[Tom]

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[This message has been edited by Tom (edited January 30, 2005).]

[Caleb Murdock]

Tom, you can find 10 of Greg's poems, from his first book, on my site.

Greg, I'm also curious to hear what some of your favorite lines are, and why.

[Tim Murphy]

If I were asked this unfortunate and importunate question, I'd tell people to read my books and come up with their own answers. Asked, "What is your favorite Hecht poem," Tony gleefully answered "The most recent one I've committed." Lines, phrases, couplets, can only be appreciated in the context of the poem. So I'm going to answer this for Greg, making reference to poems posted on Mastery or quoted in Alan's essay on Discerning Eye. From Waterfall, I am particularly smitten by the concluding couplet of the second stanza:
Neglecting that the bed will steer
The water as the water steers the bed.

I'm an inveterate hiker of streambeds, and this is chiasmus which rivals any in Greek literature. From Top Priority:

And walk with God, the Top Priority.

Jason Huff has complained on the Discerning Eye and in his embarrassing review of Errors on Amazon.com, that Greg just "beats a joke to death." It is appalling to me that a student of R.S. Gwynn doesn't understand how wit can serve High Seriousness. After this extended, amazing riff of a poem, poking fun at how we massacre our language, Greg turns the whole thing into a serious meditation with his last line. Hint: If you're looking for favorite lines in Williamson, read Greg's last lines.

In Story and Song, the final couplet.

But he recalled the singing of a stream
And that it wore a diamond down to dust.

The diamond is the stylus on an old phonograph, and it's another "killer-diller" ending, in Dick Wilbur's phrase. (And by the way, one of the reasons Dick so admires Greg's work is those endings.)

But Greg also masters the beginnings of poems. (R.P. Warren to 18-year-old Murphy: "Boy, the first line of a poem has to grab your throat and say 'Poetry" just as this Jack Daniels' grabs your throat and says 'Whiskey.'") So here's the first quatrain of Kites:

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

I love the extraordinary vocabulary, which sends me to the dictionary, and the way the Q sets up the swooping meter which Nyctom so admires in this masterful poem. So Tom and Caleb, there are four favorite snippets from Greg, which he would blush to mention. But maybe he'll comment on these nominees. And Tom, hie thee to Caleb's gorgeous site, and read Williamson. Then buy his books. Tim

[Tom]

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[This message has been edited by Tom (edited January 30, 2005).]

[Tim Murphy]

Tom, Greg is a shy forest creature, and he was very appreciative of my remarks, but I have emailed him suggesting that he comment. I know the sort of Frost explication of metrical intricacy you're referring to, and I'll continue my comments. Many of the formalists of my generation (Boomers) are very strict metrists: Steele, Gwynn, Martin, Davis. Greg takes daring liberties with meter, but his written verse is so attuned to the music of common speech, he gets away with things lesser metrists never could. For instance in Speaking of Trees (p, 64, Silent Partner) he writes in an IP poem "As the brow of a storm is darkening with violence," a fourteen syllable, five stress line, that seems perfectly natural at that moment in the poem. Given the portentousness of the scene, the length of the line seems right. (Could be scanned as a thirteen, because silence precedes and rhymes with violence, setting up an expectation for the latter to be elided.) On the next page in Neighboring Storm, which describes a furious domestic quarrel among a neighboring couple, he concludes:

They chirp like birds, and all is peaceful there.
But me? I'm rattled. I scan the sky for days.

Two full stop caesurae three syllables apart! Yet the effect is so colloquial, there's nothing forced about it. I'm sure in your perusal of the other threads and the excellent selection of Williamson on Caleb's site, you'll find numerous such examples.

[Greg Williamson]

Hi Tom,

I wouldn't go so far as to call any of these favorites, but after your kind words about "Kites at the Washington Monument," I thought I'd mention a few things from that. As you implied, some of the lines in that poem are meant to be more overtly "mimetic," though John Hollander sternly and rightly cautions us all about how literally to take terms like "mimetic versification." Nevertheless, "The line goes tight as wire" is intended to sound like a "tight," taut line, with its three abrupt iambs and long "i"s. But "Or sags, falling, and goes slack" is meant kind of to collapse in the middle, with its trochaic reversal in the second foot and its extended third foot, an anapest or more likely a bacchic foot. Later on, with "When the line breaks, the string," that enjambment is hoped to hang there in the air, string-like, for just a second to set up the musically different, airier "Floats to the ground in the wind."

But let me turn to a different kind of effort to do something with a line. I wrote a group of three-line riddles. One, in which one answer is "Poet," goes:

Dismissed as irresponsible, it's true
I kid, dissemble, feign, and misconstrue.
Why the long face? That's just between me and you.

The ambiguity of who has the long face and what has caused it and the ambiguity of the antecedent of "that's" allow (or force) the last line to be read in about a dozen different ways. At least that's what I wanted because I love those ironies where what's funny and sad and deadpan, clenched-teeth serious are inextricably tangled. Heck, not even tangled, since they exist simultaneously in the same utterance.

Anyway, does that start to answer your question?

Greg