Story and Song

Now going nowhere and already late,
Caught in traffic, he scanned the radio
And suddenly recalled the seventy-eight
A string band had recorded long ago,
His first record, won at a county fair
And squeaking on the magical machine
Whose stylus tracked as if downhill along
The coded grooves in which he used to stare
At moving stillness, enchanted that between
The vinyl and the diamond was a song.

And staring he saw such imaginings,
As if the very kitchen came alive.
With washboard, bottles, jug, and brassy strings,
They made a music out of daily life
From which the music may have been escape.
On a ruined porch they gathered in a ring,
The banjoist sidesaddle on the rail.
The shadow wore its mountain like a cape,
And a black path meandered to a spring
That disappeared in laurel below the trail.

The ballad's girl had gone to wash her hair
And wandered the stream too far into a grove
Of ordinary trees, from which no prayer
Could save her. By afternoon the boy in love
Had found her yellow bonnet where it lay
And followed down the unforgiving hill.
He is the hoot owl asking who and why.
She is the sound of water running away.
As long as the song is sung they wander still
Confounded in the woods, in common time.

The band by now must be disbanded, wracked
By drink or age and gone around the bend.
He'd played their song until the tenor cracked,
The banjo blurred, and words came to an end
One afternoon where the boy and girl remained
Apart, except in dreams beyond the dream.
With the signal he moved on, the music hushed.
The hard and clamorous world was little changed,
But he recalled the singing of a stream
And that it wore a diamond down to dust.

Greg will join us December 14 for a two week stint on the lariat board. There is a substantial thread already posted on "Discerning Eye" on his work. It includes Alan Sullivan's luminous essay on Greg, and my short review for Amazon of his new book, Errors In The Script. I'll be posting several substantial poems on this thread before he arrives, but let's start with this early one, which couldn't have been written by anyone who didn't hail from Nashville. He's poured the wistful music of his home town into elegant stanzas of IP, a technical achievement of the first order. For the basic measure of Nashville is ballad: "Don't come home from drinkin'/ With lovin' on your mind." To be sure, there are exceptions. One night after a furious fight, Merle Haggard told his girlfirend "Last night I started lovin' you again." She said "Merle, do you know what you've got there?" A hit was born.

Much loveliness here. I was brought to mind towards the end a bit of "Ode on a Grecian Urn", how the boy and girl are caught forever--yet forever apart--in the song. (Also the idea, I think, that unheard melodies are sweeter.) The end is marvellous, and seems almost a twist on a common lyric theme, a la Horace and Shakespeare of the sonnets (that song can elevate dust to something eternal, adamantine like a diamond). The slight breakdown of rime scheme to slant rime towards the end of later stanzas seems right (though "time" dangles a bit for me--perhaps as it ought?), as the song itself becomes scratchy and deteriorates.

Thanks for posting.

Alicia

Alicia, the resonances come thick and fast toward the end. The "dream beyond the dream," is A.D. Hope, though I believe Greg hadn't read Hope and came to the phrase independently. "The world was little changed" reminds me of Auden, particularly (if memory serves me right) of a line in Shield of Achilles. We are blessed to have a few younger poets who are sponges, soaking up everything that came before; but squeeze them, and the clear water that comes out is markedly their own. You and Greg are two of them.

Here's another from Greg's book which bears an uncanny resemblance to some of Wilbur's early poems (A bBaroque Wall-Fountain, etc.)

Waterfall

In still transparency, the water pools
High in a mountain stream, then spills
Over the lip and in a sheet cascades
Across the shoal, obeying hidden rules,
So that the pleats and braids,
The feather-stitched white water, little rills
And divots seems to ride in place
Above the crevices and sills,
Although the water runs along the race.

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.

So too with language, so even with this verse.
From a pool of syllables, words hover
With rich potential, then spill across the lip
And riffle down the page, for better or worse,
Making their chancy trip,
Becoming sentences as they discover
(Now flowing, now seeming to stammer)
Their English channels, trickling over
The periodic pauses of its grammar.

Excellent...

I've wanted to ask Greg Williamson questions ever since I heard Professor Jarman talk about him all the time. :)

Now I just have to figure out what to ask.

------------------
Steven Schroeder
Darwin's Bulldog

Here's another of my favorites from Greg's new Book.

