems so obsessive that one begins to wonder whether he has skipped his medication.
Yet the lesser poems of <u>Errors in the Script</u> are just a double-sided setting for the major work at the book’s center. Williamson has devised a form expressly to convey his obsession with reflections and to carry the Hegelian principle of “Three Manuals” toward an even fuller development. The resulting poems are “Double Exposures.” There are twenty-six of these infernal contraptions. “A whole roll of film,” Williamson has called them. Together they constitute a narrative--almost a verse memoir--but the story is so obliquely and uniquely told that it has nothing in common with the pedestrian work of Hacker or Feirstein in <u>Rebel Angels</u>. Crafting just one of these pieces would be quite a challenge--for each one is two, a right hand and left hand text, which interlock on the page to produce a third poem of doubled length. (For the Eratosphere, I can only offer bold and ordinary type in alteration.) If this sounds like an impossible conceit, consider the following example:
V. Girl Hugging Snowman with Broken Goddamn Radiator
Cute, isn't she? It's 1992.
I called him "Iron Will." In him, you see
We made a "'no'man," her allusion to
My nemesis, pure lack of sympathy,
Our gendered language, cold fact, artifice,
That chilly air. Maybe it's wrong to read this
And Wallace Stevens. If I reminisce,
Picture the way our human hearts mislead us.
It's just a snapshot out of way back when
The thing was just a radiator, right?
And we were talking, vowing to try again.
Which didn't work, especially at night.
Here we see Williamson playing with his favorite tropes in a new way. In the (boldface) “snowman” poem, a male narrator recalls a failed relationship. The opening question, nostalgic yet dismissive, initiates man-to-man conversation about a woman inclined to blame the opposite sex for lacking emotion. In the (regular type) “radiator” poem, the narrator accuses himself of a chilly nature and even, implicitly, impotence, since his “Iron Will” failed to work “at night.” Like man and woman, these two poems may wed or divorce. Married, they are more than the sum of their parts. They are a remarkable statement on feeling, perception, misperception, gender and memory.
Williamson has described his invention as a concept that slowly took shape over several years, until he finally found a felicitous juncture of form and theme. “One fall day,” he says, “I was imagining a double exposure in which portentous signs were laid over a happy occasion (as they generally are), wondering how one would convey the picture. I put two and two together and decided to give it a go. I figured I ought to keep it about snapshot size, and that the two sides ought to go together in a way that flips the meaning somehow. From there I began pretty quickly to imagine the form's relevance to other matters like metaphor, semiotics, verisimilitude, yada yada yada, not to mention conventions of painting and photography.”
All the “Double Exposures” achieve their effects in similar ways. Many combine the wistful alienation of Kavafy with the philosophical reserve of Stevens. Several flirt with a creepy, voyeuristic eroticism. With two exceptions, they are twelve lines in length, and they all hew to the same rhymed pentameter couplet/quatrain pattern. In some instances the left-hand poem is descriptive, the right-hand, abstract, or vice versa. In others, like the one above, some degree of description and abstraction pervades both halves. In a few, both halves are purely descriptive, making their thematic or abstract statement only when combined. At the opposite extreme, a few others tell no story, describe no particular scene, like “White on White,” quoted below. But even in this most abstract of the “Double Exposures,” the character of each reflection changes abruptly when phased with its counterpart.
XXI. White on White
Overexposed. It’s just a plain white square.
In chemical emulsion, on a white sheet,
It isn’t steam or snow. But one’s aware
I have produced pure art and the defeat
Of its relation to the breath-fogged lens
Of representational nature. It’s the end
Of windows, winter skies, the socked-in fens
Of mediated feeling, and the end
Of the Old World, the drapes, scarves, shrouds, and all
Of shopworn art. We can decertify
Those classical illusions which enthrall.
The Nineteenth Century, Romantic “I.”
This is arguably the most abstruse of the “Double Exposures.” Here the contrast between interlocking halves is necessarily minimized to suit the subject. Neither is wholly representational in the Nineteenth Century sense that Williamson proposes to “decertify.” Consider this word, decertify. It is harsh, bureaucratic, self-righteous--the tone adopted by the academic enforcers of an all-dismissive modernism when they encounter formal poetry. Even the irony is ironic, turning back on itself, like an image in a mirror. Pure art is the most impure of all. Face to face with the mystery of being, consciousness has only one refuge--the infinitely various and diverting surfaces with which being amuses itself.
In his “Double Exposures” Williamson has devised a form that perfectly matches his predilections. This is just what form should do--enhance the themes a poet feels compelled to explore. Too many New Formalists write sonnets or sestinas for the purpose of writing sonnets or sestinas, not because they are seized by sonnet or sestina-shaped ideas. These poets succumb to “classical illusions,” while Expansivists indulge the Romantic “I” by telling stories that might be better told in prose, if at all. Adherents of the Formalist Revival are not immunized against authorial vices present or past, simply by virtue of writing in form. Still, as long as newcomers like Greg Williamson continue to appear, we need not fear too much for the future of language in a semiliterate culture. Williamson is particular in his mid-Southern settings, his mirror surfaces, his love of puns, and his mimetic models. He is universal in his metaphysical concerns. But above all he is a consummate craftsman of words, and he takes to form as exuberantly as a dolphin takes to the sea.
A.S.
|
Linear Mode
