Origami - Greg Williamson

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’re 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,
As 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 surrender
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 the 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 fingers 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.


---Greg Williamson


Greg Williamson’s Origami

One of the exercises I used to give my students was to summarize a whole poem into a single sentence. It’s a bear of an assignment, but it forces you to read, think, analyze, and then take the product of your thoughts and filter it into a strong and brief statement. It didn’t matter if the student was looking at one of their own poems or one of Shakespeare’s, this assignment shocked the hell out of them. They figured that one sentence would be a piece of cake. They’d read the poem once, then write a one-line summary and they’d be done. As Lee Corso says, Not So Fast, My Friends. With an assignment like this, requiring an economical use of words, the expectations are high and the margin for error is slim. All of this talk about what I’ve come to call the Smushed Poem Assignment has me motivated to try it today. Let’s take a look at Greg Williamson’s wildly creative Origami and hopefully by the end of our examination I’ll have a good solid sentence for the poem.

You’ve heard countless phrases about first impressions so I won’t dare giving you another, but I will ask you this: what’s the first thing you noticed as you read this poem? If you’re a smart ass then you’re chomping at the bit to tell me you noticed the title first. That’s not what I had in mind. The detailed descriptions of the kids creating their origami creatures and items are well written in the first few stanzas, but almost immediately I noticed the rhyme scheme. The rhymes are nearly perfect throughout the poem and quite often they are end stopped. This is a recipe for formulaic and metered verse that might drift off into the droll of Old English drinking songs and nursery rhymes. But Greg Williamson avoids the fate of conventional rhyme schemes by balancing the rhymes with a healthy blend of varied images, lively characters, and fresh, true dialogue. These features are very difficult to pull off in a poem that is constructed with a rhyme scheme, yet when they fit a poem organically they propel the reader through the poem.

Combining the poem’s title with the first stanza, Williamson wastes no time giving readers the necessary particulars to immerse themselves in the poem’s world. There are a group of children folding the paper to make origami figures. Paper litters the floor from failed attempts and some stirring successes. Williamson devotes the whole second stanza to providing a great list of the imaginative things the kids have created. We find ourselves endeared to Williamson for the way he treats the failed attempts as something unique, and thus a masterpiece in its own right:

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.

In the next two stanzas Williamson introduces dialogue in the form of a short interchange between himself and some of the children. His answers are witty and self-deprecating, the type of thing an audience might love. “They ask what I can make. ‘I make mistakes.’ / ‘No, really, Mr. Greg!’ They don’t like puns.” Letting his mind do the work, as opposed to his hands, Williamson responds to the children’s prodding by ripping loose a single sheet of paper. He holds it before them and says “I’ve made a bed.” If they didn’t like his line about making mistakes then it should come as no surprise that Williamson is greeted with frowns. It doesn’t bother him though; he resolves to take this “bed” he’s made and “lie on it.” With one last attempt he says to the kids “See, it’s a sheet. But they’re not buying it, / And seem to imply (“You’re crazy!”) it’s all in my head.” This will be an important link to the rest of the poem, a point of departure into Williamson’s constantly churning imagination.

We often think of children as possessing untouched and limitless minds, but in this poem it appears to be Mr. Greg who is tapped into a steady stream-of-consciousness. After working with the children, our speaker returns home where “even more white lies.” He won’t be folding this white to resemble a spear or a one-legged crane, but he will be laboring just as hard to get words onto the page. The blank page is daunting; he sees it as a “window filled with frost, / As unformed thought, a thought I had, but lost.” And this is where he begins to pick up steam, next the page is someone rolling their eyes, which seamlessly shifts into “Tomorrow morning, laundry on the line, / The South Pole, circa 1929, / The mainsail of the Pequod, Moby Dick.” Are you beginning to see what I mean about stream-of-consciousness? One image segues into the next, sometimes with strong connections, while others are lucky to have a mere flicker of similarity. Realizing that it might be a little difficult and disorienting at first for readers, Williamson gives us a small bit of encouragement, telling us “you’ll recognize the trick.” The writing style keeps readers swimming within their minds, trying to keep up with the poem’s path, but boy is it fun, nearly as much fun as the children seemed to be having with their origami earlier in the poem. Dare I say Williamson is crafting poetic origami in this poem.

One of the things that differentiates this poem from others that are swept up with the creative spirit is how Williamson is caring and attentive to his readers. We just made note of his aside to readers that they’ll recognize his trick and how he constructs his links of images, but he also tries to give us variety to appeal to a wider audience. As the poem moves into a realm “Of untold tales, where hero and author together / Must turn, out of the silence, into the whether- / Or-not-they-find-the-grail,” Williamson quickly follows this up with a question to his readers: “Not to your taste?” This allows him to make an abrupt turn and pull back in the readers he might have been losing. He takes the poem more introspective with the white page as his surrender, as “the napkin at a table set for one, / The shade drawn in a room where someone died.” Ultimately, it is not surrender that overcomes Williamson, but a sense of the awesome depth of imagination. He acknowledges the pages and their images “assume / more shapes than I can put my fingers on.” There exist an infinite web of connections within the world, all waiting for a writer to pluck them free and toss them onto the page. When this happens then “the pages keep on turning.” We’ve been in the outer limits of Williamson’s wide open mind, but the journey is coming to an end, returning to his own house where all of this thought originates from: “The stared-at ceiling of my rented room” where he hears again “You crazy, Mr. Greg” as he notices “the sheet on the unmade bed is gone awry.” His day¾events, words, thoughts, gestures¾is stringing itself together like hands reaching out to each other to be held. With these forces pulling together, with this wonderful synergy, Williamson sits down at his “ little desk in mid-July, / Throwing snowballs at the Sheetrock wall.” He is ready to dismantle impossibilities, he is juiced with creativity.

Having reached the end of our deep reading of the poem and having originally promised a tightly constructed and well thought out sentence to summarize the poem, here is my best effort (it’s a little long winded :)) to fulfill that most difficult assignment: The genius of creativity is that it follows no rules except for those that you create, and even those are your personal sense of how best to coax awareness so that in seeing a sheet of paper you look beyond its physical form and see ten thousand things no one else could spot.