Kites at the Washington Monument

"What's up, today, with our lovers?"
W. D. Snodgrass

At fingertip control
These state-of-the-art stunt kites
Chandelle, wingover, and roll
To dive from conspicuous heights,

Whatever the pilots will,
While the wowed audience follows
As the kites come in for the kill
And slice up the air like swallows

But look, across the park
Someone has put together--
What is it? It looks like a lark
Tossed up into the weather.

It's homemade out of paper
That tumbles and bobs like a moth
On another meaningless caper.
Why, it's a bit froth

Spun on a blue lake,
A name or a wrinkled note
Dropped into the wake
Of an ocean-going boat.

But still it pulls itself higher
As he would pull it back.
The line goes tight as wire,
Or sags, falling, and goes slack,

And while the audience claps
At the aerobatic buzz,
It flutters, quiets, then it snaps.
But that's about all it does.

Flying its tail of rags
Above these broken lands,
It's one of those white flags
For things that are out of our hands,

The hoisted colors of
Of attenuated hope,
The handkerchief of a love
That's come to the end of its rope.

When the line breaks, the string
Floats to the ground in the wind.
He stands there watching the thing
Still holding up his end

As the kite heads into the sky
Like a sail leaving a slip.
The rags wave goodbye.
They're scarves at the back of a ship.

So Tim, when does Mr. Williamson touch down at this wacky place? I have a few questions to ask him about meter. I really like the kite poem--besides the double exposures, it is my favorite of his stuff I have read. That meter rolls and bounces and swoops. Thanks for posting it.

Tom

Here's a real romp of a poem from Errors in the Script. I think it's a typical example of how Greg employs humor in the service of high seriousness.

The Top Priority

Granted I am a malcontent, a geek,
Whose people skills and interfacing technique
Are, let's say, challenged; granted I maintain
A kennel of pet peeves, and yet this reign
Of fashion needs a simple boy to focus
On our nude king, the cheeky hocus-pocus
Of base, Orwellian duplicitese:
Free gifts, true facts, and top priorities.

At JFK the ticket engineer
Invites us to pre-board. I down my beer
Then stash the paperback and check my fly.
That isn't what she means. I don't know why.
She says to us, who clearly aren't on board,
"Those that have not pre-boarded now may board."
And when we land in the weather event called rain,
Do we de-board? It turns out we de-plane.
I've left, egressed, dismounted, not remained;
But the hitch de-planing is, we never planed.

Granted I am a grump, a grouch, a crank,
But when the recipe for braised lamb shank
Au dik-dik says, "Preheat the oven to,"
If it said, "Heat the oven," what would you do?
If grocery stores supply a pre-sliced roll,
And sliced is sliced, pre-sliced is what? Well, whole.
If the sales clerk suggests a pre-made bow,
You think that he means ribbon. Does he? No.
When Deal Dan says, "Not 'used,' 'pre-*owned*' Crown Vic,"
You ask him, "Did she use it?" He says, "Dick."
If soup is ready to eat, what soup is not?
The kind that's rice, a chicken, and a pot.
And this kind, too, because there is no pan,
No bowl, no spoon, it's cold, it's in a can.
And why not offer ready-to-fish-with hooks,
Or ready-to-read, pre-bound, pre-written books?

We call things "literal" when figurative:
"I literally died." And yet you live.
We float a metaphor until it fails:
"The steam was taken out of the president's sails."
We drown correctness in polluted waters:
"Woman admits to allegedly killing her daughters."
We dress plain subjects up in regal guise:
To talk is "to share"; to plan, "prioritize";
And the big business, when its growing ceases,
"Rightsizes," when, more rightly, it decreases.
We form tautologies defying sense,
As with, say, "previous experience,"
"Past history," or when he poet wrote,
"Then I can truly forgive her." By a vote
The class refused to find the phrase unruly.
Later I forgave them, but not truly,

And add my errors to the list, of course.
I have misspoken, riding my high horse,
But hope I'm truly forgiven every lie.
And so, you know, like, basically, when I die,
Pre-dig my grave six feet to hide the coffin,
Brainstorm and dialogue about me often,
And I'll de-body to join the win-win group
For pre-cooked ham and ready-to-eat soup,
Completely free gifts, no extra charge to me,
And walk with God, the Top-Priority.