| Though Williamson says there's no right way to write a double-exposure, for each of his pieces he began with a sketch of the imaginary double-exposed snapshots ("usually just with stick figures," he says). From there, the poem could grow in any direction: "Sometimes, I might have the two lines at the end—one line on either side—and then be able to write more or less one whole column, but be stuck on the other half. . . . Sometimes I'd work from the beginning and end toward the middle. I tried to get new ways for the syntax to work over the lines, but it's pretty much just like writing a sonnet or other short form, except for that 'estuary' down the middle, where the lines have to go both ways."
If Williamson's process sounds like working a crossword puzzle—figuring out what parts of a sentence will fit in the blanks that the poet's form leaves him—then that might not be far from the truth. "I like puzzles," says Williamson, "and to some degree I think about poems as puzzles, at least the ones that I'm writing." Just as each letter in a crossword grid must read both across and down, each line of his double exposures must read in two senses, in its own column and in the poem as a whole.
In "New Year's: a Short Pantoum," and in the repeated lines of "The Dark Days," Williamson continues to experiment with sentences that can similarly be read "double." However, if comparing poetry to crosswords seems to take something away from poetry, or if we want to insist that poetry is more than a game, we should remember that double-vision, double-meaning, and double-understanding are central to the way Williamson asks us to see the world.
Indeed, lurking beneath all this charm and play, Williamson's poems remind us that our vision, our metaphors, our word and world mean more than the simple day-to-day definitions with which we're comfortable. Williamson reminds us, too, that poetry's task is to create—or to restore—our double vision.
"Those etymological puns and formal discoveries," he says, "they're part and parcel with figure and metaphor. In the roots of every word is a metaphor. Emerson says something about that—that every word was once a stroke of genius. For me, as a reader and as a writer, those things are fun. It's not a game to me. Or rather, it is a game, but the game's all hazards, as John Ashbery says, and you never win. I couldn't be more serious."
Isaac Cates is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Yale University. His poetry has appeared in the Southwest Review and at poems.com.
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"Greg Williamson's Errors in the Script is a brilliant, masterful, hilarious book of poems that disquiets even as it hugely entertains. In poem after memorable poem, in an astonishing variety of forms, idioms, styles and subjects, Williamson explores, laments and celebrates the inherent doubleness of art, of language, of our relation to the world within us and around us. I know of few poets so exquisitely attuned to the way imagination both recreates experience and displaces it, to the way metaphor both discovers truth and invents it, to the way the very words with which we write or speak, and which make us who we are, both serve and elude our intentions, both make and unmake meaning. In Greg Williamson's accomplished hands, the unavoidable 'errors in the script' have helped produce a flawless book."
— Alan Shapiro
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